I haven't read the entire thread but nVidia cards i've used in last 10-15 years had issues at some games, which would be from XP age.
NFS5 fails to draw a texture and it breaks the game on a game track (Industrial zone) which you have some missions to pass until you get to race on it. Patches and stuff were needed, but better option is to just run nGlide.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-09-06, 09:23:

I haven't tested this thoroughly, but from what little I've heard, Creative ALchemy usually does the job quite well.

One game where I noticed slight issues with EAX was Baldur's Gate 2, specifically the Throne of Bhaal expansion. With ALchemy, EAX effects are too strong in the expansion areas (e.g. Saradush) compared to playing the game on WinXP. But that's probably an outlier, since that game has (different and unrelated) EAX issues even under WinXP. It's not entirely surprising since Baldur's Gate 2 was released way back in 2000. That's probably why its occlusion effects only work correctly when using VxD drivers under Win9x.

I haven't played that yet, but sounds like it could be the same issue that is in NFS High Stakes / Road Challenge when not using creative .vxd drivers. However that basically means it is broken on XP as well

What you think about 2XHD26000XT 512MB (2x45W) Totally Silent Crossfire or HD3870x2 (165W) for XP gaming @ Catalyst 7.11?

http://vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=1931

Absolutely all semi-modern multi-GPU solutions were trash. Especially under Windows XP.

indeed, imo NVSLI/CF was only good for benchmarking, for the user experience it's not worth it,
even more pairing 2 budget cards, when it was 2 high end cards at least you could justify because you are achieving more than was possible with single gpu at the time,

obviously 3dfx sli was a different thing and worked better at the time,

I do wanna explore the angle of using CF/SLI for extra antialiasing rather than for framerate increase, that sounds like it should provide a bit of benefit without hurting the frame timing

I leave ATi HD2600XT @ single card with HTPC + Retro XP gaming then and for newer i did get HD7750 1GB GDDR5.
What Catalyst buid is best for HD7750 (Catalyst13.1)? Someone have made good custom CatalystXP build for HD7xxx?
Does the HD7750 work well @ PCIE1.1 x16 or i need PCIE2.0 x16? Older AM2 board PCIE1.1 (AM3 cpu) or AM3+ PCIE2.0?

If you're looking for the best, as the title says, I believe the following are the absolute best xp cards

Nvidia: 960/970/980/Titan X with modded drivers (750ti = full xp support = same arch as 9x0)
https://mattpilz.com/windows-xp-drivers-nvidi … 980-ti-titan-x/

ATI: R7 450 4gb.
R7 450 = update of older R7 architecture
https://www.amd.com/en/support/downloads/prev … eon-r7-240.html

For your card... I guess try those drivers and see.

R7 450 is NOT an update. It's just another rebadge of Radeon 7750. While there are some GCN 2.0 cards which are supported, the fastest card for Windows XP on AMD side is still Radeon 7970 (GCN 1.0).

A lot of these "best" cards have over 2 GB of VRAM. It's my understanding that in XP pretty much all of them act like they have 2 GB of VRAM if they have more. Is that right? The GTX 960 2GB still feels like the best blend of overkill performance and low price.

myne wrote on 2024-10-04, 08:57:

Nvidia: 960/970/980/Titan X with modded drivers (750ti = full xp support = same arch as 9x0)
https://mattpilz.com/windows-xp-drivers-nvidi … 980-ti-titan-x/

IIRC GTX 960 is one of the five Nvidia models (along with 950, 750 Ti, 750, and 745) that could work under either WinXP or Win11 with unmodified drivers.

dormcat wrote on 2024-10-16, 14:41:

IIRC GTX 960 is one of the five Nvidia models (along with 950, 750 Ti, 750, and 745) that could work under either WinXP or Win11 with unmodified drivers.

don't forget 344.11 the launch date driver for gtx 980 and 970, which supports them on winXP un-modded too

God Of Gaming wrote on 2024-10-16, 15:59:

dormcat wrote on 2024-10-16, 14:41:

IIRC GTX 960 is one of the five Nvidia models (along with 950, 750 Ti, 750, and 745) that could work under either WinXP or Win11 with unmodified drivers.

don't forget 344.11 the launch date driver for gtx 980 and 970, which supports them on winXP un-modded too

This is what I don't understand Nvidia: 960 was released four months later but retained "literal" WinXP support to this day, yet 970 and 980 were "hidden" from WinXP support. What's the point of doing this? Would cutting off WinXP support of 970/980 benefit the stock price of Nvidia or what?

