Comments Locked

38 Comments

Back to Article

  • Amoro - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link

    Radeon HD 4870.....It still has really good performance. I guess my wife won't know the difference anyways.

    I just hope that they'll actually update the drivers quarterly or even yearly compared to the previous "Legacy Video cards". The X100 and X1000 series haven't been updated since February of 2010.
  • tipoo - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link

    I think those cards have gotten the extent of tweaking that would help them, but I'm wondering if it would be like the x1000 series on Windows 7 which I had to deal with. They can still run ok for light work, but they don't have official drivers under Windows 7, the Vista ones do work but it leads to some rare but annoying problems. So I wonder if these cards, even as new as the 4000 series, would have problems running Windows 8 in a similar fashion, or if they would get an official driver for it.
  • dragonsqrrl - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link

    Wow, I didn't realize the X1000 series didn't have any official Windows 7 support... that sucks. I'm sorry to say it, but this is just a lower standard of driver support than I'm accustomed to. Nvidia provides non-legacy Windows 7 driver support for all their cards since the Geforce 6.
  • kmmatney - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link

    I didn't have any trouble getting an X800 working with windows 7, so I don't think the X1000 series would be a problem. The X800 plays everything just fine (at least what it is capable of) in Windows 7.
  • tipoo - Thursday, April 26, 2012 - link

    Your mileage may vary. The drivers for Vista (or even XP I think) do work, but they are not officially supported and might have some bugginess.
  • Wolfpup - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link

    I've got to say yeah, i'm really surprised by how short AMD supports their GPUs. I guess it's not terrible compared to how short Apple supports a lot of their hardware (let alone Android gadgets), but personally it's another reason I continue to prefer Nvidia if possible.
  • Wolfpup - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link

    EDIT: Guess I should add too that anymore I don't upgrade hardware that often, and a high end part from that generation would to me still be very useable...
  • bassbeast - Thursday, April 26, 2012 - link

    Uhh...what more support exactly do you need? these drivers WILL work on Windows 8 if that floats your boat and the current drivers now are quite good so what more EXACTLY are they gonna do? they've squeezed just about every droplet of performance they can out of the silicon, so what is left besides bug fixes? they can't magically give them more shaders or faster buses ya know.

    Personally I'm VERY happy with the HD4850 I have and I doubt I'll be switching to Windows 8 and since you can pick up the HD4850 for like $50 right now I don't see a problem. The nice thing about the 48xx chips is that they frankly still crank out the pretty and play the latest games while being affordable enough i could grab a pair of them for my two boys so they can enjoy the gaming goodness on their new PCs.

    So by the time these leave legacy win 8 will have been out awhile and Win 9 will be coming out and we'll probably be up to Dx12 by then and until then I can always throw another HD4850 dirt cheap for some Xfire goodness or simply wait until the 58xx or 68xx are similarly cheap so me and the boys can all be on the same level. So I don't see what there is to complain about, these chips are 4+ years old ya know and if they run in everything from XP-Win 8 what's to complain about?
  • dgingeri - Wednesday, April 25, 2012 - link

    This is the same type of thing Adaptec does.

    Dell had a few series of servers that used a remarked Adaptec SCSI controller (the PERC 2, 3, and 4 series). Adaptec up and decided they weren't going to support their SCSI products under Windows Server 2008. So, all of a sudden, these perfectly viable servers (particularly the Poweredge 2650 and 6650) were rendered unusable with the new version of Windows Server. I have about two dozen of these machines in my lab that are still quite operational, but can't be used with Windows Server 2008. We still use them for Linux testing (Red Hat and SuSE work just fine on them) but we had to spend more money to get more machines for Windows testing.

    Creative Labs did the same thing with their cards when Vista came out. Cards that were still quite usable under XP were rendered useless with Vista, and thus Windows 7 as well.

    This isn't unusual in this industry. Rude and cheap, sure, but not unusual.
  • hughlle - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link

    It speaks volumes for how far the game industry has progressed, or alternatively the amount of pointless graphic card releases there are, for my 4850 to be able to play everything out there without an issue.
  • CeriseCogburn - Monday, April 30, 2012 - link

    The money line: " This is the best use of our resources..."
    In other words, they fired enough people that they cannot maintain the promises to the gamers, and have abandoned as many as possible.
    4870x2 is $159.99 on the egg right now - a result of this decision.
    4890 is toast - yet it's still faster than way over half of the cards produced and sold today.
    This is a lousy decision, and is no good, from an evil company groveling for dollars.
  • ltcommanderdata - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link

    http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Lega...

