Recently all we seem to have had is Ryzen news from AMD, however AMD have also been working on other projects and have recently launched a new Crimson ReLive driver. However version 17.2.1 which doesn’t contain any major new features apart from some extra Multi-GPU profiles and optimisations for newly released games. There has however been an unexpected but not surprising omission, Windows 8.1 32-bit has been removed from the list of supported operating systems.
An AMD representative gave the following reasons for the omission:
- Extremely low download numbers for the driver.
- Cutting development team costs by discarding OSes and architectures that have a minimal audience.
We completely understand why AMD have dropped support for the OS, why would they want to spend valuable development time on an unused OS when the time could be used much more wisely in developing drivers for OSs that are more widely used.
But then again why would anyone who needs the advances given by new drivers be running such an OS, with and increasing number of modern games recommending 8GB of system RAM the 3.5GB limit of 32-bit OSs is becoming a major limit in gaming.
However there is some light at the of the tunnel for Windows 8.1 32-bit uses, AMD have said they will try and produce occasional releases depending on the driver team workloads at the time. With Vega on the horizon the whole AMD driver time are understandably very busy trying to get the most out of the soon to be released cards.
Let us know your thoughts on the AMD driver updates below.
