Actually, the latest drivers for ANY AMD vga are the 14.4 WHQL. Even for R9 series, win 8.1 x64 😉
Starting from last year, the AMD drivers are being released on a 3-month basis and not monthly anymore. They are just "a little bit" late 😜

The periodic AMD updates are in that beta download that's available for Win7 and 8.1. The latest release was last month. The WHQL release is lagging way behind this year. I have a feeling XP support is done. They ended Vista support too, even though Vista has D3D 11. You also don't get continued support if you are on 8.0.

I'm sure AMD is strapped for cash and that's why they are somewhat quietly cutting corners like this.

swaaye wrote:

The periodic AMD updates are in that beta download that's available for Win7 and 8.1. The latest release was last month. The WHQL release is lagging way behind this year. I have a feeling XP support is done. They ended Vista support too, even though Vista has D3D 11. You also don't get continued support if you are on 8.0.

I'm sure AMD is strapped for cash and that's why they are somewhat quietly cutting corners like this.

That and they tend to dump driver support relatively quickly versus nVidia or others. If you want 5-10 year driver lifecycles, go with nVidia or Intel (ofc that doesn't mean newest drivers are always the best choice - many ATi cards run perfectly well on Legacy Release builds or older WHQL builds (same is true for nVidia's final builds and such), it's just that there's no updates in the event something is broken in the future).

Chaniyth wrote:

I've been a long time Nvidia user (the first Nvidia GPU I ever bought was a GeForce 2 Ultra), I decided to try something different and so recently purchased an AMD r9 270x with 4GB card for only $200 USD (Equivalent Nvidia card would be Nvidia GTX 760 4GB which on average costs about $300 USD) and I seriously don't think i'll ever buy Nvidia ever again, for multiple reasons.

The following statements are my own opinion and should be taken as such and maybe some research on your part too will find what i'm stating is true.

A) Nvidia high-end GPUs cost WAY too much these days, B) AMD GPUs are usually cheaper and you are able to achieve higher framerates than an equivalent Nvidia GPU, C) The only thing that Nvidia really has going for it are extremely top-notch drivers, the PhysX engine and "Nvidiot" gamers that are suckered into the hype the company always has and thus said Nvidiots throw their money at the screen.

And don't forget all the money nVidia throws at developers to optimize specifically for their cards so the games look and play better than on AMD cards.

swaaye wrote:

I'm not entirely sure what we're arguing about here. 😀

I will say that I don't want a GF7 for any modern games because the cards have relatively poor texture filtering and anti-aliasing quality that was remedied by GF8. The ATI X1xxx series had superior quality at the time. X1950XTX can't run Bioshock at 1600x1200 at 60 fps though.

The only reason I worry about power consumption is because the 200+ Watt cards are difficult to cool quietly. You have to be smart about what cooler the card you buy comes with.

I had to buy a quality 750W power supply just to run my ATI 4870x2 card (dual CPU opteron server board), hate to see what that thing consumes (I know it blew up a supposed 880W supply just trying to run a benchmark).

Unknown_K wrote:

swaaye wrote:

I'm not entirely sure what we're arguing about here. 😀

I will say that I don't want a GF7 for any modern games because the cards have relatively poor texture filtering and anti-aliasing quality that was remedied by GF8. The ATI X1xxx series had superior quality at the time. X1950XTX can't run Bioshock at 1600x1200 at 60 fps though.

The only reason I worry about power consumption is because the 200+ Watt cards are difficult to cool quietly. You have to be smart about what cooler the card you buy comes with.

I had to buy a quality 750W power supply just to run my ATI 4870x2 card (dual CPU opteron server board), hate to see what that thing consumes (I know it blew up a supposed 880W supply just trying to run a benchmark).

I upgraded to an 850W PSU before I bought my R9 280x Vapor-X. I couldn't be bothered to fix the noisy fan on my HD6870 so I went without it until I could find a suitable replacement. The HD6870 was already pushing the system close to the limit of my old 550W unit, though, so I had to upgrade.

Some rumor: Windows 9 Might Not Work on 32-Bit Computers

So... shall we place bets? I bet it's going to be 32 bit.

The big issue is driver support for old hardware and software support.

If HyperV in Windows 9 supports vt-d and if they package a free Windows 7/8 32bit with it like they did for VPC then that won't be a issue for businesses.

I'd imagine that most home users running 7/8 are running 64bit processors although I don't have the data to back it up but considering that only 2004+ Pentium 4's supported NX and I doubt too many of those are running 7/8.

