ryzen support on win10 only AMD: Sorry, There Will Be No Official Ryzen Drivers For Windows 7

[WALLONN7]

AMD: Sorry, There Will Be No Official Ryzen Drivers For Windows 7

 

 

AMD won’t be providing Windows 7 drivers for its upcoming Ryzen processors, the company said, contradicting recent reports that indicated AMD would support Microsoft’s older operating system.

AMD confirmed that it has tested and validated Ryzen on Windows 7, but that it won’t officially support the OS. It puts to rest the suggestion of a recent translated report from Computerbase that AMD would reverse its stance and ship Windows 7 drivers for Ryzen.

“To achieve the highest confidence in the performance of our AMD Ryzen desktop processors (formerly code-named ‘Summit Ridge’), AMD validated them across two different OS generations, Windows 7 and 10,” AMD said in a statement in response to a question from PCWorld. “However, only support and drivers for Windows 10 will be provided in AMD Ryzen desktop processor production parts.”

AMD is maintaining a position that it, along with Intel and Microsoft, has held for the last year. In January 2016, Microsoft said that Intel’s Kaby Lake and AMD’s Ryzen would only be supported under Windows 10, and reiterated that position last August. 

Why PC enthusiasts should care: Though Windows 10 is Microsoft’s most modern OS, with support for the latest APIs and drivers, a dedicated base of gamers has stuck with Windows 7. If AMD supplied Ryzen drivers for Windows 7, all would be well: Windows 7 users could continue to game on their older, stabler OS. AMD’s messaging, however, is a return to the status quo: If you want to run AMD’s latest chip, you should have Windows 10, too.

Microsoft’s busy building features like Game Mode into Windows 10 to lure PC gamers onto its most modern OS.

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The reason Microsoft gave for tying Windows 10 to Kaby Lake and Ryzen was simple: Silicon and software needs to be designed and shipped in close conjunction, so that the software can support the features of the processor and vice versa. Windows 7, for example, simply couldn’t anticipate features that chip vendors would include later. Microsoft stopped mainstream support for Windows 7 in 2015, and extended support will end in 2020. (As it is, Microsoft only grudgingly added support for Intel’s prior Skylake chip on Windows 10 after customer complaints.)

“As new silicon generations are introduced, they will require the latest Windows platform at that time for support,” a Microsoft spokeswoman said last August. “This enables us to focus on deep integration between Windows and the silicon, while maintaining maximum reliability and compatibility with previous generations of platform and silicon.” 

At this point, AMD has “verified”, or tested, that a Windows 7 PC powered by Ryzen will boot. But will it take advantage of all of Ryzen’s capabilities? That seems less likely. Consider: Gamers are always seeking the most up-to-date GPU drivers to eke out the last little bit of performance from their graphics card. A Ryzen desktop won’t have to worry about properly supporting the sleep states that a notebook might, but there’s still a decent chance of something breaking.

 

As my colleague Brad Chacos notes, systems powered by Kaby Lake have booted an unsupported OS, namely Windows 8. Ryzen may as well. But there are two issues: compatibility, and performance. Even if Windows 7 boots Ryzen, a lack of support means that any bugs will probably not be patched. And it's totally unknown how a Ryzen system will perform compared to a Windows 10 Ryzen PC, and if all of Ryzen's features will be available on Windows 7.

Unfortunately, now that AMD has clarified its position, gamers remain at a crossroads: Upgrading a Windows 7 PC with a Ryzen CPU—but without proper drivers—seems like cutting off one’s nose to spite Microsoft’s face.

Updated at 9:23 PM with additional details.

 

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[Israeli_Eagle]

The question is: They mean the CPU drivers or only the wannabe-inside-GPU drivers (which nobody ever needs anyway)?

[straycat19]

On 2/11/2017 at 5:10 AM, Israeli_Eagle said:

The question is: They mean the CPU drivers or only the wannabe-inside-GPU drivers (which nobody ever needs anyway)?

 

They mean the CPU drivers.  But it really isn't an issue.  The 6th Generation Intel Processors are plenty fast to play games and with a little water cooling can be nudged to the 5Ghz plateau.  The difference between the 6th and 7th generation Intel CPUs is nominal.  They both operate at 91W and the stock speed is 4 and 4.2 respectively.  That little bit of speed isn't even significant.  A lot of these articles are written to scare users into buying the new processor and thus Windows 10 because they are being led to believe that they won't be able to play their games.  The Video card makers aren't helping the situation either.  I recently bought several EVGA 1080 cards and a perk was a free game on steam, the only caveat was I couldn't get the game because I am not running Windows 10.  Not that the game requires it but to download it your system has to be running Windows 10.  Wonder how much Microsoft is paying them to do that.  It is even a convoluted distribution that goes through EVGA to Steam, so it isn't Steam enforcing it.  The good news is I don't care.  I still have Windows 98 game boxes that have games I play and still like, and the same with XP game boxes.  The games won't run on anything newer so I kept the old systems with the games, plus I have spare parts in case anything breaks and needs to be replaced in them.  I will do the same for my Windows 7 systems.  However, forewarned is forearmed, so I have built 7 new Windows 7 Gaming systems since Christmas,  split between 2011-v3 and 1151 based processors, most with 128GB, and 1080 Graphics cards. They will probably last me the rest of my lifetime.

[DKT27]

3 hours ago, straycat19 said:

They mean the CPU drivers.

 

I wonder what do CPU drivers are for. Or are we talking about chipsets, or something about things that happen before the OS runs, if I put it that way here.