Quote:
Originally Posted by FlyByU
After reading that thread it seems AGP users are stuck with ATI which means ATI is doing there best to push everyone onto a Vista and PCIE.
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That would be technological progress that's pushing it, not ATI.
I'm not sure how it's ATI's fault that AGP is being passed over. New games already push GPU's to exceed the limitations of the AGP bus. Not significantly, but they can. The industry selected a successor(PCI Express). Heck, I think it showed up in late 2004. So over 3.5 years that it's been on the scene. Eventually AGP has to be passed by. Plenty of companies make basic AGP cards...as few people will be purchasing "high end" AGP cards, since most of those systems will be on average, probably 3-5 years old.
Of course there will be a crossover period where you can have a solid system on both formats...but let's be honest, there aren't many AGP configured systems left that are considered "up to date" in the PC world. ATI can't justify producing AGP solutions of higher end cards if there's not enough customer base to support it. And there isn't.
As for support of XP...I don't see how they're discontinuing that. Future driver optimizations? Probably not... but those drivers have been in development for some time now and the bulk of the customers have no significant issues. There will be updates to address any compatibility issues that come up, I'm sure. I've yet to see where ATI is abandoning XP. I would absolutely LOVE to see some concrete evidence of where you obtained this information. Especially since you're so committed to spreading the word everywhere you go.
I just recently switched to nVidia, but it had nothing to do with ATI's support of any OS or any other complaints about their support of what is now, "legacy" hardware.