philscomputerlab wrote:

What's a good AMD card for a Windows XP machine? HD4850/4870?

I use/used multiple cards of the HD6xxx series with windows XP SP3 32-bit. Sticking to a particular driver version that works well (almost gave up there), together with a different version of the OpenGL driver dll. Sometimes I use a registry file to temporarely change pixelcenter to legacy for a particular game. This runs the windows games I have very well. I cannot imagine NVidia doing a better job really.

Intel graphics is quite compatible too, but I hate the drivers for not having a force 2xAA option.

Edit, Looked it up: Catalyst version (20)11-10. Put atioglxx.dll from driver version (20)11-5 in some game folders for better OpenGL.

There are a lot less PCIe versions than PCI. With PCI there are a lot of OEM cards that don't take the creative driver. I've got an Alienware / Dell card, it needs special drivers.

I did a little write up here: http://www.philscomputerlab.com/x-fi-sb0770-d … enware-oem.html

For PCIe there is the regular X-Fi Titanium (sb0880) and there are also a few Fatal1ty cards. The main card to avoid is the Xtreme Audio. It's a software card, doesn't have the X-Fi processor.

EDIT: Good to know Gerwin. I do have a HD6770 that isn't really being used at the moment.

I haven't played any new games for many years. I have been checking out all the DirectX 9.0 games out there and I am really getting stoked! (it at least has a DirectX 9.0 mode)

Bioshock
GTA IV
The Witcher 2
Far Cry
Doom 3
Quake 4
F.E.A.R
Half Life 2
Battlefield 2
Condemned

and many, many more.

At least I played Far Cry

It's a great list. There's plenty of great old games to enjoy from this era. Don't forget Oblivion btw. I find myself switching back and forth between my 98SE machine and my DirectX9 machine depending on my mood. It really gives the DirectX9 games a new shine by comparison.

Add any Elderscroll games that run under XP 😉

Would love to hear more games, most of which I probably never heard of 🤣.

gerwin wrote:

I use/used multiple cards of the HD6xxx series with windows XP SP3 32-bit. Sticking to a particular driver version that works well (almost gave up there), together with a different version of the OpenGL driver dll. Sometimes I use a registry file to temporarely change pixelcenter to legacy for a particular game. This runs the windows games I have very well. I cannot imagine NVidia doing a better job really.

KT7AGuy asked for more info/files through PM. I will put the link here for anyone interested:
Catalyst_v11-10_xp32_dd_ccc_ocl+extras.zip [62 MB] Meant for Radeon HD5xxx en HD6xxx under Windows XP.

Extra 1: Atioglxx.dll is an OpenGL driver, and I put that in the IL-2 Forgotten Battles folder, to fix visual problems.

Extra 2: The legacy pixelcenter toggle is for games like AvP gold, Populous III and X-Wing Alliance. Otherwise these games will have textures and fonts that are misaligned horizontally by 1 pixel. I toggle this with a reg+bat file contraption for each game, but one has to edit these to fit the system setup.

There is also a trick to add new 4:3 video modes to the driver, like 1440x1080. by editing the "DALNonStandardModesBCD1" key in the registry.

😊 Many thanks!

@gerwin

That is awesome!

Hmmm brand new HD 6970's are $120.........

squareguy wrote:

Would love to hear more games, most of which I probably never heard of 🤣.

Look at Assassin's Creed 2. Good designers' work, nice gameplay.

Morrowind, old as it may be, can potentially be one of the most demanding applications for a WinXP DirectX 9.0c machine. In vanilla form it's not demanding. But if you install graphical mods then it can become very intense. For however much power you build into a PC, you can configure graphical mods to end up needing all that power. I think the same is true of Oblivion and Skyrim, but I haven't tried modding those as much as Morrowind.

Though the original game is DirectX 8, the "Morrowind Graphics Extender" (MGE) uses DX9.0c. Morrowind MGE was a priority for me when deciding what graphics card to buy a few years ago. It's an old game with modifications that can't change the underlying code, so they rely on an excess of brute force to accomplish the goal.
I guessed that the high memory bandwidth and older architecture of the GTX260 would be a good fit for this, but I wasn't aware of any benchmarks to validate my assumptions. The rest of the internet was worried about the latest version of Crysis or whatever, not heavily modded old games.

The GTX260 has handled my set of graphical mods well - on a single screen. A few months ago I tried it on triple screens using SoftTH. It was choppy. You can never have too much power.
I've since replaced it with a GTX275 for unrelated reasons. It's a faster version of the card, but I don't expect it to make much difference.

shamino wrote:

Morrowind, old as it may be, can potentially be one of the most demanding applications for a WinXP DirectX 9.0c machine. In vanilla form it's not demanding. But if you install graphical mods then it can become very intense.

Don't play morrowind myself. But in case such mods include 3D models, and the creators did not bother to keep the polygon count in check, neither bothered to add lower poly distance models, then that is the recipy to get any PC to its knees. Texture size matters less for framerate, but increases level loading times.

Unmodded ArmA 2 (Arrowhead or Combined Ops) is a very demanding DirectX 9 game/sim. Mainly because of vegetation and view distances, as well as AI and physics.

Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars looks pretty good

Little bit offtopic, but I realized today, after some research, that I actually have the top XP-machine, without even knowing it before; Z77-motherboard, i7 3770K and a pair of 780 Ti's. Can't beat that since everything newer doesn't have XP-drivers. 😀

Running Win10 though 😜

Parts are arriving today! Wohoo!

Playing Thief 3 on a 6800 GT at 1600x1200 is fun but not perfectly smooth. This will solve that problem too!

Can you think of any real world games that benefit from a quad-core CPU? Possibly some really late DirectX 9.0 games?

I am planning to build a DirectX 12 computer within the next year or two, it looks extremely promising with multiple CPU cores and AMD graphics. Cannot wait to see the next generation of hardware from AMD and Nvidia and see how they do with DirectX 12 games that will be out by then.

Not really.

However, and this depends on the motherboard, on an i7 or i5 you can just disable cores in the BIOS and do all sorts of testing.

I found a second core to give a very solid boost in games such as Doom 3, FEAR and Far Cry. This was also on a modern platform like yours.

squareguy wrote:

Can you think of any real world games that benefit from a quad-core CPU? Possibly some really late DirectX 9.0 games?

There are DX9 games that benefit from quad core. From top of my head - Call of Duty 5 and GTA IV... I can't remember anything else, but it is likely there are more.
And of course many DX10/11 games.

Falcon 4.0

It may also have been the very first to take advantage of multi-CPU systems.

Well I decided to just go ahead and load SP3. Installing from a Windows XP SP3 disk now. I'm sure SP2 would have been fine but since I am going to be doing a lot of late stuff and the fact that Steam might possibly come into play I just went ahead. I like the motherboard and it has IDE mode for SATA so no AHCI XP drivers to mess with. Left the driver disk I downloaded and burned at work so I better get downloading again now 🤣. Honestly, I might just take this thing back apart and toss it into a Dell 4600 case to have the X-Fi's front panel headphone jack. Would definitely make a stealth system. This case is awesome though. Time will tell.