Are there a massive amount of XP/7/8 pre-2004 Pentium 4 home users looking forward to Windows 9 but desperate to stay with 32bit? heh

Easiest way to find out if Windows 32bit is staying will to wait for the alpha\betas to appear.

heh
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2 … 24/6849530.aspx

I wanted to ask why this whole mess when most stuff needed to be ported to the new Win95 anyway because, like you said, the performance was horrible.

But of course , the real mystery is: why win95 at all ? Why wasn't Win95 just a 'home edition' of Win NT 4.0 ? What justified all the effort spent on the dead-end 9x OSes when you already had the NT kernel, which is way less horrible than the whol win 9x business ?

[The fact that Windows 95 was such a success demonstrated that the "Hey everybody, abandon all your old hardware that doesn't have 32-bit drivers and switch to Windows NT" strategy wasn't working. -Raymond]

Unknown_K wrote:

swaaye wrote:

I'm not entirely sure what we're arguing about here. 😀

I will say that I don't want a GF7 for any modern games because the cards have relatively poor texture filtering and anti-aliasing quality that was remedied by GF8. The ATI X1xxx series had superior quality at the time. X1950XTX can't run Bioshock at 1600x1200 at 60 fps though.

The only reason I worry about power consumption is because the 200+ Watt cards are difficult to cool quietly. You have to be smart about what cooler the card you buy comes with.

I had to buy a quality 750W power supply just to run my ATI 4870x2 card (dual CPU opteron server board), hate to see what that thing consumes (I know it blew up a supposed 880W supply just trying to run a benchmark).

300W or so. I ran one plus a 4890 in Trifire on a PC Power 850W for a while. Replaces a space heater while its crunching - never brave enough to meter the wall draw of that though.

If they only have an updated version of the kernel, yes there will be 32bit version.
But if they realise that the vast majority of computers that were sold the last 6-8 years is 64bit, they may intenionally cut it off to force some more users to update.
Anyway, the visual changes are "meeeeh" in my opinion. We still have NTFS, a file system already 21 years old, the last version being "only" 13 years old! And what about registry?
Come on M$, come on!!!

What I'm trying to tell is that the evolution in computers has begun to advance slower and slower... You can browse net comfortably with a Core 2 from 2006, even watch HD movies and youtube. Even play the majority of today's games at lower settings! This is 8 years old.
On 2006, what could you do with a 1998 Pentium II? Next to nothing eh? 😉

GeorgeMan wrote:

If they only have an updated version of the kernel, yes there will be 32bit version. But if they realise that the vast majority […]
Show full quote

If they only have an updated version of the kernel, yes there will be 32bit version.
But if they realise that the vast majority of computers that were sold the last 6-8 years is 64bit, they may intenionally cut it off to force some more users to update.
Anyway, the visual changes are "meeeeh" in my opinion. We still have NTFS, a file system already 21 years old, the last version being "only" 13 years old! And what about registry?
Come on M$, come on!!!

What I'm trying to tell is that the evolution in computers has begun to advance slower and slower... You can browse net comfortably with a Core 2 from 2006, even watch HD movies and youtube. Even play the majority of today's games at lower settings! This is 8 years old.
On 2006, what could you do with a 1998 Pentium II? Next to nothing eh? 😉

That's a very good point. I still use my Powerbook G4 from 2005 and I can browse the internet perfectly fine, I just can't watch HD videos because no one ever bothered to make a good h264 decoder for PPC's. But there's no point in watching HD stuff on a 15 inch screen, anyway... I have my Windows box and TV for that

Heh I remember rumours that Windows 7 was not going to have a 32bit version and yet here we are and 8.1 still supports 32bit cpus.
I would be extremely surprised if 9 didn't provide a 32bit version after all it isn't that difficult for them to maintain given the design of NT.

Also are there actually any mainstream cpus that are 128bit?

So looking beyond Pentium 4 and Athlon 64, what 32 bit gaming options are there?

The Core 2 platform was very good. Looking on eBay there a ton of motherboard bundles for little money to be had. But there are also a wide range of boards, some with older chipset that don't support the newer processors. What about AMD? An AM3 board with a Sempron or Athlon II could work very well?

Basically something that runs XP well, supports 4 GB of memory and is compatible with 7, 8 and 9 series of graphics cards. Are newer graphics cards even necessary? I always like to avoid driver problems...

What about current gear? A cheap S1150 board and a Pentium? Or FM2 and AM3+ gear from AMD? Do they all still support XP?

