AMD makes Ryzen processors suitable for Windows 7

AMD has announced that it is making drivers available to allow Ryzen processors to fully run on Windows 7. Unlike Intel’s Kaby Lake processors, which are only officially supported on Windows 10.

ComputerBase reports that AMD announced this at a manufacturer information event. The processor manufacturer makes its own drivers for Windows 7, so that the processors continue to function fully in combination with that operating system, although Microsoft itself does not provide support for this.

Microsoft previously announced that new processors, such as the Kaby Lake chips and AMD’s upcoming lineup, will only be officially supported on Windows 10. Windows 7 and 8.1 will not release updates to make the operating systems work properly. Initially, this would already be implemented with Skylake processors, but this has been reversed after a fuss.

Intel also does not provide graphics drivers for Kaby Lake processors for Windows 7. Some motherboard manufacturers have started to release drivers themselves, whereby Windows 7 is recognized as Windows Server 2008 R2. The igps of the chips thus in principle function properly with Windows 7, but functions that were added to Kaby Lake and were not yet available with Skylake, do not work properly. For example, Heise tested whether it could get hevc support working under Windows 7, with little success.