Is Vista now Retro

That one went a bit nuts at time, so let's keep it to video cards and nice and friendly 😁

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Is Vista now Retro

That one went a bit nuts at time, so let's keep it to video cards and nice and friendly 😁

Err, did I post this in Video? It was suppose to be in general.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Is Vista now Retro

That one went a bit nuts at time, so let's keep it to video cards and nice and friendly 😁

Go ahead and delete my post. Completely redundant. Thank you for pointing out that other thread.

Personally, I wouldn't go for Core 2 based PC for "Vista gaming", Nehalem or Lynfield are much faster... but also more expensive. Any SLI/CF based GPU solution is extremely power hungry and full of stuttering, it simply doesn't work very well. Also I don't think 1600x1200 is apropriate for this era... at the time a nice 1920x1200 IPS or even 2560x1600 (hiend) was the common LCD.

For sure, there is a place for Vista retro PC. But there are still only a few DX10+ games that won't run on modern windows 10 PC. Some of the 2006 - 2009 games still requires a lot of performance to run good enough, so much performance the period-correct rig simply can't deliver. Just two examples - Crysis (1) and GTA IV. I can't imagine playing these on first-gen Core i7, let alone C2Q and Radeon HD 4800 / GTX 200 series GPU. To play Crysis comfortably, it pretty much need all the performance of my main PC (i7-7700K + GTX 1070). Comfortable for me is 2560x1440 @ 120+ fps with TRAA. The same apply for GTA. Without some form of oversampling it is simply too ugly. And also very CPU limited - just a quick example: 4.3GHz i7 3930k = 70 fps, 5GHz i7 7700K = 112 fps. Nehalem would be something like 50-ish fps and Core 2 even less. 😈

Split / moved 😀

I love the idea of a Vista machine. A lot of late XP era games got DX10 goodies / upgrades / patches and I remember that dual booting for a while was quite popular.

havli wrote:

Personally, I wouldn't go for Core 2 based PC for "Vista gaming", Nehalem or Lynfield are much faster... but also more expensive. Any SLI/CF based GPU solution is extremely power hungry and full of stuttering, it simply doesn't work very well. Also I don't think 1600x1200 is apropriate for this era... at the time a nice 1920x1200 IPS or even 2560x1600 (hiend) was the common LCD.

For sure, there is a place for Vista retro PC. But there are still only a few DX10+ games that won't run on modern windows 10 PC. Some of the 2006 - 2009 games still requires a lot of performance to run good enough, so much performance the period-correct rig simply can't deliver. Just two examples - Crysis (1) and GTA IV. I can't imagine playing these on first-gen Core i7, let alone C2Q and Radeon HD 4800 / GTX 200 series GPU. To play Crysis comfortably, it pretty much need all the performance of my main PC (i7-7700K + GTX 1070). Comfortable for me is 2560x1440 @ 120+ fps with TRAA. The same apply for GTA. Without some form of oversampling it is simply too ugly. And also very CPU limited - just a quick example: 4.3GHz i7 3930k = 70 fps, 5GHz i7 7700K = 112 fps. Nehalem would be something like 50-ish fps and Core 2 even less. 😈

Yeah, but those games are the exception. While I agree with GTA IV 100%, Crysis is kinda exaggerated IMO, it was perfectly playable in my testing a while back with a E7200, 4GB RAM, a 680i SLI, and a 9800GX2. I was maxed out @ 1600x900 no AA getting something like 30-40FPS with no stuttering. I was using a 500 watt EVGA White and I imagine I was pulling something like 350-400 at the wall.

Isn't stuttering in SLI usually caused by poor optimization, using too much VRAM, or occasionally too loose of main ram timings?

havli wrote:

Comfortable for me is 2560x1440 @ 120+ fps with TRAA.

Well, not everyone has the bar of comfortability set so high 😉
I played Crysis 1 on Q6600 and it worked well.

Weren't these 22" 1680x1050 screens really popular around that time?

My pick would be something around socket AM3+. A Phenom II based CPU, maybe SLI, but likely just a beefy single card.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Yeah, but those games are the exception. While I agree with GTA IV 100%, Crysis is kinda exaggerated IMO, it was perfectly playable in my testing a while back with a E7200, 4GB RAM, a 680i SLI, and a 9800GX2. I was maxed out @ 1600x900 no AA getting something like 30-40FPS with no stuttering. I was using a 500 watt EVGA White and I imagine I was pulling something like 350-400 at the wall.

