Farcry or Doom3 for WinXp. Crysis for Vista. Unreal was pretty demanding for Win98. Quake/Quake2 were standard benchmarking games.

Technically, there's an unofficial Direct X 10 for windows XP that supports a few early games, and you can get crysis running with maxed out settings with a little work. SO Id say unofficially crysis on XP if you can get all of it running correctly.

Technically you can hack DOOM 3 to run on 98se so Id say, unofficially Doom 3 for 98se. Youre going to need a bunch of other patches also to patch 98se ram limitations and what not.

PS Vista is not a thing hello. 😲 😒 😐 😢 😵 😠

So obviously max is pretty stupid, yea these games require insane gear to run on XP and 98 and its just dumb. You might need specific versions of these games, and specific drivers as well.

vista is classy

GLQuake is when MS-DOS died for sure.

Halo 2 is what killed Windows XP. Ok, ok, that one was a joke.

I'm not counting things you can tweak, just simply games that came out with support for the OS. I was thinking personally Farcry might be a good cut off for Win98, even though it came out after XP it was close enough that many people may have run it on 98.

Windows 98:
Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Max Payne, Deus Ex, Sacrifice, Giants: Citizen Kabuto, The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind, Black & White

Windows XP:
F.E.A.R., Neverwinter Nights 2, The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, Unreal Tournament 2004, Medieval II: Total War, Black & White 2

SO Id say unofficially crysis on XP if you can get all of it running correctly

Crysis requires 64-bit OS to work best and Windows XP 64-bit is a mess.

I was thinking personally Farcry might be a good cut off for Win98

No. Far Cry requires GPUs which don't work with Win9x (Radeon X1900) or work bad (GeForce 7900).

Vista is not a thing hello

Vista isn't a thing the same way Windows 2000 isn't.

I'm playing Farcry maxed out (including water reflections) and its entirely playable on my Radeon 9800pro 128MB. 1024x768.

Giants is nothing on a 9800 Pro , it runs fully playable at 1920x1080 fully maxed out.

9800PRO/XT don't choke on Far Cry or Half Life 2. In fact, they are playable even at 1600x1200.

Doom 3 and Halo are where I draw the line for 9800PRO.

Far Cry can't be maxed out on Radeon 9800. Patch 1.3 implemented HDR support, which can't be rendered on Shader Model 2.0 hardware.

The Serpent Rider wrote:

Far Cry can't be maxed out on Radeon 9800. Patch 1.3 implemented HDR support, which can't be rendered on Shader Model 2.0 hardware.

That's a moving goalpost, by the same token Half Life 2 added HDR with Episode 2 as well. Out of the box Far Cry works just fine with a 9800PRO.

Also, you can't max out Far Cry regardless, because if you enable HDR you can't enable FSAA.

9800PRO doesn't choke on Far Cry

It chokes heavily with anti-aliasing and high resolution.

because if you enable HDR you can't enable FSAA.

You can, that's only GeForce 6xxx/7xxx limitation.

The Serpent Rider wrote:

9800PRO doesn't choke on Far Cry

It chokes heavily with anti-aliasing and high resolution.

40+ fps at 1600x1200 is not choking AFAIC.

The Serpent Rider wrote:

because if you enable HDR you can't enable FSAA.

You can, that's only GeForce 6xxx/7xxx limitation.

Ok, so the only card that can play it with HDR and FSAA on are.. X1K series?

Fair enough.

But to me that's as valid as saying you need a GeForce RTX 2000 series card to play Quake 2 because nothing else can enable pathtracing rendering.

Ok, so the only card that can play it with HDR and FSAA on are.. X1K series?

Actually, you can play Far Cry HDR with anti-aliasing even of GeForce 6xxx/7xxx, but you're limited only to SSAA. Then again, all DX10+ cards will work with HDR and MSAA. And you need DX10+ card anyway, for smooth gaming in late XP games.

40+ fps at 1600x1200 is not choking

Choking at its finest. No AF, no AA, framerate drops below 30.

Giants is nothing on a 9800 Pro , it runs fully playable at 1920x1080 fully maxed out.

Even with shader patch? If so, it will run almost everything WIn 9x related absolutely fine.

The Serpent Rider wrote:

Crysis requires 64-bit OS to work best and Windows XP 64-bit is a mess.

Crysis works fine in 32-bit mode as well. And Windows XP x64 runs Crysis just fine.

The Serpent Rider wrote:

No. Far Cry requires GPUs which don't work with Win9x (Radeon X1900) or work bad (GeForce 7900).

Far Cry works fine even on a GeForce2 card.
Far Cry was the first game with an x64 version. I ran it on WinXP x64 with an overclocked GF2GTS back in the day.

I guess Archimedian Dynasty, Interstate 76 and some Build games (when run at 1600x1200) would be the most resource-hungry titles for DOS.

I'm limiting myself to Glide games on Win9x, but otherwise I think Morrowind would be a good example of a game that would require a really out-of-period system to run well.

The Serpent Rider wrote:

Crysis requires 64-bit OS to work best and Windows XP 64-bit is a mess.

For some reason Crysis 64 won't launch on my vista 64 pc.

No. Far Cry requires GPUs which don't work with Win9x (Radeon X1900) or work bad (GeForce 7900).

Far cry was almost 2 years old at the time of the x1900 launch. I could run it with 6x msaa in 1400x1050 on my x1900xt.

for me Duke Nukem 3D marked the end of 386, because it simply wouldn't run 😁 had to go over to a friends house to play

oh... missed we were talking about OS, sorry x3

appiah4 wrote:

Doom 3 and Halo are where I draw the line for 9800PRO.

Doom 3's performance on Ati is due to their opengl driver, in other cases 9800pro would match 6600gt.

jheronimus wrote:

I'm limiting myself to Glide games on Win9x, but otherwise I think Morrowind would be a good example of a game that would require a really out-of-period system to run well.

Does Morrowind run 'well' on anything?