First post, by God Of Gaming
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This feels a bit wrong to ask here as I'm asking about a modern graphics card rather than a retro one, but I feel like if anyone will know the answer to my question it would be you guys. I'm planing to do a separate PC build for each major OS in order to get the best possible experience out of the games released during that period, and I'm planning those builds to be pretty overkill.
For the Win98SE machine, covering 1995-2001 games, I've decided on FX 5900 Ultra. I currently have a voodoo3 but Im not happy with it, its not powerful enough to completely max out the later games. I thought about the 6800 GT or Ultra as the fastest models with win98 drivers, but those are missing table fog and 8bit palletized texture support, and the FX 5950 Ultra doesn't support the 45.23 driver that I hear is best for those games, so FX 5900 Ultra it is. As a bonus the FX 5900 Ultra has some limited dx9 support, which should mean I might be able to use nglide rather than rely on dgvoodoo and such for glide games.
For the WinXP machine, covering 2001-2007 games plus a few later ones that were obviously not made with Vista in mind, I've decided on GTX 285, my research tells me that this is the fastest nvidia card properly optimized for DX9 games, and while later models up to gtx 700 series have WInXP drivers, they have issues with a few of the older DX8/9 games.
Now, about the Win7 machine, covering about 2007-2016 or so I guess, lets say up to the point where DX12/Vulkan games started releasing more often (I'll build yet another win10 machine for 2016+ games later) I feel like its a good time to plan it out now. With Intel Kaby Lake and AMD Ryzen not officially supporting win7 anymore, its pretty obvious what would be the best motherboard and cpu for win7, but its still not clear what would be the best graphics card. Nvidia has not dropped support for Win7 yet, Pascal has win7 drivers and Volta might have win7 drivers too. This machine should be capable of perfectly running DX10 and DX11 games, as well as OpenGL 3 to 4.5. Im fairly sure I'll have no issues with DX11 / OGL games regardless of graphics card choice, but I've been wondering if there's any issues with DX10 games on the latest nvidia models?
Basically this is exactly why I'm posting this thread, I'm wondering if like how even though the 6800 Ultra is the fastest win98 card but the 5900 Ultra is probably the most compatible while still fairly fast, and same with winXP the 780Ti is the fastest but the GTX 285 probably the most compatible while still fairly fast, I was wondering whether for Win7 and for DX10 games in particular from the Vista days the latest 1080Ti is still perfectly compatible or I might want a slightly older model, like a 980Ti or maybe even like a 780Ti, for reasons I'm not yet aware of?
BTW I'm avoiding AMD on purpose, and I did not mention a DOS build for pre-1995 games because for the time being I'd rather stay with DOSBox.
