Oh Noes: AMD Dropping Support On Many DirectX 9 Cards

What an absolutely stupid idea this is.  With millions of people fearing Windows Vista, AMD has decided to drop driver support on the majority of the company’s DirectX 9 (Windows XP) cards instead of helping them skip over Vista.  Who in their right mind thought this was a good time to move these cards to legacy?  Hot off the release of Windows 7 don’t you think the company should be trying to generate favorable press, especially since it is the only one with a DirectX 11 card on the market?  Isn’t that basic PR – new product = surround the company with good publicity?

Nope, AMD went the other way.  Instead of offering users a smooth way to skip DX10 and jump right to DX11 (comes with Win7), AMD thought domestic violence would be a more appropriate tactic.  It apparently has no qualms with slapping its consumers in the face, forcing them to upgrade if they want to be recognized by the hurting company.

Sure, DirectX 9 is now two step behinds, but you could placate the users with reduced Window 7 graphics functionality.  If that’s not possible, just give them the absolute basics so Windows doesn’t freak out on them for improper drivers. More advanced users will likely just live off of third-party drivers as they wait for nVidia’s solution, thus sticking it to AMD.  And the company deserves it, some of the discontinued cards are only two years old, and easily capable of playing today’s titles at reasonable settings.

Here’s the corporate line behind the move:

AMD has moved to a legacy software support structure for these graphics accelerator products in an effort to better focus development resources on future products.

It isn’t unreasonable, or outlandish by any means, but there’s the obvious stigma of feeling abandoned.  Again, it is the horrible timing of the decision that puts this news in the Oh Noes category.