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As time goes on and a product catalog grows, it's not unusual for a company to reduce and eventually eliminate support for older products. In the case of ATI, AMD's graphics division, a new decision to reduce support for older graphics chips is about to take effect.

To date, ATI has provided a new WHQL certified driver every month to nearly every graphics card capable of DirectX 9 acceleration. That includes cards all the way back to 2002's Radeon 9700 Pro. After this month's Catalyst 9.3 release, that will not be the case.

After Catalyst 9.3, products prior to the R6xx generation of graphics cards (that go by the Radeon HD 2000 series brand names) will be changed to "legacy support status." This means that these products will get quarterly WHQL driver updates, instead of monthly updates. AMD assures us that these products will still receive critical "hotfix" drivers if high-priority fixes are needed.

Products from the Radeon HD 2000, Radeon HD 3000, and Radeon HD 4000 series will continue to receive monthly driver updates as they do now. AMD says, "By moving pre-6xx products to legacy support status, we will be able to focus more of our software engineering resources on current and future products, operating systems and applications."

Our take on this? It's not a big deal. This sort of thing happens all the time. For example, Nvidia's current drivers support cards going back to the GeForce 6 series. The latest official driver for GeForce FX cards (released in 2003), is dated October 17, 2006. AMD's cutoff date is more recent, affecting products as recent as four years old, but their continued support with quarterly updates is actually quite generous compared to how "legacy" products are usually updated. Frankly, we're a little surprised the company didn't decide to make updates yearly or bi-yearly.

If you have one of the affected products, make sure you grab those Catalyst 9.3 drivers when they hit the Web later this month.

The full list of products to be shifted to legacy support status is below:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2 … 476,00.asp