wierd_w wrote on 2026-09-18, 16:51:

They seemed to always *Say* a specific card was unsupported by a driver pack, that supported more expensive versions of that gpu core, and manually adding in the IDs almost always worked.

Not an exclusive Nvidia habit but, for sure, they were the king of the hill

XP's weird. Last time I messed with it, loading official NVIDIA AHCI driver for my motherboard's SATA controller would just BSOD 32-bit version. But x64 driver on XP x64 worked.

I could not use KeePassNatMsg plugin for KeePass on x86 XP, it threw exception about unsupported cipher. But worked on XP x64.

EAX didn't work on XP x64 with Audigy Rx (Daniel K's drivers) AND limiting RAM. At least not through DirectSound, OpenAL was fine.

I remember Explorer on XP x64 glitching once and taking most of the 4 GB of RAM.

2 words, holy mess!

Is it just me or are Creative drivers a dumpster fire that you deliberately start in your OS?

They were. Creative Labs' drivers for the AWE32 and AWE64 allowed games to dynamically load soundfonts to them, but almost always broke in spectacular ways, only worked with very specific configurations, and were more fragile than raku pottery.

Ive noticed this on forums now, XP got the blame for a lot of stuff it just didnt deserve.
UCyborg last post about XP's weird...
What he is talking about is a known driver problem to do with the nForce driver and NCQ on the SATA controller. It was fixed by using the generic microsoft driver, which im sure you know about on here, but it doesnt stop people saying its an XP thing when it really wasnt, XP was just there while it was happening.
Nvidia are some of the worst in the business for driver shenanigans. How else to you get, on the older cards, two basically identical cards to function completely differently!
The Quadro GeForce gap.
Famous on forums like this of course but all that messing about trying to control who gets access to the power of their card through drivers when they really needed to concentrate on making decent drivers that didnt break the OS they were running on to the point of instability. And then forcing Microsoft to remove the access to memory over 4Gb to stop the problem they were being blamed for.

ElectroSoldier wrote on Today, 17:30:

Ive noticed this on forums now, XP got the blame for a lot of stuff it just didnt deserve.
UCyborg last post about XP's weird...
What he is talking about is a known driver problem to do with the nForce driver and NCQ on the SATA controller. It was fixed by using the generic microsoft driver, which im sure you know about on here, but it doesnt stop people saying its an XP thing when it really wasnt, XP was just there while it was happening.

I didn't know it was a known issue. I've come across the working Microsoft's driver. On modern Windows, there would be a delay with hybrid shutdown (aka. log off and hibernate) with Microsoft's driver.

I thought it was mostly just me ranting about things being buggy on XP, possibly stemming from trying to do "too modern" things on it on a computer with core components from late Vista era and a bit newer graphics card.

Are "too new" drivers for newer NVIDIA cards from first half 2010s generally still problematic on newer systems? At least with my limited experience, too new driver on XP seemed more noticeable in bug department, with breaking the screen resolution page in NVIDIA control panel. Or when I had the old GeForce4 MX 440, where the latest driver significantly degraded performance.

But then at some more recent point I noticed some glitches in maps in Half-Life (z-fighting), for which there are fixed maps, but don't remember if this was the problem with older drivers for my GTX 750 Ti too or does it only happen in newer ones...and it's been a good while since visiting XP. Though this could be design bug that happened to went unnoticed on old hardware. At least going by Mafia 1 and its z-fighting issue with blood and such, some developers did have problems in that department back then too. I remember there was a tweaker application with checkbox for specifically targeting that issue in Mafia, perhaps some of you remember it, it slipped out of my memory.

I mentioned some time ago in another thread here that I wasn't aware for the longest time that AMD Processor Driver existed for Windows XP too. It's bundled with Windows since Vista and is responsible for CPU frequency scaling on AMD CPUs, depending on the load. No apparent problems on Vista+, but loading appropriate driver on XP, it adds horrible lag spikes when frequency changes. At least that happened on my side.

In any case, I think it's fair to say getting things working properly on XP is on the more difficult side.

Teenager me had most fun on Windows 7, so there's that as well. 😉

UCyborg wrote on Today, 20:57:

I didn't know it was a known issue. I've come across the working Microsoft's driver. On modern Windows, there would be a delay w […]
Show full quote

ElectroSoldier wrote on Today, 17:30:

Ive noticed this on forums now, XP got the blame for a lot of stuff it just didnt deserve.
UCyborg last post about XP's weird...
What he is talking about is a known driver problem to do with the nForce driver and NCQ on the SATA controller. It was fixed by using the generic microsoft driver, which im sure you know about on here, but it doesnt stop people saying its an XP thing when it really wasnt, XP was just there while it was happening.