    AMD's previous legacy driver experience with their DX9 GPUs isn't inspiring. When it was initially announced, they said "legacy" meant quarterly driver updates, but when they posted the above support document, there was actually no mention of "quarterly" only "periodically". That basically left people to routinely ask them about it in comments in the blogs posts that announce monthly Catalyst releases. It seemed like when an arbitrary number of comments accumulated and months went by, a legacy driver was released, but it was not a consistent 3 month schedule as "quarterly" implied. All the while nVidia continues to support their GPUs back to the DX9.0c 6000 series to this day. I could understand AMD not supporting the vanilla DX9.0 9000 and X100 series, but the DX9.0c X1000 really should have gotten more care, particularly because the X1900 has aged better than the comparable nVidia 7900 due to the X1900's more shader heavy focus which turned out to be the right forward thinking bet.

    Given how successful the HD4000 series has been and the nostalgia factor of it being the series that reinvigorated AMD's graphical fortunes, hopefully it's legacy support will be more consistent. I think 2 years of legacy driver support for DX10 GPUs makes sense. If next-gen consoles with DX11 GPUs come out late 2013, with say a year for adoption and transition, most games in 2015 will probably require DX11. So legacy support for DX10 GPUs from 2012 to the end of 2014 should cover things.
  • Zink - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link

    The HD 6770 is still for sale and it is very similar to the HD 4870 performance wise. It would suck to have to upgrade from a 4870 because of driver issues and not performance.
  • gevorg - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link

    Its called planned obsolescence.
  • CeriseCogburn - Monday, April 30, 2012 - link

    Yes and don't forget super OC 4890, as the evil amd has.
  • tipoo - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link

    Yeah, that's like the 1K series and Windows 7, the performance for non-gaming was fine but no official driver support.
  • Latzara - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link

    The, always, buggy drivers that have almost become, or for some have become, the staple of ATI/AMD graphics?

    To me unfortunately it's completely normal to expect their drivers to crash on me on a somewhat regular basis. I'm not talking about preview/beta versions but of the complete WHQL versions that today can at least benefit from the win 7 driver crash recovery but are still crashing. If it were only my experience I would definitely write it off as my problem and that would be it but it's obviously not ...

    To me a real news story would be the expansion of their graphics driver department with new experts and a real push to get their driver offering in check but I don't think I'll ever hear that....
  • kyuu - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link

    Funny. I have had zero issues with my 6950 since I built my new rig last year.
  • probedb - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link

    Odd then that the only issue I've ever had with drivers and my 4850 is with OpenGL in Photoshop 6.

    Instead of moaning why don't you use your time productively and go try an Nvidia card or something?
  • Kazashi - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link

    Well, actually, my brother and I both have a HD 4870. His is a diamond reference card version and mine's an after market by sapphire. We (And quite a few people online from what I've seen) suffer from a few severe bugs/issues with our cards.

    Firstly, for some reason, whenever we try to play any game at all that uses any graphic power, the card will crash and then the monitor will go to black, flicker and then turn back on for a few seconds after 10ish minutes. It happens repeatedly, until we quit the game. From what I could gather up from someone's explanation, whenever the card switched from 2d to 3d, it'd turn on some type of overdrive/boost function....Then turn off and then back on again. It'd throttle from a few hundred Mhz to above 600 and then back down repeatedly, making it crash.

    The way how I fixed it was using Riva tuner to manually set the clock on the card to be permanently above 700 all the time, and set the fan to a fixed high setting because our cards ran extremely hot, ah and because ATI Overdrive never changed the fan speed beyond 20% on auto, regardless of the temperture of the GPU. (For my brother's anyway, his reference card ran unbelievable hot. it had to be at 70% fan to be at a bearable 65-70C idling! Mine did better, idling around 40-50C with only 40% fan speed)

    Then there were quite a few issues with some games like KOTOR and artifact issues that popped up on the screen randomly every now and then (Not pertaining to overheating)

    Don't get me wrong, these cards worked really well when they weren't messing up. I could play ME2 on full settings on a 1280X1024 screen with great frame rates.
    We've used the 4870 cards for at least 3 years now. My brother was finally fed up with his accursed reference card and moved up to a GTX 570. I'm still with my 4870 wondering if I should stick with AMD even after all of these problems or check out a Nvidia card. But it's performing well for me right now, so until then.
  • frostyfiredude - Wednesday, April 25, 2012 - link

    Sounds like you got a bad card, or saphire messed up the whole series. Let me tell you, nVidia won't be any better, my friends with 570 and 580s aren't without their issues.

    I've got a reference design XFX, it's got the AMD logo on the PCB and all, and the only issue I've seen in common is the heat at idle which is because 2D mode is nearly the same clock speed and voltage as 3D (I drop down 15Mhz, LOL).
  • bassbeast - Thursday, April 26, 2012 - link

    Mind some advice? Change out the PSU with one you know to be good, if you don't have a spare go to your local mom&pop shop and see if he can test your PSU for you. Because I have found a LOT of those weird crashing errors with GPUs that need external power to be caused by the PSUs not giving them good clean consistent power. Doesn't matter the brand either, because every manufacturer can have one slip past QA.

