As I recall, the most expensive mitigation in the whole Meltdown/Spectre mess was kernel page table isolation (called KVAS on Windows). It relies on changing out the page table when switching between kernel and user space. In other words, rather than relying on x86 privilege levels to block user …

This isn't really 'old' hardware but I don't see a better place to post this. I've been building a Windows XP/7 gaming rig on an i7-3770, and am planning to acquire a second. I know that Spectre/Meltdown mitigations are supposed to have a noticeable performance hit on early gen Intels, but the …

I need to find a dedicated soundcard that sounds half decent and works with XP. Good to hear its working!!, try the Creative Labs SB0880 PCI Express Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Sound Card, is the sound card I have on my Windows xp build and it works so good and have EAX compatibility. Do you happen …

Turns out the issue was the Realtek audio drivers for my mobo audio. I disabled it and used a cheapo Sabrent USB audio device, and it works fine. I knew it couldn't be a GPU thing because I tried 4 different GPUs, what a relief... Now I need to find a dedicated soundcard that sounds half decent and …

Always forget that I can't edit posts here, but if mods want to move this thread elsewhere please go ahead, I came from another similar thread to here, wasn't sure what the best place for it was as it's not necessarily ancient hardware and it refers to multiple Windows versions in my testing. FWIW I …

Lately I've been playing about with getting decent GPUs for an XP build, but I'm running into a major issue with Chaos Theory. When run under XP, the game is almost unplayable due to frequent massive stutters, the game effectively freezes for half a second, sometimes including the audio. It is most …

I got a crash by default... I fixed it and indeed, the video playback was missing. The game needs a valid GPU vendor ID for some reason, which the default internal virtual card do not provide (0x0). Either use other virtual card like the GF9800 or set a valid vendor type/id in the DirectXExt config …

This game runs very poorly on modern hardware/OSes, but dgVoodoo seems to get the framerate under control quite nicely. The caveat to this is that the videos that play on the menu and as bonuses simply do not work. I can't seem to find a setting/tweak that will fix this, I'm curious if anyone else …

Actually it's a problem on the game side. It needs non-pow2 textures for the bloom effect but misinterprets the D3D9 capability bits when checking out if they are supported. It works only if the 3D device supports them conditionally, but not when they are unconditionally supported (like on modern …

Squall Leonhart wrote on 2025-04-10, 15:43: it expects the faulty linear scaling of devices prior to Geforce 8. That's what I was looking for! Do you happen to know if there's any way to emulate this behavior on current hardware?

For some reason the bloom setting in this game is very particular about what hardware it supports, it seems like by 2010 no video cards at all support it. The only things I've actually seen run bloom in this game are C2D era Intel integrated graphics. I had hoped that dgVoodoo would rectify this, …

I have some older Dell Optiplexes from the late 2000s that still have Win2k driver support, both official and unofficial. In the case of the former the iGPU outright sucks, in the latter the drivers for it perform poorly in games. Was interested in throwing a low-profile GPU into this thing, but I …

Don't see a way to edit the post, but I did eventually figure out my issue. XP was just being stubborn and reinstalling the same bad driver over and over, even though the dates were changing in Device Manager. It turns out I could point the update driver to any .inf file and it would 'work', because …

I also installed the official 14.4 drivers manually from Pack2 like in the philscomputerlab video and it has the same issue. Going to try Win7 with this card and see if it does the same thing, if so it's probably junked.

I recently bought a Dell Optiplex 7010 to run XP on, and it came with a Radeon 7570. Seems like it's the Dell OEM version, 1GB DDR5. Temps on the card are very good for its size, so I figured I'd try to make it work with XP. Found a couple of drivers that worked, but I'm having a big issue. When …