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Installing AMD/ATI Legacy driver in Windows 8
Di Marco Tenuti (del 29/01/2014 @ 11:38:21, in Windows, linkato 2124 volte)

I found this tip in the Answers in the Microsoft Community. The question by a user was: "How to install Catalyst-legacy driver in Windows 8.1 with an AMD ATI HD Radeon 4200"?

At now, if you install Windows 8 or you update to Windows 8.1, Microsoft will install its legacy driver WDDM, which doesn't let you get hardware acceleration with OpenGL. However there's a fix to that!

Let me drive you to install the ATI legacy driver, instead of the Microsoft one:

  • Install all components of the driver normally (Catalyst Control Center etc.) -> The graphics driver itself will fail - you need to install it manually using the Device Manager!
  • Open the Device Manager (right click on Start-Icon in left corner), go to "Graphics Card"
  • Right click on the card and select "Update driver..." from the context menu (first entry)
  • Click on "Search for a driver on the computer" (second entry)
  • Click "Select driver from list"
  • Click on the "Device..." button in the right corner
  • Select the driver file (*.inf) from the extracted ATI folder. In my case, this was C:\AMD\Support\13-1-legacy_vista_win7_win8_64_dd_ccc\Packages\Drivers\Display\W86A_INF. There are a few different files, it seems the dialog will choose the right one if you simple select one of them... TRY IT FIRST! Otherwise you could try to read the .inf files (they are just plain text files - maybe you'll find your chipset in there...
  • Click on OK, the dialog will now show one or two entries, which should have the name of your graphics card - select one of them
  • Click on Next - the screen(s) will go black and flicker, you will hear the device connection/disconnection sounds several times. Don't worry, everythings works as intended! :)
  • The driver should now be ready - restart your system, and you should now be able to control your graphics settings using the Catalyst Control Center.

Last Tip (which I did here in my own blog): save this trick somewhere, it will save you lots of headaches the next time you need to install windows! I figured it out painfully at least twice! :)