If you want the best WinXP GPU that's fanless, there's Palit GTX 750 Ti KalmX. I have one and it's very nice.

dormcat wrote on 2024-10-16, 16:11:

What's the point of doing this? Would cutting off WinXP support of 970/980 benefit the stock price of Nvidia or what?

As someone who used to maintain commercial driver support (not for nVidia drivers), I can guess a few likely reasons:
- if the team is struggling with (or not prioritizing) fixing XP issues, then these will pile up on JIRA, the JIRA stats will be crappy, and one (of many) way(s) a line manager or product owner or scrum master can interpret this, is that the team is struggling to provide such capacity: if the team can receive more funds, they will hire someone who can patch this gap in capacity, or if not, then the capacity will be reduced to what the team can actually deliver
- the developers can be just tired of providing support for a target that generates more problems than gains (happens a lot) or they wanna work on something that interests them more (happens when the team has good JIRA stats and wants to drop dead weight) and will decide on their own to drop this support if there's no business obligation holding them hostage
- a person that knew how to support XP left the company and one day the CICD's capacity for compiling XP drivers broke, so there's nobody inside the company to fix it
- an enterprise customer stopped paying for XP support or even upright declared they upgraded or got rid of their XP machines, thus releasing nVidia from serving this kind of support

Maybe, if xp only saw 2gb they didn't want to deal with complaints. So they just dropped them from the inf, and no one complained.

I recently got hold of a radeon hd 6970 2gb. Up until now my only directx 11 video card was the geforce gtx 560 ti 1gb. Performance was in all tests better than anything older - gtx 285, radeon hd 4890, ....
Not with radeon 6970. I only tested 2 games but performance is actually slower than the older cards.
Example: company of heroes tales of valor from 2008. Latest patch applied.
With radeon 4890 at 1080p max settings including AA=0 the framerate never droped below 60. With 6970 the framerate is around 40...50 regardless of the AA setting - 0, 2, 4, 8.
The game is run in directx 10 mode.
So newer is not always better!

Any idea what might be the best WinXP drivers for GTX 285 and 580 in terms of compatibility with dx5-8 games?

pilipali wrote on 2024-12-01, 10:16:

Any idea what might be the best WinXP drivers for GTX 285 and 580 in terms of compatibility with dx5-8 games?

Can't say are they the "best" but I had generally alright compatibility with DirectX 6-8 using Nvidia 260.99 driver with 9800 GTX+, so I suggest giving those a try with the GTX 285. I think compatibilty with older games started to go downhill with later drivers. Don't expect DX5-6 compatibility to be 100% though.

With the 580 you could just as well use last driver released for it (368.81), too new card for older more compatible drivers but still mostly fine with DirectX 7+ games.

Since a lot of DirectX 5-6 games are rendered only in 16-bit color, any DX10+ capable card from AMD or Nvidia is a poor choice to play them natively. AMD/Nvidia dropped support for 16-bit dithering and color banding is really bad.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2024-12-01, 13:11:

Since a lot of DirectX 5-6 games are rendered only in 16-bit color, any DX10+ capable card from AMD or Nvidia is a poor choice to play them natively. AMD/Nvidia dropped support for 16-bit dithering and color banding is really bad.

what's the best way to play these dx5-6 games on a modern-ish windows (xp or newer) build? some kinda wrapper program or buy a GF FX 5500 PCI gpu just for that?