    So have that checked because that really isn't normal behavior for a card unless it is seriously overheating or getting bad power.
  • jabber - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link

    Show me someone with hardware driver issues for graphics cards and I'll show you either someone that doesn't know how to build a PC or someone with a load of crappy junkware on it.

    There is always more to such tales of woe than 'crappy drivers' especially when 98% of folks (myself included)install them month after month with no issues.

    Is it the drivers or the user? Hmmmm.....
  • retrospooty - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link

    "it's completely normal to expect their drivers to crash on me on a somewhat regular basis. I'm not talking about preview/beta versions but of the complete WHQL versions that today can at least benefit from the win 7 driver crash recovery but are still crashing. If it were only my experience I would definitely write it off as my problem and that would be it but it's obviously not ..."

    It is? In recent years I have had a Radeon HD 1650, 4650, 4870, 6950 and have never had any bugs or crashing issues in any games... Nor have I heard of any widespread problems. I think your PC has issues.
  • hybrid2d4x4 - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link

    I've had a 4870 since the 1GB versions hit the market and have never had any driver issues. What you're describing sounds like hardware thermal issues, not drivers. Check the seating of your heatsink, contact with ram and VRMs. It's true these things run hot as hell, which is why you need to have a well ventilated case. Mine idles in the high 30s with an Accelero S1 Rev2 and 120mm Scythe fan @ 800revs and the core hits the 70s at full load (RAM is ~100, VRMs ~80).
  • bassbeast - Thursday, April 26, 2012 - link

    Strange my two boys and myself are all running Win 7 HP with HD4850s and haven't had a single crash between us. You might try looking into a fabulous tool called "dependency walker" to see if you can track down the problem, as I had exactly one customer with a Radeon that had a crashing problem and it turned out to be a broken .NET update that had messed up his system. Once i uninstalled with Revo and cleaned out the original driver the new driver took perfectly and he's been hassle free ever since.

    Before you go blaming AMD for a Windows crash you really should run DW and make sure its the driver and not Windows with the problem friend, as i have found messed up Windows updates can break both Nvidia and AMD drivers quite nastily.
  • piroroadkill - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link

    Very poor show. 2000 & 3000 I can understand, but a huge number of people bought 4xxx series cards, they represented amazing value for money and still give the performance people need.
  • haukionkannel - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link

    I have AMD HD1800 and I can play new games guite easily. I play LOTRO, Star wars online, civilization 5 and so on without any problems. So don't be too alarmed!

    The alarming thing may be that old radeon 1800 is still fast enough to run games in 1600*1200 resolution... There is something very wrong with game grap power creep...
  • Death666Angel - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link

    I'm trying to identify what new games you are talking about.
  • tipoo - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link

    And what card...HD2800? X1800? There was no HD 1800
  • haukionkannel - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link

    Sorry. X1800.
    SWTOR is guite new game. Shogun 2 allso. But I have to say that in Shogun 2 you have to give up guite a lot of eye candy ;-)
    But the main thing is that you can play relative new games with legasy drivers.
  • Wreckage - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link

    As if AMD does not get enough complaints about their drivers.
  • Golgatha - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link

    What do you expect? They couldn't even be bothered to provide WHQL drivers for their flagship 7970 at launch.
  • redchar - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link

    I'm not an owner of any of those series of cards, but last I heard there were still usability problems that have yet to be solved on the drivers that those cards use. For example - flickering/screen tearing fixed yet? It doesn't even seem to be fixed on my 5000 series. And mouse cursor corruption? I haven't seen it in a while, but perhaps it's because I rarely use that computer for anything but gaming anymore. If there are problems left, which I'd guess so, it's a very poor showing to stop development without fixing all your problems.

    As some people have mentioned above that their AMD cards do not experience problems - that is likely true. From what I have seen between nvidia and AMD, it's not that AMD cards are always buggy, but rather that they seem more likely to be. In my experience those who stick to single monitor and single card setups see the least issues, whereas more than a few issues exist for those who utilize dual monitor setups. As if AMD does less QC on niche setups than they should. And then there is crossfire. With slow updates to crossfire support, dual-gpu utilizing people will often be upset (Skyrim for example... called game of the year by some and yet AMD couldn't get their act together with crossfire support permenantly. One driver added it, another driver broke it, another driver fixed it... broke it.. etc, don't know what the latest working one is now, but 11.11c seems to be the most reliable recently).

