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Which ATi Drivers Support What?

Please be aware that this entry is over two years old. Therefore, it may contain broken links, outdated information, or views and content which are no longer completely valid.

There’s been a little bit of confusion over some of ATi/AMD’s Catalyst drivers and what each one supports, so I’ll go over them here in the blog briefly.

Catalyst 5.11 is one of the older “safe” driver sets, and one of the last to come with the ATi Control Panel, rather than the .NET Catalyst Control Center (CCC) that has to be loaded in the system tray at startup (or loaded manually) in order to have access to the video card’s settings.  The CCC is the only interface available with Catalyst 6.1 and newer.  Catalyst 5.11 does not support X1900 series cards.

Catalyst 6.1 does not support X1800 or X1900 series cards.

Catalyst 6.2 is the last driver set to support Windows 2000.  So, if you’re running Windows 2000 and an ATi card, you are stuck at this version.  Just watch out if you purchase newer ATi cards in the future–some of them may not be supported under this Catalyst version.

Full support for Radeon 7xxx, 8xxx, and 9xxx cards ceased after Catalyst 6.5.  Some of the more prevalent cards are still supported up through the most recent release of Catalyst 6.10, which includes Radeon 9800’s, 9700’s, 9600’s, 9650’s, 9550’s, and 9500’s.  These are the cards that are NOT supported after Catalyst 6.5: Radeon 9250’s, 9200’s, 9000’s, 8500’s, 7500’s, 7200’s, and 7000’s.  The same applies to all ATi All-In-Wonder equivalents.

Catalyst 6.7 introduced Alternate Frame Rendering (AFR) support for CrossFire-enabled configurations running with Direct3D applications/games.  Certain specific applications/games that do not work with AFR are not supported.

The X1950 Pro is not currently supported by any publicly available Catalyst driver set, so you will need to use the specific drivers provided on CD that comes with the video card, or download them here: https://support.ati.com/ics/support/kbAnswer.asp?questionID=23582

(Originally published on a now-defunct blog)