AMD No Longer Supporting Windows 8.0 For Video Card Drivers

AMD Catalyst 14.6 Beta video card drivers were released today and we noticed that Windows 8.0 is no longer being supported by AMD. Users must accept the free Microsoft update to Windows 8.1 if they choose to install AMD Catalyst 14.6 Beta drivers. We are fairly certain that you could force the drivers to work on Windows 8.0, but AMD has dropped support for Windows 8.0 early and has removed the NT6.2 entries from their INF files.

We reached out to AMD to comment on why they no longer support Windows 8.0 and they replied with the following statement:

AMD choose to focus our development efforts on the latest version of Windows 8, which is available to all users as a free update.

On the bright side there are a number of Linux improvements! AMD Catalyst 14.6 Beta drivers are available for Ubuntu 14.04 and there is a more intuitive driver install process!