When I upgraded from S775 Core 2 Duo to the next thing (i5 750?) I swear that the Core 2 Duo was faster at certain things.

No, they dropped support for XP at IvyBridge (Z77/3xxx CPUs).
That's why I'm keeping my Z77/2500K system.

It seems that from now on AMD will not support XP, because their newest product (R9 285) doesn't have XP driver. But WTF, even MS doesn't support XP anymore, it's 13 years old!

Also, your new nickname is more difficult to read and I don't recognise you "miles away" because your new avatar is not highly distiguishable. 😢

Windows 10 32bit

"Microsoft, right on schedule, has made the Windows 10 Technical Preview available to download. There are 64-bit and 32-bit versions available "

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/191295-h … chnical-preview

GeorgeMan wrote:

Also, your new nickname is more difficult to read and I don't recognise you "miles away" because your new avatar is not highly distiguishable. 😢

Sorry to hear that. I'm just in the process of changing everything, so I'll let it be for the time being and let things settle down. Maybe down the track who knows 😀

GeorgeMan wrote:

You can browse net comfortably with a Core 2 from 2006, even watch HD movies and youtube.

Web browsing sounds like it should be an easy task for a PC, but my experience is quite the opposite. Web page authors assume that everyone has a modern gaming PC. Recently there was a thread touching slow web pages. I find sites like GameSpot or Google groups, as soon as you open a thread with a decent number of posts, too slow to be enjoyable with my current Conroe CPU. I get distracted and can't remember what I was looking for while the page loads.

HD playback on my system is done "for free" on a GT 610 video card, which according to device manager consumes only around 209 MB of memory space (out of 1 GB on board). The CPU can't cope.

In my opinion, there is no practical need for a site like Google groups to exist in its current form when the same can be accomplished by a forum like the present one, to change for the sake of change. But that is what they do.

Whether this top end video card will have an XP driver seems kinda irrelevant. Almost nobody bying it will care for old games. These games don't work well on Fermi or Kepler cards already, because functions which existing games rely upon are no longer present in the GPUs (ordered dithering, some kind of depth buffering issue that causes games to show flashing, corrupted video, or crash outright). Even if the card could be made to show the windows desktop and probably run DX9 games, it would be a "broken" mostly not working 2000/XP system, that looks like it should actually be "dying".

I've another Ivy Bridge system, which is relatively fast for XP it is running, also with a GT 610. But it supported older games well again when I plugged in an ATI X550. The PCI-E seems to be a very good, long-lasting compatible standard. I recall AGP with different voltages for each "x" rating, advanced and became incompatible more rapidly.

We still have NTFS, a file system already 21 years old, the last version being "only" 13 years old!

So why make all the existing data recovery and partitioning tools instantly obsolete? The file system works, has no practical limits on file and volume size, disks with it can be moved and read on a wide range of systems.

philscomputerlab wrote:

So looking beyond Pentium 4 and Athlon 64, what 32 bit gaming options are there?

The Core 2 platform was very good. Looking on eBay there a ton of motherboard bundles for little money to be had. But there are also a wide range of boards, some with older chipset that don't support the newer processors. What about AMD? An AM3 board with a Sempron or Athlon II could work very well?

Basically something that runs XP well, supports 4 GB of memory and is compatible with 7, 8 and 9 series of graphics cards. Are newer graphics cards even necessary? I always like to avoid driver problems...

Core 2 for desktops shared LGA 775 with NetBurst, but aside from a few oddball in-between chipsets (like PT880 and 945), NetBurst and Core are separate beasts (and remember that later P4s are 64-bit). I think "32-bit gaming" is also kind of a misnomer - do you mean XP gaming? 😊 There are plenty of 32-bit games (especially those released after 2007) that run just fine on 64-bit Windows Vista, Windows 7, etc (as a random example: Skyrim), and will benefit from modern or fairly modern (e.g. DX10+) hardware. IME I've yet to find a DX9+ game that actually won't run on 7x64 (I would assume this should mostly translate to Vista x64 and 8x64 too). However I've come across a few DX6-8 games that won't, but that work just fine on XP - and for all of those games even a top-tier Pentium 4 or Athlon64 is overkill, as would be a GeForce 6-9 (or equivalent Radeon), and in some cases you may even create compatibility problems with the whiz-bang new card (AGP bridged Radeons can be a problem for some folks, and GeForce 6+ dropped some legacy features that may or may not matter for you (paletted textures is often the one most people complain about, but it doesn't affect all games)). OFC that doesn't mean you should avoid such a machine - P4s are dirt cheap, as are nice PCIe Radeon/GeForce cards from ~2005-7 (afaik NOS Radeon 2900s are still $20-$30 on ebay), so I'd just go for it and crank AA/AF to the moon. 😎

