VOGONS


Best WinXP Video Card

Topic actions

Reply 140 of 241, by agent_x007

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie
element6 wrote:

I can't tell you both (kithylin and agent_x007) how helpful your posts have been for me. I love this subforum but I wish there was a better way of collecting and organizing this kind of info. We do have a wiki at our disposal but I'm not sure of the best way to organize this.

Glad it helped and you are welcome 😀

The Serpent Rider wrote:

Won't Titan X (M) crash WinXP x86 when VRAM usage goes over 4GB ?

Should be noted, that proper 32-bit OS can use more than 4Gb (benefits of 36-bit addressing).

I decided to test it myself : It didn't crash 😀

3DMark 06 stock.PNG
Filename
3DMark 06 stock.PNG
File size
570.77 KiB
Views
1890 views
File license
Fair use/fair dealing exception
Titan X mini.png
Filename
Titan X mini.png
File size
465.54 KiB
Views
1892 views
File license
Fair use/fair dealing exception
Crysis 2560x1600 4x mini.png
Filename
Crysis 2560x1600 4x mini.png
File size
649.54 KiB
Views
1892 views
File license
Fair use/fair dealing exception

OS "eats" 512MB more RAM than Titan Black (hardware reserved).
It also can't use older drivers (GM200 support required).
To make it work, Titan X only needed ID device line and name line, added in .ini file.

157143230295.png

Reply 141 of 241, by havli

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

But you have maximum of only 762 MB VRAM used (in Crysis). So this doesn't really answer the question.

Anyway, I think this is hard to prove because finding game which can use >4 GB VRAM and supports XP might be difficult.

HW museum.cz - my collection of PC hardware

Reply 142 of 241, by mothergoose729

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie
havli wrote:

But you have maximum of only 762 MB VRAM used (in Crysis). So this doesn't really answer the question.

Anyway, I think this is hard to prove because finding game which can use >4 GB VRAM and supports XP might be difficult.

Windows XP reserves a certain amount of main memory as an address space for VRAM. I believe it is something like 256mb. The amount of VRAM you card has doesn't matter as main memory only contains pointers to address blocks within it (at least that is my understanding, please feel free add to that). There is a theoretical max of VRAM based on how much can be physically indexed within the allotted main memory, but I believe it is more than 6gb.

Some more discussion:
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/can-i-us … em-ram.2360226/

If you are using 16X SSAA or crazy high resolutions on demanding games like Crysis, there is a good chance you VRAM utilization is over 4GB.

Reply 143 of 241, by mothergoose729

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie
God Of Gaming wrote:
For Serious Sam I have the Gold Edition rerelease which is both TFE and TSE updated to latest patches and with a few bonus maps. […]
Show full quote

For Serious Sam I have the Gold Edition rerelease which is both TFE and TSE updated to latest patches and with a few bonus maps. Issues were, in OpenGL, weird triangular holes visible in geometry in distance, and in TSE distant trees had a blue overlay, in Direct3D these issues were gone but instead a very unpleasant stutter and occasional mouse input weirdness going on. on the gtx780 it works fine in both D3D and OGL with none of these issues. For NFS Hot Pursuit 2, there was something very wrong with the rendering, all cars were gray, and the road textures looked pretty off in places too. I think fog was missing as well.

tzLk5SA.jpg

These are surely not the only 2 games with issues but I hadnt tested too many old games on that card while I had it. It did pretty well for modern games tho. Sold it for a profit when the mining craze started, don't regret it.

Interesting, I hadn't seen any specific examples of games not working in XP with newer cards.

In my experience though, the issues with games in XP are often more complicarted than that. I had an issue with water shaders in Farcry 1 that I couldn't resolve on my GTS 250 (G92 based card). The GoG version fixed it for me. It could have been a driver problem, an issue with that particular retail release, or something entirely different.

The PC Gaming WIKI page for that game doesn't mention this issue, but it does mention a couple of others.

https://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Need_for_Speed:_Hot_Pursuit_2

I don't have an XP machine up and running at the moment, but I did get this game running fine for me in windows 10 with a GTX 1080.

