AMD Clarifies Driver Support on DX9 Only Hardware in Win7

On Wednesday we posted about DX9 only cards receiving legacy driver support status under Windows 7. AMD’s Terry Makedon sets the record straight and clarifies what exactly this means for DX9 only video cards under Windows 7.

WDDM1.1 (Windows Display Driver Model) is the driver architecture required to run Windows7. To meet the Microsoft dictated requirements, GPU’s must be DirectX10 and later level hardware. So as stated on our website, Windows 7 users with DirectX 9 AMD graphics hardware can use the legacy Windows Vista WDDM 1.0 drivers (as it is not possible for DirectX 9 hardware to support the WDDM 1.1 driver requirements). On a separate note the move to "legacy driver" status happen when we moved our DirectX 9 based hardware to a legacy support structure back in March 2009, and we were quite public about this. We’ve been providing updates to this driver on a quarterly basis - in fact we will be posting a new legacy driver in the next few days.

Summary: Windows7 users on DirectX9 can and should use the legacy Catalyst driver which will be updated quarterly.

Ongoing Discussion

Sony Continues Quarterly Losing Streak

Sony has posted its second quarter numbers today and they look pretty bad all the way around. The one bright spot was Sony’s music business which saw a bump in sales thanks to higher sales of Michael Jackson’s music after his death.

Compared with a profit of 20.8 billion yen a year ago, this marked Sony's fourth straight quarterly downturn. Sales for the quarter that ended September 30 also took a spill, dropping 19.8 percent to 1.66 trillion yen ($18.26 billion) from 2.07 trillion yen in the year-ago quarter.

Comments

Top Costume Searches Include 'Adult Care Bear'

Imagine that, the top internet searches for costumes this year include stuff like adult care bear and adult snow white. Sweet!

I don't care what you dress up as for Halloween. Have fun with it. But just think about it. Adult Care Bear costume. Really. It's a costume that's probably itchy and uncomfortable, unflattering, and will embarrass the heck out of your kids if you have any.

Obviously this person has never done a Google search on "adult care bear" or they’d have realized this is hardly itchy or unflattering.

Comments

Pirate Bay Founders Banned From Running The Site

Something tells me this isn’t going to stop these guys.

The Stockholm District Court has taken action against two founder members of The Pirate Bay. Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij are now banned from operating the site and will have to pay fines of $71,000 each if they continue. This, despite the fact that they nor the site remain in Sweden.

Comments

Spam King Ordered to Pay Facebook $711M Damages

I’m not sure what "message" Facebook thinks they are sending with this $711 million fine, the guy continues to spam people and hasn’t paid the other $235 million dollar in fines either. Normally I love seeing spammers sued into oblivion but when you are at almost one billion in fines and the person is still spamming, a dose of jail time might be what the doctor ordered.

"While we don't expect to receive the vast majority of the award, we hope that this will act as a continued deterrent against these criminals," said Sam O'Rourke, associate general counsel for Facebook, in a blog posting Thursday. "This is another important victory in our fight against spam."

Comments

Let's Kill the OS Upgrade Disc

Killing the operating system update disc? Subscribing to operating system upgrades as an ongoing service? I see what this guy is trying to say but would you guys even go for that?

Here's what I propose: no more OS upgrade pricing. Vendors, make your money for each new machine that runs your OS, either up front when the OS is installed on the machine (easy for Apple, which makes 99.99 percent of the machines that run the Apple OS), or by letting customers subscribe to operating system upgrades as an ongoing service.

Comments

Windows 7 and Microsoft Hardware: Better Together

Windows 7 is now broadly available to the public, and to celebrate this launch Microsoft Hardware is offering deals on some of its innovative products that help make everyday tasks faster and easier with the new operating system. Consumers all over the world are celebrating the availability of Windows 7 by hosting their own launch parties from Oct. 22 through today, and party hosts have been able to receive virtual coupon books to share with their guests, which are filled with exciting offers on several products. These offers are now available to people who didn’t host a party so everyone has the opportunity to take advantage of the deals.

Comments

IBM To Provide 100% Primary Health Care Coverage for Employees

IBM today announced that it will provide U.S. employees with 100 percent coverage for primary health care, beginning in 2010. Employees enrolled in IBM plans will receive full coverage throughout the year -- no coinsurance or deductible -- for in-network primary care with their internist, family practitioner, pediatrician, general practitioner or primary osteopath. IBM will be among the first U.S. companies to cover primary care at 100 percent.

Comments

On-chip Highways: 2D Interconnect for Tera-scale Processors

The ability to integrate hundreds of Intel Architecture cores into future microprocessors will help deliver the power of Moore's Law to new user interfaces and visually compelling experiences. A high performance, resilient, core-to-core interconnect will be as important for these tera-scale microprocessors as a well-designed highway grid is to moving goods and services across a country. Recently Intel demonstrated a next generation 2D interconnect prototype that provides high data bandwidth and low latencies between cores, memory and I/O. The demo also featured our -MCEMU FPGA-based many-core emulation platform developed at Intel Labs, in Braunschweig, Germany, and a 3D visual interface developed with UC Irvine.

Comments

The Case Against the FCC's Net Neutrality Plan

The author of this guest editorial at C|Net says he has read the FCC’s net neutrality plan (185 numbered paragraphs, 310 footnotes and 3 appendices) and he has come to the conclusion that there's nothing to see here, folks.

The basic thrust of the proposed rules, as nearly everyone knows by now, is to keep broadband Internet access providers from managing last-mile network traffic in ways that discriminate, pro or con, based on content, applications, or devices. Access providers would be banned from restricting or throttling services that the provider doesn't like, for example, perhaps because they compete with more expensive alternatives the provider or one of its business partner offers. The proposed rules would apply to all broadband access, including wireless.

Comments

Malware Abundant in Twitter URLs

Kaspersky Labs has announced a new tool today called Krab Krawler that examines every post on Twitter and analyzes any linked web pages for malware.

As many as one in every 500 web addresses posted on Twitter lead to sites hosting malware, according to researchers at Kaspersky Labs who have deployed a tool that examines URLs circulating in tweets. The spread of malware is aided by the popular use of shortened URLs on Twitter, which generally hide the real website address from users before they click on a link, preventing them from self-filtering links that appear to be dodgy.

Comments

[H]ardware Round-Up II

Cooling

Cogage TRUE Spirit LGA1366 CPU Cooler @ Legit Reviews

Dynatron Genius G950 CPU Cooler @ OCIA

Memory/ Storage

Kingston SSDNow V Series 40GB @ TestFreaks

SanDisk Extreme Pro Compact Flash Card @ TechwareLabs

Video

Gigabyte GTX 275 1792MB Super Overclock @ HWC