My graphics card died so I thought I’d just grab a cheap replacement RX 550. Local computer place’s website said Windows 8.1 compatible.
Turns out, the RX 500 series is not supported on 8.1! Neither is the VEGA series. There is no driver available for those cards, but for some reason they fully support the older Windows 7!
Only Windows 7 and Windows 10 are supported now. Had to return it and get a 400 series.
I haven’t encountered a Win7 driver that hasn’t worked on Win8/8.1 when I used it for … idk 5 years?
The system didn’t change a whole lot.
The only thing where I had issues installing drivers on Win8 was when I installed it on a Bootcamp Partition on my really old MacBook (the unibody plastic ones). And even there I could install them with a workaround and it worked fine for years.
The Windows 7 drivers won’t support the DX version in 8.1 I think… The Windows 10 drivers wouldn’t install. The RX400 drivers didn’t find the card either. Well, they found the HDMI audio part, but not the graphics part.
I don’t really want to upgrade to Windows 10. I tried when it first came out, got a black screen on boot after enabling BitLocker, no support or solution from Microsoft. In any case, the way they ram major, feature-breaking updates up your arse and the amount of telemetry you have to block is highly problematic too.
Windows 8.1 was the sweet spot. Supports BitLocker eDrive, doesn’t have all the nonsense from Windows 10. And now it’s unsupported.
There probablly isnt really that much to do about it.
The official hardware driver support for windows 8.x has allready been dropped more then a year ago.
If not two years ago…
Windows8.x has pretty much been the shortest supported version of Windows ever.
8/8.1: 26. October 2012 to 9. January 2018
ME: 14. September 2000 to 31. December 2003
Honestly having used 8.1 for years (not 8 though) I don’t see how so many people have an issue with it. Guess most people had issues with the original 8, so they didn’t even bother to try out 8.1.
Call me a fool or a jerk, but I wonder if the reason you can’t use a 400 series driver is because you’re using a 550, which didn’t have an equivalent 400 series card. This also makes me curious about the compatibility of 560 drivers with 460s and vice-versa in relation to their differing number of SPs…
RUNNING 8.1 PRO in RAID 10 and it operates smoothly. On the flip-side I’m running Win 7 Ultimate in RAID 0. I shudder to think what would have happened if I attempted this with VEGA.
No but really 8.1 is the only windows I will use. 7 still had the BS search system from windows xp and fuck me if I touch 10. According to windows my wifi and 580 aren’t compatible so windows just breaks and explodes.
If you want some succ go grab some ubuntu or suse and go nute my dood.
No nute need. Another nodding on your notation. Windows couldn’t pay me enough to use their Win 10 “Key Loader Edition” with our without 3rd party security progies (unless it was on someone else’s PC). No arbitrary Linux shilling here, I miss my Mint and would like to get it back. Alas, something keeps killing it and I don’t know if it’s Kaspersky or some other permission I gave down the chain. Think I might try a reinstall on SSD this time instead of a klunk drive. Talk about an RISC to my BIOS There is a slight chance that it could be RST @ work. In which case nothing can be done for it unless I throw up my hands and quit using Windows altogether.
8.1 is the sweet spot. 7 is getting crusty and the updates over the past couple of years have started to cripple it. Also no support for self encrypting SSDs.
10 is spyware and forces unwanted feature updates on you.
Supported doesn’t mean it won’t work, it means it is not supported.
Microsoft made significant changes to that part of the OS from XP to Vista and from Windows 10 RTM to Windows 10 November update (1511).
In other words, Windows Vista until Windows 10 RTM use the same display driver backend so a display driver for Win 7 will work on Win 8.1 unless nVidia/ATI implement some context self-enforcement mechanism (cse) to deliberately stop it from working.
The installer might not work, the driver may need to be manually specified, the files (*.inf) may need to be manually modified to tell Windows the driver is compatible with that OS+PCI Device ID and driver signature enforcement might need to be disabled, but the driver will work.
There are consequences to stuff not being supported, but you did not have to return it if you actually wanted it to actually work, as long as you were willing to run your system in an “unsupported” mode.
Returning it means you care more about running in a supported mode than having that RX 550 actually work.