I've been playing around with 340.52. The last XP drivers for various older cards like GF8. I haven't played all that many games though. Half Life 2 (2004 build), Max Payne 1&2, DS9 The Fallen each seem fine.

You probably don't want any of the early drivers like 97.92. I remember when I had 8800GTX back then that old games were often broken. Jedi Knight 1 didn't render right for example. I figured they just hadn't gotten around to testing lots of old games on their new architecture yet. Maybe they literally hadn't yet implemented everything necessary to support some old DirectX features.

swaaye wrote:

I've been playing around with 340.52. The last XP drivers for various older cards like G80. I haven't played all that many games though. Half Life 2 (2004 build), Max Payne 1&2, DS9 The Fallen each seem fine.

You probably don't want any of the early drivers like 97.92. I remember when I had 8800GTX back then that old games were often broken. Jedi Knight 1 didn't render right for example. I figured they just hadn't gotten around to testing lots of old games on their new architecture yet.

It's a weird one - 340 is definitely not ideal from what I recall for the older games but you're right, the 9X "Forceware" drivers were terrible - they had very little options as well. I now installed 175.19 for now, a 2008 driver, and will test a bunch of games with that. Every time I encounter a problem, I'll go a few drivers up and try again and try to find the sweet spot that way.

Which games have you seen problems with on 340.52?

swaaye wrote:

Which games have you seen problems with on 340.52?

Oof you're testing my memory. I remember a few off the top of my head:

Singles - Sims like game: it had transparency issues
MGS2: tons of glitches

But there were way more. Something in the later drivers broke and I remember vividly testing driver after driver to find the one the version where it happened. I used that driver for quite some time until Vista was released and I was forced to upgrade. Vista broke a ton of other stuff (64bit).

I too use older drivers on my GTX 285 because I seem to remember having issues with certain games on the latest drivers. Can't think of anything in particular at this time though.

Garrett W wrote:

I too use older drivers on my GTX 285 because I seem to remember having issues with certain games on the latest drivers. Can't think of anything in particular at this time though.

Yeah - we learn by experience but we quickly forget which games caused problems when solved 🤣

From what I learned, there's three things to watch out for if you build a late end XP system:

- Processor Affinity: about 5-10% of all games tested required only one core to be active. Not doing this could result in crashes, slow down, glitches, stuttering, mouse behaviour problems, ... . Good thing it's easy to disable cores.

- Don't use a modern gaming mouse. About 10-20% of games I tested had mouse related issues due to the DPI and polling rate being higher than the game anticipates causing the mouse to not respond correctly. Examples: Ground Control II and XIII. The ONLY solution besides patches and hacks and whatever, is to use a "regular" mouse. eBay has tons of older Logitech mouse on sale for really not much money.

- don't chose very late-end driver for ANYTHING. ALWAYS go for period correct drivers if the hardware supports it. My Audigy 2 had all kinds of issues with Creative's later drivers which were really for the X-FI and Audigy 2 ZS.
On top of that, games sometimes expect certain hardware to behave in a certain way and more modern drivers can break behaviour. That's what Nvidia's later drivers do: break certain compatibility that those games relied on. On top of that yet again, newer drivers often take up more space and CPU/RAM.

For now I'm happy with my XP build but I'll be thoroughly testing more games for compatibility.

It's difficult to be period correct for old games when using a DirectX 10 card. 😀

But yeah certainly for old hardware that is a good approach.

swaaye wrote:

It's difficult to be period correct for old games when using a DirectX 10 card. 😀

🤣

Yeah, well, you know how it is, you gotta have a system that will play everything, otherwise you end up with 5-6 systems! 😊 I seem to recall either FEAR or Splinter Cell Chaos Theory causing me issues with the latest drivers available, some sort of texture flickering, but I can't be sure.

Garrett W wrote:

Yeah, well, you know how it is, you gotta have a system that will play everything, otherwise you end up with 5-6 systems! 😊 I seem to recall either FEAR or Splinter Cell Chaos Theory causing me issues with the latest drivers available, some sort of texture flickering, but I can't be sure.

I guess it's Chaos Theory.

Yeah, FEAR seems fine with the latest drivers. I played it for awhile last night after beating Half Life 2. I think that was only the second time I've finished HL2.

I have not played the Splinter Cell games much. I just tried them a bit on the original XBox out of curiosity.

swaaye wrote:

It's difficult to be period correct for old games when using a DirectX 10 card. 😀

But yeah certainly for old hardware that is a good approach.

