AMD to Slow Driver Support for Radeon HD 2000, 3000 and 4000 Series

If you’re running an AMD Radeon HD 2000, 3000 or 4000 series graphics card, listen up. AMD has just announced that driver support for those series will be moving to a quarterly cycle, beginning with the May 2012 release. Current-gen cards (5000, 6000 and 7000) will continue to receive driver updates on a monthly basis. Aside from the obvious fact that companies need to slow support at some point, AMD’s reasoning behind the move is hard to disagree with:

“The reason for the shift in support policy is largely due to the fact that the AMD Radeon HD 2000, AMD Radeon HD 3000, and AMD Radeon HD 4000 Series have been optimized to their maximum potential from a performance and feature perspective.“

With this move, AMD will be putting most of its focus on its current-gen cards, and looking to the future (aka: Windows 8). When Microsoft’s next OS launches, AMD will not be supporting the 2000, 3000 and 4000 cards with a new driver. Instead, the driver designed for those cards will be handled by the Windows Install (and Update, I am assuming).

As mentioned above, the driver to kick off the new cycle for older cards will be released next month, versioned 8.97 (likely to be part of Catalyst 12.4).