maximus wrote:

Darkman wrote:

now it might be due to me using a Radeon 6870

Ah... when I said "newer hardware," I was thinking more along the lines of my Radeon X850 XT PE 😁 (Incidentally, even that card has issues with Max Payne 1.)

I guess I've given up on gaming with truly modern hardware, to be honest. It got to be such a pain in the post-DX10 years, mostly because of driver issues like the ones you mentioned.

really? what kind of issues would that X850 have? Max Payne should work fine on such a card

I was actually thinking of putting together a WinXP machine for just these types of situations (my Win98 machine has a 700Mhz PIII , so it struggles with UT2003 or above for instance), but was wondering the usefulness of such a machine, Ive also tried to install WinXP on a separate partition on my modern PC , but it won't work due to incompatibilities with the SATA drivers apparently

Darkman wrote:

really? what kind of issues would that X850 have? Max Payne should work fine on such a card

It's a driver issue affecting anything newer than Catalyst 6.8. Things slow down significantly in scenes with lots of action / gunfire (from 100s of FPS down to like 20, which is absurd).

Darkman wrote:

I was actually thinking of putting together a WinXP machine for just these types of situations (my Win98 machine has a 700Mhz PIII , so it struggles with UT2003 or above for instance), but was wondering the usefulness of such a machine, Ive also tried to install WinXP on a separate partition on my modern PC , but it won't work due to incompatibilities with the SATA drivers apparently

A properly-configured XP machine can be wonderful! My primary gaming rig is actually the following:

ASRock 939Dual-SATA2
Athlon 64 X2 4200+
Radeon X850 XT PE
Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS

I'll have to make a separate post about it one of these days. It does have some compatibility problems with older games, but most can be fixed with patches and tweaks. I'd say it runs 90 to 95% of the games in my collection, and the majority of those are from the pre-XP era. Plus it has the muscle for Doom 3, Far Cry, F.E.A.R., et cetera. Overall, not too bad.

Just installed all my planned upgrades. Jeeze, this thing is fast... almost too fast 😀

The GF2 Ultra eats up everything I throw at it. Really great 2D image quality, too. I think it's the right card for this build. The only thing wrong with it is the noisy little fan. Needs to be replaced, I think. It should not be this noisy.

Thanks for the driver advice, badmojo. The 45.23s seem to be working perfectly.