    I just hope that whatever driver they decide to stop on for the long period between legacy updates is one of their most reliable, as their drivers seem to fluctuate in quality - something I've not seen in nvidia or really any other company gaming or not.
  • Targon - Friday, April 27, 2012 - link

    There are some issues with Crossfire support having bugs(SLI also has similar problems in various titles), so that might upset SOME, not getting those fixed. Most people are fairly clueless when it comes to reasons for system instability. If you don't know WHY your system becomes unstable, then it is easy to incorrectly point to the wrong place for the source of the problem.

    As others have already posted, if you need one or two power connectors from the power supply, it is VERY possible the power supply itself is not delivering clean power, and that will cause the GPU to glitch. That isn't a problem with the video card or GPU, it is the power source not being good enough.

    I have seen XFX 4890 cards(from personal experience) hit high temps(over 80 degrees C) and that can cause some issues. You can fault the cards for power draw and as a result heat issues, or cooling issues, or whatever, but NVIDIA has had its share of cards that run very hot as well, and if the cooling system doesn't do the job, those will also have similar stability problems.

    A good reason to switch to a newer generation than the 4000 series would be for lower power draw and as a result, fewer overheat related problems. It may make more sense to just wait until Windows 8 comes out, and then get whatever new generation products come out at that point, just to make sure you don't get cut off with "DirectX 11 cards will not be supported, but 11.1 will be." types of issues.
  • CeriseCogburn - Monday, April 30, 2012 - link

    You're talking to people in denial, and they will never admit amd drivers suck.
    The amd forums are full of it, there is a 30 plus standing list of general bugs, and when forum polls are done about 60% have problems with their amd cards and about 43% have unsolved and never resolved problems they just live with.
    This is why you have these people who try to blame everything but amd - they happen to be one of the less than half that either claim they've had no problem (more likely after they've had to fix something or hack something in or change the way they do things to manage the problem) or they do email and play one online game, or already went through endless hours of troubleshooting a year ago and don't really remember it and out of pride claim they never have had even a single crash, ever...
    We know the facts are very, very different.
    Part of the problem is the immense fanboy denial - and when you point out the very few things you did, the response is didn't you listen to someone else - it's the power supply, etc - anything but the truth, the amd driver bundle is buggy, always has been, and always will be, period.
    You have about a 50% chance of not having disturbing problems and ongoing issues when you buy any amd card.
  • andrewaggb - Monday, April 30, 2012 - link

    Personally, I've had a radeon 8500,9100,9600xt,x800pro,hd2900xt,3850,5770,6870, a couple mobility 5650's, and a c50 netbook.

    For the most part very few issues. Halo PC bluescreened changing resolutions on the 8500/9100 series but that was eventually fixed and that's years ago. It didn't occur on their newer cards such as the 9600 series that was out at the time. Better than ut 2004 blue screens with the nvidia 5900xt I had that made the game unplayable.

    Other than that, when vista first came out, the ati 2900xt ran way worse in unreal tournament 3 in dx11 mode than dx9 mode. My brothers had an 8800 gts and 8800 gtx and they were way faster. But the game didn't crash and I played in dx9 mode where it was fine. My brothers had a bunch of blue screens in windows vista the first few months with their 8800 series nvidia cards until nvdia got their drivers sorted out.

    Rage had radeon driver issues, but it kinda had issues in general. Nvidia support was definitely better though.

    I had some starcraft 2 issues at one point on radeon cards due to some setting I had changed in the catalyst control center (I don't remember what it was anymore, but it caused the protoss power circle to not render properly)

    That's about it for me. To be honest I haven't really had frustrating driver problems in years. The ati halo, nvidia ut2004, and nvidia vista blue screens were the worst because blue screens are just unacceptable. I've been mostly pro ati since because when I complained to ati about the halo issue with detailed logs and all the different driver revisions etc (including those that worked and didn't work) they got info from me and fixed the issue in an upcoming driver. With nvidia they wouldn't respond and gave no indication they cared even when I submitted technical and detailed reports. That's frustrating.

    Details----------

    http://www2.ati.com/drivers/CATALYST_41_Release_No...
    'Changing the resolution in Halo while playing in the middle of a Campaign no longer results in a reboot of the machine. This issue was known to occur under Windows XP with an ATI RADEON™ 9000 series installed'

    Also, I pointed out that Catalyst 3.1 or 3.2 had much better performance in a specific scenerio then their current drivers, and they fixed the regression (though they covered it up and didn't call it fixing a regression, see the performance improvements - ongoing committment to previous generation bs)
    http://www2.ati.com/drivers/catalyst_42_release_no...

    And here's one of many threads relating to the nvidia bluescreen with UT2004, I gave up waiting a bought a new video card, but it was eventually fixed in the 71.xx releases
    http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=182&a...
  • m0rsh - Tuesday, May 29, 2012 - link

    Okay. My next card will be from Nvidia. Wddm 1.2 is a DRIVER MODEL, it doesn't need a dx11 card. You can find wddm 1.2 drivers for the 9800gt.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now