Reply 144 of 241, by SPBHM

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie
God Of Gaming wrote:

Well thats cool, and yeah, I think I was using the latest driver? Like, can't remember, maybe 14.4 or something? Yeah could indeed be a driver issue, I should really buy an AMD card for testing again and give it another chance. ideally something compatible with even older driver versions so I can test driver compatibility. HD 5870 perhaps? Its the first DX11 card and where supposedly game compatibility went downhill, its also compatible with pretty old driver versions, and should be cheap now. But till I can confirm if its usable or not, nvidia cards up to maxwell will remain my recomendation

I actually also have an HD 5850 and well, it works fine on XP, I used my main PC from 2010 until mid 2012 with an HD 5750 under XP and it would run whatever I wanted,
with that being said, the 7850 looks just as good for now on XP from what I tested, and it supports a range of drivers from early 2012 until the end of support (the 5800 supporting from late 2009), but for Windows 10 and games past 2013 the HD 5800 is... bad, while the 7900 and 7800 are still OK to this day, so with a 7900/7800 you have what looks like good XP support and also decent Windows 10/DX12 and Vulkan (and even Mantle, VK and DX12 on GCN 1.0 cards is likely better supported than on Kepler cards).
for just running XP sure, for dual booting with a newer OS I think the 7800 is a lot nicer,

also I just tested Serious Sam (demo from december 2000) and it seems to work well with the 7850 on XP. (catalyst 12.8 )

SeriousSam_2019_08_14_20_47_55_062.jpg
Filename
SeriousSam_2019_08_14_20_47_55_062.jpg
File size
1 MiB
Views
1851 views
File license
Fair use/fair dealing exception

(reported vram usage I think it's wrong, it stuck at 5MB with this game)

havli wrote:

But you have maximum of only 762 MB VRAM used (in Crysis). So this doesn't really answer the question.

Anyway, I think this is hard to prove because finding game which can use >4 GB VRAM and supports XP might be difficult.

Skyrim? without mods you can use the HD texture pack (official) and it uses over 1GB of vram easily, but the game by default is limited to 2GB of ram, which can be removed with a mod I think, and you can go crazy with the texture mods and other models and use unreasonable amounts of ram/vram, but I think its likely to crash on XP, and even vanilla skyrim for me at least was a game that was slower on XP than on 7.

Reply 145 of 241, by God Of Gaming

User metadata
Rank Member
Rank
Member

The Serious Sam issues can be a bit harder to notice if you don't know where to look, as basically distant stuff may get triangular holes and also in TSE distant trees may get a blue overlay, theres some spots I can recommend, probably easiest thing that comes to mind is to go with The Second Encounter (can be the free demo) and you start falling into a lake under a crashed spaceship, go forwards into the valley towards the temple, then turn around and look at the spaceship, should be far enough from it at that point to easily spot the large triangular holes. Sadly I didn't keep any screenshots of that to demonstrate it. But yes, its possible older drivers wont do this, sadly I dont currently have anything newer than HD 4890 to test with.

1999 Dream PC project | DirectX 8 PC project | 2003 Dream PC project

Reply 146 of 241, by SPBHM

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie
God Of Gaming wrote:

The Serious Sam issues can be a bit harder to notice if you don't know where to look, as basically distant stuff may get triangular holes and also in TSE distant trees may get a blue overlay, theres some spots I can recommend, probably easiest thing that comes to mind is to go with The Second Encounter (can be the free demo) and you start falling into a lake under a crashed spaceship, go forwards into the valley towards the temple, then turn around and look at the spaceship, should be far enough from it at that point to easily spot the large triangular holes. Sadly I didn't keep any screenshots of that to demonstrate it. But yes, its possible older drivers wont do this, sadly I dont currently have anything newer than HD 4890 to test with.

while I didn't play much of the game I was paying attention to the details and I think if something like that was happening I would've noticed,

I also tried the Second Encounter demo and played for a while taking my time to look around including what you described (the crashed ship behind on the way to the temple) many times and I failed to notice any issues, it seems to be running quite well with no visible glitches for me on the 7850 with XP and 12.8 driver, so the problems you had with NFSHP2 and Serious Sam is likely not an issue that affects all of the HD 7000 series under XP, and more something that happened with your card/driver or some combination at the time, or I'm really unlucky on my attempts to reproduce the problems.

Reply 147 of 241, by God Of Gaming

User metadata
Rank Member
Rank
Member

Should be the driver, because confirmed with other people with different cards including a guy with HD 5670 that we were all experiencing the same problems, so I suppose hardware had nothing to do with it and it was just because we were using the latest drivers

1999 Dream PC project | DirectX 8 PC project | 2003 Dream PC project

Reply 148 of 241, by SPBHM

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie
God Of Gaming wrote:

Should be the driver, because confirmed with other people with different cards including a guy with HD 5670 that we were all experiencing the same problems, so I suppose hardware had nothing to do with it and it was just because we were using the latest drivers

is this the problem you experienced?

