We were surprised to see that customer oriented AMD has decided to leave its all DirectX 9 supporters hanging. According to AMD's support site, its DirectX 9 cards won’t be officially supported under Windows 7.

AMD says: "Note: AMD’s DirectX 9 ATI Radeon graphics accelerators are not officially supported under Windows 7. If the user chooses to, they can install the ATI Catalyst Windows Vista graphics driver under Windows 7. Please be aware that none of the new Windows 7 graphics driver (WDDM 1.1) features are supported (as the Windows Vista level graphics driver is limited to WDDM 1.0 level support).  Using the ATI Catalyst Windows Vista driver under Windows 7 is not officially supported by AMD, and as such AMD will not provide any form of customer support for users running in this configuration."

The list is quite long and it includes ATI Radeon 9500 Series, ATI Radeon 9550 Series, ATI Radeon 9600 Series, ATI Radeon 9700 Series, ATI Radeon 9800 Series, ATI Radeon X300 Series, ATI Radeon X550 Series, ATI Radeon X600 Series, ATI Radeon X700 Series, ATI Radeon X800 Series, ATI Radeon X850 Series, ATI Radeon X1050 Series, ATI Radeon X1300 Series, ATI Radeon X1550 Series, ATI Radeon X1600 Series, ATI Radeon X1650 Series, ATI Radeon X1800 Series, ATI Radeon X1900 Series, ATI Radeon X1200 Series, ATI Radeon X1250 Series ATI Radeon X2100 Series and ATI Radeon Xpress Series.

Most chipset IGPs won’t officially support Windows 7 which is kind of an issue if you ask us. The owners of the cards listed above won't get any support for any operating systems anymore and if you have in mind that most of the games on the market are DirectX 9 and they are programmed for consoles, it kind of makes things look bad. Nvidia's new Windows 7 driver supports cards all the way to Geforce 6 that is DirectX 9.

You can read more and download catalyst 9.8 the last official one for these cards here.