Isn't stuttering in SLI usually caused by poor optimization, using too much VRAM, or occasionally too loose of main ram timings?

The problem is 1600x900 noAA @ 40 fps is far from maxed out for todays standards. It was good back then (I was playing Crysis at 25 fps @ 1280x1024 high details DX9 using Radeon HD 3850) 😊 but today, it is unplayable for me.

The biggest problem of SLI is poor synchronization of the GPUs in AFR mode. This has been solved (to some extend at least) when GTX 690 and frame packing was introduced. And now SLI is almost dead anyway, as most of the new games doesn't support it. Low amount of vram was also issue on the 9800 GX2, nvidia memory management wasn't so good back then and 512 MB for G92 is rather low.

Azarien wrote:

havli wrote:

Comfortable for me is 2560x1440 @ 120+ fps with TRAA.

Well, not everyone has the bar of comfortability set so high 😉
I played Crysis 1 on Q6600 and it worked well.

Yeah, many years ago I played Carmageddon 2 on ATi Rage II... maybe at 5 fps and it was great... until I saw it running at 60 fps on GeForce 4. 😀 Similar thing applies to hi-refresh LCD, once you get used to it, going back is difficult. Which is the reason I can't build period-correct builds for retro gaming, they are not fast enough. But that problem can be solved easily, usually games run well enough on HW 2-3 years newer. 🤣

I recommend a first or second gen i5/i7 system as it is a lot more punchy than a core 2 system while still being faster than most AMD builds at a fair cost plus the kiddies are all too happy to dump their "outdated" hardware the moment something new comes out so prices are good at times. As for the card I don't like skimping when something like a GTX 295 or a 4870x2 or even a 5970 can be had for around $40 to 50 shipped and fit the era well. 680i system is good for a 2007/8 build if the board is healthy enough.

I still have the same Q6600/GA-P35-DS3P box I built a decade ago with Vista Ultimate, but have since maxed out the RAM with 8 GB of DDR2-800 and replaced the 8800 GT (which still works) with a GTX 760 4 GB, not to mention replacing Vista with 7 and then 10. It's actually still in active use as a hand-me-down family computer that I set up to replace an old Athlon XP 1800+ box, and my little bro enjoys gaming on it.

I have no desire to move it back to period-appropriate configuration, since there is rarely any compatibility-related incentive to do so. By the time Vista took off, compatibility going forward generally hasn't been an issue gaming-wise, such that my 4770K setup handles any Vista-era games just fine, with far more performance to boot. That and as far as older OSes go, Windows 7 is basically Vista SE.

As havli just said, the sweet spot for games, at least from the '90s onward, tends not to be an exactly period-appropriate system (though my very period-appropriate P4EE 3.2 GHz/2 GB DDR-400/6800 Ultra setup actually does handle Doom 3 pretty well), but rather something two or three years down the line, even if it's just a GPU upgrade. Case in point: the aforementioned Q6600 box performs a heck of a lot better just by dropping a GTX 480-caliber GPU in it, even though that card's bottlenecked a bit by the CPU. (It has an even more powerful GTX 760 because the 480 died and it's a hand-me-down from the 4770K box when it got a GTX 980.)

This goes double for late-1990s titles like Quake III Arena, Unreal Tournament and Tribes, where you have pretty much no chance of maintaining a constant 60 FPS with anything less than a 1 GHz CPU and a GPU of roughly Radeon/GeForce 2 caliber (but NOT the Radeon 7000 if you like gaming above 640x480, that thing is terrible!), and these days, you're expected to maintain a constant 120-125 FPS for competitive gameplay.

nforce4max wrote:

I recommend a first or second gen i5/i7 system as it is a lot more punchy than a core 2 system while still being faster than most AMD builds at a fair cost plus the kiddies are all too happy to dump their "outdated" hardware the moment something new comes out so prices are good at times. As for the card I don't like skimping when something like a GTX 295 or a 4870x2 or even a 5970 can be had for around $40 to 50 shipped and fit the era well. 680i system is good for a 2007/8 build if the board is healthy enough.

Somebody was selling 2 GTX 295s for 50 shipped on Hardwareswap earlier. 680i's are slowly going up in price (I own 2, one I need to get working and one working in my main machine) and 780is are still in demand since LGA775 is still a popular entry socket.