SeriousSam_2019_08_15_20_42_36_748.jpg
Filename
SeriousSam_2019_08_15_20_42_36_748.jpg
File size
544.97 KiB
Views
1766 views
File license
Fair use/fair dealing exception

this is a "7850" (r7 370) under windows 10 x64 with driver 19.4 on an i5

now this

SeriousSam_2019_08_15_20_49_00_218.jpg
Filename
SeriousSam_2019_08_15_20_49_00_218.jpg
File size
657.51 KiB
Views
1766 views
File license
Fair use/fair dealing exception

is the 7850 under windows xp sp3 with catalyst 12.8 and the C2D

the glitch is very clear on the newer setup if you are looking for it, on the 12.8 setup I was unable to find it, seems like the bug was added at some point after 12.8,
I should test newer drivers on XP to be sure, but I think this considering what you've said would indicate as that being the case?

Reply 149 of 241, by God Of Gaming

User metadata
Rank Member
Rank
Member

Yes, exactly, those triangular holes, they happened in quite a lot of places, usually distant objects and arhitecture, really bugging me, and I remember the trees in the open terrain in the end of the 2nd level valley of the jaguar had ugly blue overlay from distance, and there was z-fighting noticable too in many places, overall opengl looked broken, and switching to direct3d fixed the visuals but instead caused very noticable stutter, so no good either way. So, what then, modern AMD hardware fine, but they totally fucked up their newer drivers? Gee... K then, will still get myself an HD 5870 for testing purposes, as Im currently in the middle of filling an excel sheet with my observations of testing various games on various combinations of hardware, os, drivers and stuff, gotta add this to the roster as well. BTW even if it all works fine, I still don't think there's much reason to prefer 7970 / 280x, amd's last card to work with XP, over like 780ti or even 980ti, even if the compatibility is good with old drivers, the latter has more performance, which will be particularly good thing for dualboot winXP/win7

p.s. here's one more game I remember showing issues, Far Cry, zooming in with the binoculars or sniper rifle, only on higher zoom levels, would corrupt textures like this:
8RO6DaZ.png

1999 Dream PC project | DirectX 8 PC project | 2003 Dream PC project

Reply 150 of 241, by SPBHM

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

I've only tested far cry demo and it seemed to be working well with 12.8, no glitches of the kind to report, nothing funny going on with zooming, I had some oddities that didn't cause visual glitches (changing settings on the menu initially gave me a gray screen, not a driver crash just the game stuck in there, and required me to restart the game, but at least it changed the settings, and when I started to take screenshots with afterburner "system" decided to use 50% of the CPU, but the game was still running OK)

but from FC demo to fully patched FC they've changed things quite a bit (I think the demo runs in SM 2.0 at best for example), still it might be another bug introduced by a newer driver version,

as for the comparison with Nvidia, well I'm not claiming the GCN 1.0 cards are better on XP, but I think with the older drivers I'm seeing it as a viable option,
I did find Mafia a little too slow for my taste (it seems like the e7300 was struggling), but at least it didn't have the shadows glitch that I have with my FX 5900 with the drivers I tested (45.x and 53.03 so far), the shadows also glitched on windows 10 with the Radeon with the newer driver, but not on XP with 12.8, but I want to test Mafia more because the performance didn't make a lot of sense; basically I'm seeing potentially lower framerate on bad spots with the e7300+7850 than I saw with the FX 5900 with a P4 s478 3GHz and it looks very CPU bound...
with the i5 on 10 it runs massively faster, even with me forcing the i5 (which is a sandy bridge) to 1.6GHz (on 10) it was still over twice the framerate of the e7300 (with XP), when I have some time for this it's probably a good idea to run XP on the i5 to see how Mafia behaves,

EDIT: oh yes, there is something going on with Mafia, I swapped the HD 7850 for an HD 4670 DDR2 (12.8GB/s ram!) and it's night and day, I tested this quite a bit and it's very consistent, the 7850 (with cat 12.😎 runs very often at 40s touching 20 in heavy action, be it 640x480 or higher res... the same exact PC with the 4670 = 63FPS pretty much locked all the time....
still, it looks the same on both, no shadow glitch at least I suppose.