I found the "DX10 or DX9 card" question an interesting one because there's really only one answer once you pose all the right questions: (warning, a rather pedantic post incoming but I like to write down my findings just in case someone learns from it)

1- How demanding are late-end XP games (e.g. games built for XP on DX9)
2- How powerful are DX9 cards
3- What negatives are there for using a DX10 card
4- What benefits does using a DX9 card give

Now, if you want a system that can play almost all XP games, you need a pretty damn beefy system because developers were very reluctant to switch over and the XP vs Vista argument at the time didn't help. It took at LEAST 3 years since Vista (and DX10) appeared before the majority of games released focused on Vista first and XP second. It took even more years before devs would start focusing on 64 bit and on multi-core processing.

Although this is very subjective, I place the "time of death" of XP around 2012, a massive SIX YEARS after Vista was released and 3 years after Windows 7 was released. The reason I picked 2012 as the time of death, is because it's the first year where a majority of AAA titles required Vista or even Windows 7.

Now, if you consider the time span between Windows 95 and XP (with 98, 98SE, ME and 2000 released between) was also 6 years, that's crazy. Think about it: compare it to the 90's and it would be the equivalent of a game released in 2001 that could still run on Windows 3.1. It's insane. Windows 3.1 only lasted a few years either - XP lasted 5 years before another OS appeared.

So yeah, the answer to point (1) is "very demanding compared to the earliest XP games"

And then you automatically get the answer for answer (2): because of the ridiculous 6 year gap between the release of Vista and the end of XP support for games, DX9 cards are utterly crap compared to DX10 (or even DX11) cards for the simple reason that they stopped developing them around 2006 and there was six more years of XP games to cover, some of which simply don't even work in a 64 bit environment so a retro XP system is the best solution here.

(3) and (4) are connected of course: a downside for one is usually a benefit for the other. Surprisingly, there's very few benefits for DX9 cards:

- they have support for older drivers so older games are more guaranteed to work well in case later drivers break anything - this is theoretical since I don't know any games that mess up on a DX10 card with early drivers
- ... it's more "authentic"?

Now let's look at the downsides:
- lower performance so late-end games will perform terribly
- much higher heat signature and power usage as a result as well since these cards need to work a lot harder
- the DX9 period of cards had quite a battle between ATI and Nvidia where entire generations of both brands were rather iffy - built quality was often poor, cards overheated, drivers were rushed out. Basically, there's a lot of cards that are to be avoided so you need to do your homework.

The Direct X 10 downsides are similar to the benefits of a DX9 card:
- you're forced to use later drivers (2008+) but compatibility is pretty high as long as you don't go 2011-2012. I don't exactly know where the Nvidia drivers start to mess up (hence this topic) but I know ATI drivers were more consistent and even later drivers have good compatibility with older XP games ... if the drivers don't crash.
- it's not authentic to an XP system
- you may need a modern modern PSU for the PCIE power connections, however, although there's adapters.
- early DX10 drivers (2006-2007) are wonky - steer clear of them and look for drivers from at least 2008.

The benefits are interesting though:
- way more choice of quality cards (although I guess this is subjective)
- since most XP games are not very demanding, most of the cards will run rather cool with low fan speeds meaning a quiet PC. Sidenote: ATI managed to make some of its cards bleeding hot even when running idle so Nvidia may be the way to go here.
- quite a few XP games ran under Vista or 7 have performance hits while running these games in XP even with a DX10 card sees better performance. Example: Neverwinter Nights 2.

So yeah, long post, but I think DX10 cards for XP builds come out as a very clear winner if you intend to play XP games up to 2010.

agent_x007 wrote:

Garrett W wrote:

Yeah, well, you know how it is, you gotta have a system that will play everything, otherwise you end up with 5-6 systems! 😊 I seem to recall either FEAR or Splinter Cell Chaos Theory causing me issues with the latest drivers available, some sort of texture flickering, but I can't be sure.

I guess it's Chaos Theory.

Chaos Theory was a bitch - not only did it use the dreaded Starforce which killed the game in Vista (not compatible due to how it accessed the CD drive on hardware level), it was VERY sensitive to which driver you used or you had tons of weird glitches. Considering Vista was released just a year after Chaos Theory, I was pretty miffed it wouldn't work when I upgraded.

I'm glad you mention the game because it reminded me i should test it on my XP rig to see if the driver I picked works with it!

EDIT: it runs beautifully with all options turned to full at 1024x768 - at least 50fps. For a 8800 GTS that's not bad!

Hate to necro the thread but I've noticed that after 306ish, Pre Directx 7 seems to be broken on Nvidia cards on XP, I get garbled video and I've seen it across Tesla, Fermi and Kepler based cards.

And it happens on 2 different systems.