@ the guy above me. I use a GeForce256 SDR sitting on top a 900MHZ Pentium III for those 90s titles along with some games from 2000-2001. For anything 2002-2005 I use a Prescott P4 2.8GHz with an FX5950U. Everything 06-09 is either saved for my main or my less than super laptop. Anything newer is my mains duty.

My main is an 680i SLI, E8400 (soon to be QX6850), 8GB DDR2 800, R9 290 4GB, 750Ti 2GB for PhysX/CUDA support, and multiple WD hard drives for storage with a Seagate boot disk inside a CM690 III Advanced case. The weak processor is an artifact of moving from a Q8000 board that only supports 4GB ram to a slightly older board that supports 8 and a ton of other features.

I can actually run Fallout 4 as it sits. Once I get that quad core I'll be back to playing new releases. I plan to move to a newer socket late 2018.

Also, on monitors is it weird if I still prefer 16:10 monitors? My main is a 1440x900 19" ASUS VW Series LED.

Get people together for whom vista is endurably nostalgic, and you'll have a community in which the idea of a retro vista feels at home. But whether that perception can 'arrive' to vogons and at what rate seems to depend in large part on whether the temporal aspect of retro catches up even semi-linearly as time passes for the individual or whether it requires the community to grow with, i.e. attract, younger members whose notion of retro is always advanced relative to the rest of the community.

In terms of video, seems vista and windows 7 are the same thing, so should the conversation on this be limited to vista? [this post was merged from the video subforum]

Speaking of Vista, fallout 4 and monitors.
I play the game at 1600x1200 on a dual 1366 Xeon setup with a 780gtx on a 4:3 19" diamond pro triton. And the system it running Vista. 😀

😕 https://server6.kproxy.com/servlet/redirect.s … hp?f=46&t=54364 😕

Overall I think it is a great idea to have a system for that time slot!

I am currently restructuring my retro machines to remove redundancy and as a matter of fact want to resurrect my socket 775 system in order to address late WinXP games and the early DX10 titles and therefore WinVista.

I want to end up again with four machines, one for DOS 6.22/Win95c, one for Win98SE/Win2000, one for WinXP(early), and one for WinXP(late)/Vista. All machines share an Eizo CRT, Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro, a Logitech mouse and a set of Canton speakers (all via KVM-Audio switch).

Win7 is addressed by my main rig. I don't care for Win10, in its current state it is worse than Vista ever was. I have seen and tested it for longer period of time, and it was my worst OS experience in many years. It will not find its way again on any of my machines, be it physical or virtual.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

My pick would be something around socket AM3+. A Phenom II based CPU, maybe SLI, but likely just a beefy single card.

My take will be a Xeon X5470 on an Asus P5Q-E with 8GB Corsair DDR2 800 and an Evga GeForce GTX 580 3GB (with a Morpheus on top to keep it cool), plus an X-Fi Fatal1ty PCI-e (would have loved to use my X-Fi Titanium HD in that, but it has no WinXP support). All the parts are in storage, I only have to find the time to assemble everything...

IMHO, the post-3dfx SLI implementation is a joke. Micro-stutter, nothing more has to be said. I place image quality way above fps. SLI cannot replace a powerful single-GPU card (remember, I am talking about absolute image quality, not fps). Hence, I tend to buy the most powerful single-GPU card available at the time I build a new system. If at some point in time, I can't set all options to max, it will be replaced.

I really loved the socket 775, had it for many many years. That's why I now want to use it again for this machine, although socket 1366 is way more powerful. The Xeon gives it a nice touch, and it is faster than any QX9xxx model. The GTX 580 will be used because that's what I had in there before I moved on to socket 2011.

Imo - its kinda pointless because.... hmm no vista exclusives?

As was said you can use w7 for that era games compatability on modern hardware,tho c2d still capable as lowend for moden games,which means its not retro.

But for such build no need of bottlenecking c2d too... well except period correctness and some kind of special builds with interesting hardware.

rein_ein wrote:

Imo - its kinda pointless because.... hmm no vista exclusives?

As was said you can use w7 for that era games compatability on modern hardware,tho c2d still capable as lowend for moden games,which means its not retro.

But for such build no need of bottlenecking c2d too... well except period correctness and some kind of special builds with interesting hardware.

I feel the same way. What exactly is the point of having a Vista machine? Is there anything at all that works on Vista that will not work on Windows 7 or Windows 10 for that matter?

Now would be a great time for a period correct vista machine before everything sky rockets in price on ebay.