I didn't know it was a known issue. I've come across the working Microsoft's driver. On modern Windows, there would be a delay with hybrid shutdown (aka. log off and hibernate) with Microsoft's driver.

I thought it was mostly just me ranting about things being buggy on XP, possibly stemming from trying to do "too modern" things on it on a computer with core components from late Vista era and a bit newer graphics card.

Are "too new" drivers for newer NVIDIA cards from first half 2010s generally still problematic on newer systems? At least with my limited experience, too new driver on XP seemed more noticeable in bug department, with breaking the screen resolution page in NVIDIA control panel. Or when I had the old GeForce4 MX 440, where the latest driver significantly degraded performance.

But then at some more recent point I noticed some glitches in maps in Half-Life (z-fighting), for which there are fixed maps, but don't remember if this was the problem with older drivers for my GTX 750 Ti too or does it only happen in newer ones...and it's been a good while since visiting XP. Though this could be design bug that happened to went unnoticed on old hardware. At least going by Mafia 1 and its z-fighting issue with blood and such, some developers did have problems in that department back then too. I remember there was a tweaker application with checkbox for specifically targeting that issue in Mafia, perhaps some of you remember it, it slipped out of my memory.

I mentioned some time ago in another thread here that I wasn't aware for the longest time that AMD Processor Driver existed for Windows XP too. It's bundled with Windows since Vista and is responsible for CPU frequency scaling on AMD CPUs, depending on the load. No apparent problems on Vista+, but loading appropriate driver on XP, it adds horrible lag spikes when frequency changes. At least that happened on my side.

In any case, I think it's fair to say getting things working properly on XP is on the more difficult side.

Teenager me had most fun on Windows 7, so there's that as well. 😉

AMD processor driver existed due to the way AMD implemented the frequency changes, it was baked into the kernel in Vista but XP needed it to be added and it didnt work well because of that.
It was a change in technology that didnt work well because of the age of the OS at the time the change in hardware capability was released... You either lived with it or locked to CPU to not change frequency. There is of course more to it than what Ive just said but without going all technical its good enough.
All the tech changed and advanced so rapidly. It was hard for XP to keep up. Dont forget XP went final in 2001.

As to nvidia drivers its always best not to load the latest release drivers for those older cards especially when they are on the edge of the OS being dropped as they just didnt put in any work to iron on the edge case bugs. There was no money in it, nvidia always had its eye on big corp money paying their bills not gamers, so they dont write the best to the smaller share of their income. The gaming market cards are pocket change for nvidia today.
You only have to look at the stats on Steam to see most of the bought cards are in the mid range, I know looking at forums it looks like everybody is rockin the top of the line but their user stats say otherwise. So nvidia offer up little effort into their drivers and even limit them so we couldnt mod the cards to get quadro performance from geforce cards. But back then nvidia were trying to keep the Quadro and GeForce cards separate because they made more money from the GeForce cards but wanted to keep the high profits money they got from the Quadro cards too. So you get the driver shenanigans.
Jeff on his Craft Computing YT channel touched on this a few times without diving into what was really going on with the nvidia drivers.
He has mentioned a few times a card can do "X" but the drivers wont allow it.

As to the problems in the games you mention they were not WinXP problems in themselves, they manifested themselves in WinXP but they were not caused by XP itself... It was due to the way the newer cards changed, became "better" and thus we saw the problems created.

Yeah I see where you lived in Win7 and know that well you dont know all of what happened before to get to Win7...
I suppose it happens a lot on here, which is why I read what I read about WinXP. Which is a good reason to correct it now.

Why do Windows client editions on 32-bit x86 systems artificially limit RAM to 4 GB?

Typically, device drivers must be modified in a number of small ways. Although the actual code changes may be small, they can be difficult. This is because when not using PAE memory addressing, it is possible for a device driver to assume that physical addresses and 32-bit virtual address limits are identical. PAE memory makes this assumption untrue.

Many device drivers designed for these systems may not have been tested on system configurations with PAE enabled. In order to limit the impact to device driver compatibility, changes to the hardware abstraction layer (HAL) were made to Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003 SP1 Standard Edition to limit physical address space to 4 GB.

This is straight from one of Microsoft engineers.