l33ch wrote:

...Either red faction or mafia should be the most demanding, so what would make constant 75fps (for vSync) on these games?

Not a G400 😜

I would consider from GeForce3 / Radeon 8500 onwards to get DirectX 8 (Max Payne, Red Faction). If your goal is to play these hassle free, maybe a cheap Pentium4 system with a cheap Radeon 9500 or so will suit your needs. If you're set on Pentium3, we can't really give advice unless you tell us which resolutions you want to play at because I think you would have to optimize the system a bit. I play Max Payne at 1280x1024x32 on a 1 GHz Pentium3 with a Radeon 8500 and get slow downs every now and then. Its smoother at 1024x768, but I don't know if it hits 75 fps all the time, or at all.

Yes, thank you, we are getting somewhere.

So yes the goal is to play these games hassle free at 75Hz 800x600 on sony trinitron 15''. Would like to be able to mantain at least 75 fps at all time, but do not want to just go overkill and don't care. If I have to settle with Pentium 4 so be it, but I'd rather as close as period correct without sweating much about it.

700Mhz is the most my 440BX Slot1 handles because of stupid VRM, and I only have three videocards, a G200, a G400 and a 9200.

😀

I can't speak about the other games but Mafia is my favorite... so I can provide some performance figures. 😀

First thing - I never managed to get rid of the built-in 60 fps lock, so it is possible you won't get 75 fps. And as for the performance it depends what settings you wish to use (details level, AA, AF).

For maximum details, noAA, noAF and 800x600 @ 60 fps without drops GeForce2 GTS / Radeon 8500 / Radeon 9000 or better GPU should be good enough. For 4xAA + 8xAF, GeForce4 Ti 4600 / GeForce FX 5700 / Radeon 9500 or better. Seems easily doable.

CPU might be a problem though. I have some numbers at hand... and not even Pentium 4 3 GHz or Athlon 64 FX-51 can keep steady 60 fps. At maximum details, that is. Under these conditions PIII 700 does only 12.6 fps avg. 😐

Those games are available on GoG and will work fine on any computer. They are also not particularly difficult to get running on authentic hardware. If these are the only games you care about I think it is really up to you.

If you want the cheapest experience possible, run it on any laptop or desktop you already have. If you want to build a retro PC for early XP gaming, than a single core CPU with pretty much any PCIE graphics card will work just fine. I think the sempron 145 on AM2+ paired with a GTS 250 is a great setup for 2000-2006 era games, especially if you pair it with a creative X-Fi sound card.

Another alternative is windows 98 with aureal vortex 2 and a geforce or quadro fx. This is a fair bit more expensive. Of the games you listed, really only half life is perhaps better on that setup because of A3D 2.0. Half life with openAL and EAX on Xp is pretty sweet to though, definitely clearer and crisper with more accurate audio effects, at the expense of some lost sound effects here and there compared to A3D.

Could not find Max Payne, Half-Life or Colin McRae Rally on gog.com, that's almost 50% of the games I want.

Pentium 4 🙁

Max Payne has a community patch that fixes and improves everything. Half-Life is no longer available as a stand alone installer, but I believe if you are persistent you might be able to track down a copy somehow. If you have a copy of Half-life, you can use the original media - both the rerelease and the original should work on XP, I have only got the original release to work properly on windows 98.

Colin McRae Rally also has community patches.

https://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Max_Payne
https://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Colin_McRae_Rally

For XP, official patches will do you just fine, you only need this stuff for running on windows 7 or later, or to get widescreen support or what have you.

A pentium 4 2.8ghz northwood or better is fine for that era of XP games. You could even do slower without running into issues, although a faster processor and memory is more ideal.

havli wrote:

I can't speak about the other games but Mafia is my favorite... so I can provide some performance figures. 😀

First thing - I never managed to get rid of the built-in 60 fps lock, so it is possible you won't get 75 fps...

Yeah, Mafia is a classic! 😀 You can actually unlock the ingame FPS limiter now using:

https://github.com/ThirteenAG/WidescreenFixesPack

Having more FPS (and Hz) really helps with the clunky mouse movement, recoil control, and the poorly written engine that is unable to maintain steady FPS/frametimes and causes a microstutter of sorts (easily apparent in the menu when you "glide" between 2 items back and forth on the desk for example). RTSS app can be used to help with this issue as well. I think the ingame FPS limiter is set to around 63FPS by the way (the resulting framerate is jumpy though).

That FPS unlocker only works on Win7 and up though. The developers there have said that they have no intention of supporting WinXP or lower in this repo due to incompatibility of some APIs between XP<=>7 so it would be either too much work for them or not possible at all.

Regarding Red Faction, I think it does not work on newer GPUs from around Geforce 6-8 or so and requires community patch in order to launch.

As for GOG, their releases often remove EAX support, just something to keep in mind if you want to use EAX.

If you want to play games such as Q3 and HL online then I dont think the newer builds support A3D, only the oldest of builds of these games have the support for it.

And as it was noted above, some of these games would really benefit from faster CPU than PIII which I would see as viable only for games before the year 2000.

okie dokie *sniff*

We are always trying to get the best experience, but back in day the best experience would be if the new game we got would work at all, so I'm just going to install the games and play them with what I've got, which is a 700Mhz cpu and a G400, and maybe try the 9200 to see it it improves.
Thank you all.