AMD Catalyst 13.12 WHQL Drivers Now Available
by Ryan Smith on December 19, 2013 11:30 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Radeon
- Radeon 200
After 9.5 betas, AMD has finally released a WHQL certified driver from their latest driver branch (13.25x) in the form of Catalyst 13.12.
First introduced as the launch driver for the 280X and other Radeon 200 series cards, 13.12 rolls out a number of changes into AMD’s WHQL driver, including official support for the 290 series video cards (and the post-launch fanspeed changes), tiled resources support, tiled monitor support (4k monitors), a number of new game profiles, and an even larger number of performance improvements. This is also the first WHQL driver to include AMD’s phase 1 frame pacing fixes for pre-GCN 1.1 cards.
Also of note, for those users concerned about the lack of Vista support in the betas, Vista support is here and present for the WHQL version. AMD has previously indicated that they’ll continue to support Vista so this was expected, but like the 13.11 betas we wouldn’t be surprised to see that Vista support remains absent in future beta releases.
As always, you can grab the driver from AMD’s driver download page. The 64bit Windows driver weighs in at 203MB. Meanwhile release notes can be found on AMD’s driver release notes page.
Source: AMD
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Zefram0911 - Thursday, December 19, 2013 - link
Because they dropped support for a 5 year old card? Laughable.skiboysteve - Thursday, December 19, 2013 - link
windows 8 came out 4 years after the 4000 series did. and they continued to sell the 4800 series for over a year. so yes, when my ~3 year old card is no longer supported I'm not happy about it. especially when the competition is still supporting cards that are 7 years oldKhenglish - Thursday, December 19, 2013 - link
The 4870 is still no slouch of a card. It beats any integrated including iris and is faster than low end dedicated cards. If I had one I would be pissed if I lost driver support for it.TiGr1982 - Thursday, December 19, 2013 - link
No trolling - I'm a longstanding Radeon user myself.I had HD 4870 back in 2008. That was 5 years ago (now I own HD 7950 which is 3.5 times faster; more than that it's GCN - say, like the new consoles).
All Pre-DirectX 11 (DirectX 10/10.1) Radeon cards, such as HD2000/HD3000/HD4000, are now considered legacy products (which they are in fact), and the last driver for them appears to be 13.1. I'm afraid, there probably won't be any considerable updates anymore. Besides, I suppose, all new games ported from/developed simultaneously for PS4/Xbox One will be DX11 only and thus won't run on anything older than HD 5000. HD 4870 is a goode olde historicale boarde, let's face it.
What prevents you from upgrading to something more recent?
You can't use every single piece of hardware forever, anyway...
jkostans - Thursday, December 19, 2013 - link
Historical? Give me a break. I still run a 4870 and it plays everything I want just fine. I will not move to windows 8 with this machine anyways so I guess it's a non issue for me. Stop looking down on people who don't have the same priorities as you.Makaveli - Friday, December 20, 2013 - link
While I agree AMD should still be doing driver updates for the 4xxx series.A 4870 playing everything is subjective and your personal opinion.
It wouldn't be good enough for me and I know this because I have an 4890 in my HTPC that was replaced by a 6950 and that was replaced by a 7970 Ghz.
If you actually play any newer games it won't cut it. Then again playing with low frame rate may be acceptable to you.
tcube - Friday, December 20, 2013 - link
yeah 4870's are very good cards still... I can't complain I just fried mine 2 months ago, didn't realize the fan got stuck, the thing overheated during Stalker I think and I pushed it again and again without knowing the real problem... after a while the screen got dark and the GPU never came back online :|... sad story I know(my old 5 years old card did it's duty dutifully...)... Now I'm going to by a 290x and crossfire it with my next kaveri ... muahahahaa (mandrake laughter)lmcd - Friday, December 20, 2013 - link
Bro, the 4870 ~= 5770 ~= 7750That's still quite relevant, in my opinion.
And DX11 only? That isn't hitting quite as fast as you think...
freedom4556 - Tuesday, December 24, 2013 - link
I figured I'd chime in with my anger at the fact that my 4870 1GiB Crossfire doesn't work in 8/8.1. I had to go back to 7 after I figured that out. And yeah, 4870 x2 is basically a DX 10 5870. Still plenty relevant.ky4h - Thursday, December 19, 2013 - link
Agreed, my 4850 is still capable of handling most of my games and there's no real incentive to upgrade.