I can't answer all your questions, but in my experience, my HD 7770 has had no problems with Disney•Pixar Cars or Microsoft Flight Simulator X in DirectX 9 mode.

There was a short span of time a couple of years ago when the most up-to-date AMD GPU drivers for Windows 7 & 10 didn't work well with DirectX 9, but those issues have been fixed. See https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-release … sues,36365.html
This issue wouldn't affect you under Windows XP because AMD stopped creating Windows XP driver updates over 5 years ago.

DX9 is still being used in some current games, the support is very much still relevant for current hardware.
but yes, XP is frozen in 2014 in terms of drivers

you can run some very old D3D games with current AMD hardware/drivers as expected, for example I just loaded the Hal Life CD version (copied from my P3, didn't install properly) on Windows 10 x64 with a GCN radeon and it worked OK without any additional work, in D3D, Opengl whatever
and I play some DX9 games very often with it.

the Fermi cards should also work great for DX9 games.

If you already have a GTX 750, why buy an older card for use on XP? Just use what you have. If you've found incompatible Dx9 titles I'd be very interested to hear what you've found.

Main thing; More newer video cards as you go, later drivers supported drops older games compatibility from what I read here, even for D3D9.

And I read that starting with Radeon HD5xxx had problems with older D3D9 games but Nvidia had good success with these up to 750 Ti, am I correct about this?

What I have not found yet in Vogons forums is more detail as I only found at least 3 threads about GTX 4xx and GTX 5xx which is not very much to go on. I wanted to ask anyone to expand on this?

Even GTX 750ti is more of mid to low end video card. 16GP/s pixel, 40GT/s texture. I have a GTX 580 that does 37.05GP/s and 49.41 GT/s with much higher memory bandwidth.
Even GTX 560 ti is better than 750 ti. I know that 750 ti is much better on power usage but I was trying to build good specs into XP game machine.

Thanks and cheers, pentiumspeed

I've used an HD 5850 for years and played all sorts of games, I can't remember much wrong in terms of DX9 games,
the only thing that comes to mind was Mafia 2 being broken after a certain driver, but it was easy enough to install an older one that worked fine, and I don't know if they ever fixed this bug with some newer driver.

in games from around 2013 the 750 ti could beat the GTX 570, not sure how it goes on older games but I doubt the 750 TI would struggle.

pentiumspeed wrote:

Main thing; More newer video cards as you go, later drivers supported drops older games compatibility from what I read here, even for D3D9.

That is a logical thought process, given the situation with later Win98 Geforce drivers but I'd like to know of what problems people have actually experienced with the final XP drivers?
I can't find a fault with them or anyone who has. Games which were broken somewhere between version 330~350 run perfectly.
Even with a GTX960, great for noise\heat. Which can run Crysis, max settings, 1080p without a fuss and not sacrifice compatibility with your older titles.

Later the GPU driver version is, less support for older games that only works with XP 32bit, What names of games do you encounter?

What's best stable, older drivers version that works well with older games as stated for GTX 5xx series for example?

Cheers, pentiumspeed

pentiumspeed wrote:

Later the GPU driver version is, less support for older games that only works with XP 32bit, What names of games do you encounter?

What's best stable, older drivers version that works well with older games as stated for GTX 5xx series for example?

Cheers, pentiumspeed

I'm not calling 327.23 the best but I had games like Test Drive Unlimited hang on me randomly with drivers released after that and I came to a similar conclusion to you about keeping cards like a GTS 250, GTX 460 or GTX 660.
I stopped bothering even testing further updates because it wasn't getting fixed. A couple of years later I thought I'd test a GTX 960 out in XP, you have to use later drivers and I found that not only did the final version (368.81) work flawlessly, it did so with the older cards too. It was a very pleasant surprise.