I think you are confused on timing. The 5000 series came out in September four years ago and is still fully supported. The 4000 series came out in June of 2008. The last drivers for the 4000 series was 13.1 (Released Jan 2013). Which was 4.5 years after the 4000 series was released.
And honestly I don't see any reason for AMD to make sure 5 year old cards can run the latest games. Because even if they ran bug free, they don't have the horse power to run them at anything more than minimum settings.
Ha - we are dinos !
Mobile fans happily preorder in the millions without knowing specs. And when specs arive after preorder they dont care the slightest. Hell - they dont even know what specs is.
Its a growing market.
Its the future. Lol.
Pretty soon the line from Apple or AMD or nVidia or the rest will be:
"we have a...thing. We can't say what it is, what it does, or what it costs, but you can pre-order it!"
Can I just check - in this case it is at least guaranteed to be a video card you would be pre-ordering, though, right?
Its not going to turn out, come the day, that you've bought a toasted sandwich maker or a cat-tree?
I disagree, the high end cards still have more horse power than the low end cards 5 years later.
A radeon 4870 was 800 shaders @ 750mhz. That's still faster than every AMD APU. Even the 4650 still has good grunt compared to a lot of the sub $100 solutions available.
AMD still does release drivers for the 4000 series though, they're just legacy releases once every 6 months.
Linux driver support doesn't even get that though.
It's not about performance though.
In theory, the architecture is mostly optimised for in the drivers, and there are few remaining bugs.
There's basically no point in releasing new drivers, because nothing new is being done for those particular cards.
Sure, AMD could include support in their "mainstream" drivers, but what would it achieve? Not much, since there wouldn't really be anything actually done for those cards, other than rolling them into the same driver.
How much do you think NV does in their driver updates which actually impacts 95% of the cards the drivers support? Just because a driver update still supports an old card doesn't mean there's actually any point in upgrading, other than "just because".
Sure, it means you can download any driver and be sure you have the latest for your card, but it also might mean you are updating for no reason, because there's no actual change for your card for the last 5 driver releases.
NV might present a driver which supports more cards, but that doesn't mean each update has any relevance for all those cards, just that support hasn't been removed.
APUs may be slower, but they are based on a newer architecture, and hence may make actual gains from new driver releases, and of course the products themselves are newer, and may have issues which can still crop up and may need fixing.
Performance is irrelevant for driver support really. What matters is whether the drivers will actually do anything for that card/architecture.
Company of Heroes 2 crashes on all RadeonHD 4xxx cards because AMD doesn't properly support a feature of DirectX in their drivers. Not performance related at all, and something AMD needs to fix.
If you have legacy an AMD Radeon HD 4000, 3000, or 2000 display card you will need to uninstall your current drivers and install the 13.4 beta drivers or newer. These drivers can be found at:
http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/legacy/Pages/legacy-radeonaiw-vista32.aspx for 32bit operating systems
http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/legacy/Pages/legacy-radeonaiw-vista64.aspx for 64bit operating systems
Dude, literally 30 seconds on Google brings up links with fixed drivers. Did you even bother to look?
Seems like Hawaii should be pretty fast cards, but I personally wouldn't buy a card without seeing reviews. I'm especially interested in how quiet AMD's blower cooler is compared to NVIDIA's blower cooler used on the GTX 7xx series. The aesthetic on the new reference AMD cards does look pretty sweet. Would match great in my red/black themed system.
Yeah, the issues still exist with those drivers. Source: Multiple people with personal experience.