AMD confirms It won’t ship Ryzen drivers for Windows 7
Recently, a report from ComputerBase emerged online which indicated AMD’s upcoming Ryzen processors would support Windows 7, despite Microsoft having already said that the chip would only be supported under the latest Windows 10. Today, AMD clarified on the issue and confirmed it won’t ship Ryzen drivers for Windows 7.
“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. “However, only support and drivers for Windows 10 will be provided in AMD Ryzen desktop processor production parts.”
This confirms AMD isn’t going to revert from its stance that it, along with Intel, has held for the last year. Last August, Microsoft said that Intel’s Kaby Lake and AMD’s Ryzen chips will officially be supported only under the company’s flagship Windows 10 operating system.
Read More: Netflix 4K on PC Tested: Kaby Lake Works, But Radeon RX and GTX 10 GPUs Fail
As for why it’s tying Windows 10 to Kaby Lake and Ryzen, Redmond said this is to maintain deep integration between Windows and the silicon, in order to ensure both are fully compatible with each other. Older operating systems simply couldn’t anticipate features that chip vendors would roll out later.
But, what would happen if you attempt to run Windows 7 on Kaby Lake or Ryzen system? Well AMD apparently has “verified” that its Ryzen chip would boot, though it seems likely that the Win7 PC won’t be able to take advantage of all of its capabilities.
To check out what happened when Heise Online tried to run Windows 7 on Kaby Lake Core i3-7100, click here.
Without specific support for a chip’s features, there’s always a decent chance of something breaking. Which is, of course, not an acceptable risk for gamers who are continuously trying to eke out the last little bit of performance from their graphics card.
In other words, PC gamers will have no choice but to choose between the latest hardware or Windows 7. What’s your take on AMD’s announcement of no official Ryzen drivers for Windows 7?