One son is using the my old HD4890 and one son the HD7970, both playing warfront simulation games always from Steam sale and they are not the most modern games, I bet all DirectX9 maybe even DX8 and I never hear they have problems in playing any of these games after an Vcard update by MS Windows, which is generated automatic because of safety.
Most problems are what I think caused by wrong installation, not doing a clean install, or even the wrong driver is selected.

edit: Yep one problem because windows was installing the iGPU driver and not the external.