Personally I use Windows Vista's release (2007) as the dividing line - games released post-Vista generally aren't Vista-only, but they usually have compatibility with Vista, 7, 8, etc in mind (again, Skyrim is a fine example of this). Games released pre-Vista may or may not be an issue; but pre-Vista is also generally pre-multi-core, pre-"I have to have 32GB to run a web browser" and pre-"I need a 3GHz GPU with 128 ROPs and 16GB just to play this at 5 FPS because its an awful port" too. It was truly a simpler time. 🤣 😵

I think this can all be represented by two machines (or multi-booting on one machine, depending on the specific hardware under the hood (if it can run XP drivers)) - ofc if you want to have 3-4-8 machines that's fine, but I don't think it's a requirement (vs if you want to support every novel feature/game from 1980 to 2000 you're probably going to need closer to a dozen systems).

j7n wrote:

Web browsing sounds like it should be an easy task for a PC, but my experience is quite the opposite. Web page authors assume th […]
Show full quote

Web browsing sounds like it should be an easy task for a PC, but my experience is quite the opposite. Web page authors assume that everyone has a modern gaming PC. Recently there was a thread touching slow web pages. I find sites like GameSpot or Google groups, as soon as you open a thread with a decent number of posts, too slow to be enjoyable with my current Conroe CPU. I get distracted and can't remember what I was looking for while the page loads.

HD playback on my system is done "for free" on a GT 610 video card, which according to device manager consumes only around 209 MB of memory space (out of 1 GB on board). The CPU can't cope.

In my opinion, there is no practical need for a site like Google groups to exist in its current form when the same can be accomplished by a forum like the present one, to change for the sake of change. But that is what they do.

Whether this top end video card will have an XP driver seems kinda irrelevant. Almost nobody bying it will care for old games. These games don't work well on Fermi or Kepler cards already, because functions which existing games rely upon are no longer present in the GPUs (ordered dithering, some kind of depth buffering issue that causes games to show flashing, corrupted video, or crash outright). Even if the card could be made to show the windows desktop and probably run DX9 games, it would be a "broken" mostly not working 2000/XP system, that looks like it should actually be "dying".

I've another Ivy Bridge system, which is relatively fast for XP it is running, also with a GT 610. But it supported older games well again when I plugged in an ATI X550. The PCI-E seems to be a very good, long-lasting compatible standard. I recall AGP with different voltages for each "x" rating, advanced and became incompatible more rapidly.

I have no issues with any modern web-pages I've hit on any of my 'modern' systems - the slowest of them is a first-generation Pentium dual-core (Conroe based), with a measly 2GB of RAM. I'm writing this on a Core 2 Duo 6550, which has no problems with HD video, modern Silverlight/Flash/etc pages, and so on. That said, I think it's pretty miserable that I *need* a Conroe-era (or better) multi-core CPU, a few GB of RAM, and a GPU that can do h.264 and other decoding magic just to tool around on the Internet without trouble. I remember even just a few years ago, a basic Pentium III running 2000 or XP with a simple IGP was AOK for basic browsing and office productivity; things have become far too top heavy in the last few years (and in a lot of cases it leads to broken pages/applications/etc because some purely aesthetic feature was implemented in a half-assed manner, and if the actual content on the page had just been put up with HTML not only would everything load faster, but there'd be less moving parts to break, and less nonsense to navigate through). In short: I agree with you but haven't had quite as bad time with Conroe and the modern web. 😊

Curiosity question:
What games do you mean ("these games") when you're mentioning problems with Fermi and Kepler? Or at least broadly what era of games? I haven't really put my Fermi card to any sort of gaming tasks, but Kepler has had no problems with anything I can get working under Win7 (I'd assume Fermi would be the same, since it uses the same driver, and has a relatively similar feature set, but I can't say this with any certainty).

As far as AGP - I never remember compatibility being a concern, and I seem to notice more discussions about AGP compatibility today than 10-15 years ago when it was current tech.

obobskivich wrote:

do you mean XP gaming? 😊

Yes that's probably a better description of what I mean 😀

I think it was around 2007, I remember Bioshock, when games started adding DX10 features.

One game that causes issues in Vista and later is Far Cry. I wrote a little bit about that in the "Getting old Windows games working." thread.

The mountains / landmasses do not have reflections in the water: