[PhotonFanatic]

Just something I always wondered. When do Nvidia and ATi stop supporting their cards. For example, say I had an old XP machine that was still running an old Nvidia 5800 AGP card. Not too long ago, they actually released driver updates to that series of cards. I think it was a little over a year ago, IIRC. Am I really to believe that they actively making changes and improving the drivers on those old cards? Or even newer cards. Say an 8800 GT. They "updated" those drivers not too long ago. Is there really some kind of improvement? Some of these modern games, an 8800GT could barely run on absolute lowest settings. So what is really going on with these old cards and drivers?

 

[HeadlessKnight]

You could say the performance optimizations stopped long ago on those old cards. The support is mainly for bug fixes and to improve compatibility with newer games, so they don't crash and such, at least this is how I noticed it. Also generally speaking Nvidia support their cards much longer than ATI or AMD, so it is less likely to have trouble when you have an old card and a new Windows, and have less headaches when finding new drivers for your old card.
Nvidia not too long ago stopped support of GeForce 6000 series, while ATI dropped support of R400 Series long ago, same thing with GeForce 7000 series and Radeon X1000 Series. ATI dropped HD 4000 series support while Nvidia still supports GTX 200 series ... etc.
Also 8000 GTX+ benefited from newer features included in drivers such as FXAA, Ambient Occlusion and Adaptive V-Sync.

 

[Cyrious]

Quote:

Originally Posted by HeadlessKnight

You could say the performance optimizations stopped long ago on those old cards. The support is mainly for bug fixes and to improve compatibility with newer games, so they don't crash and such, at least this is how I noticed it. Also generally speaking Nvidia support their cards much longer than ATI or AMD, so it is less likely to have trouble when you have an old card and a new Windows, and have less headaches when finding new drivers for your old card.
Nvidia not too long ago stopped support of GeForce 6000 series, while ATI dropped support of R400 Series long ago, same thing with GeForce 7000 series and Radeon X1000 Series. ATI dropped HD 4000 series support while Nvidia still supports GTX 200 series ... etc.
Also 8000 GTX+ benefited from newer features included in drivers such as FXAA, Ambient Occlusion and Adaptive V-Sync.

IIRC nVidia is about to drop support for everything pre-fermi.

Its one reason why I am scrambling to finally update my cards to something marginally newer and faster (GTX 460 primary GT 430 secondary).