there are some other disappointing results comparing the two, but nothing like Mafia so far,
still I had NFS Porsche run fine in DX7 with the 7850 and glitch the texts with the 4670 with 2 different drivers (9.3, 13.4) 🤣

edit2:
driver 13.9 fixed the performance issues and high CPU usage in Mafia!
but... it added some glitching on NFSHP2 demo, basically some "lines" on the car reflections, and the driver of the ferrari is all gray.

still, I tried 9.1, 9.3 and 13.4 and the fonts on NFS Porsche are always glitched with the HD 4670,
and with the HD 7850 with both 12.8 and 13.9 the fonts are fine!

Last edited by SPBHM on 2019-08-20, 08:46. Edited 2 times in total.

Reply 151 of 241, by element6

User metadata
Rank Newbie
Rank
Newbie
God Of Gaming wrote:

My MSI N780 Lightning died 😦 Idk why, I rarelly pushed it, and it was getting really good cooling. A friend working in electronics repair service told me its an issue with BGA chips, when you're pushing 250 watts trough them, even if you cool them well, they give out eventually. I was planning to go up to 980Ti, but after this, perhaps I will have to go down a notch to just a GTX 980, still faster than 780Ti, still compatible with winXP, and is only 165 watts, so hopefully it doesnt die so easily.

I keep thinking about the 980's but I always worry that DX 8-9 compatibility would get in the way of a bunch of games. I'm probably wrong about some of it but I'm being stubborn.

Also; not sure what your prices are like in Bulgaria but I only paid $100 (shipped) for an EVGA 780 Ti Classified a few weeks ago. I was going to buy a pair of two EVGA 780 Ti Classified WITH EK Water Blocks and backing plates pre-installed on them (The impossible to find ek-780 GTX Classy models). I passed on them, but I should have just bought them for the very fair price of $300. The seller also included the original heatsinks, backing plates, and boxes. 🙁

Reply 152 of 241, by duga3

User metadata
Rank Member
Rank
Member
SPBHM wrote:

for what is worth this is NFSHP2 demo running on my HD 7850 2GB/C2D e7300 with Catalyst 12.8 under windows xp sp3,
I didn't notice any issues, maybe @God Of Gaming was unlucky with the driver version?!

I haven't tested many games, but quake 3 arena runs a lot faster on XP with this card than it does in windows 10.

By the way, NFSHP2 is a stuttering mess on all GPUs/drivers, its very obvious when turning. Also, if you stop your car and look carefully it appears the game world is very slowly rotating around the car. Such a shame because the game is pretty fun and has a great soundtrack. I was hoping this would be solved by running it on older hardware/OS but no.

98/XP multi-boot system with P55 chipset (build log)
Screenshots
10Hz FM

Reply 153 of 241, by God Of Gaming

User metadata
Rank Member
Rank
Member

PS2 version of the game is superior anyways, PC version had cool online multiplayer but that's dead with gamespy, so, eh.. play the PS2 ver 😀

1999 Dream PC project | DirectX 8 PC project | 2003 Dream PC project

Reply 154 of 241, by SPBHM

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie
duga3 wrote:
SPBHM wrote:

for what is worth this is NFSHP2 demo running on my HD 7850 2GB/C2D e7300 with Catalyst 12.8 under windows xp sp3,
I didn't notice any issues, maybe @God Of Gaming was unlucky with the driver version?!

I haven't tested many games, but quake 3 arena runs a lot faster on XP with this card than it does in windows 10.

By the way, NFSHP2 is a stuttering mess on all GPUs/drivers, its very obvious when turning. Also, if you stop your car and look carefully it appears the game world is very slowly rotating around the car. Such a shame because the game is pretty fun and has a great soundtrack. I was hoping this would be solved by running it on older hardware/OS but no.

yeah there is something off with this game, it's very obvious with the jump camera the the motion is not smooth,
for the gameplay in general at very high framerate I find it passable, but you can notice still that it isn't quite right, with a 30FPS cap it feels more obviously wrong,
software like afterburner still reports good frame times but there is something not right;
when you compare it to the next NFS, Underground, it becomes ultra obvious, since NFSUG actually runs smoothly.

God Of Gaming wrote:

PS2 version of the game is superior anyways, PC version had cool online multiplayer but that's dead with gamespy, so, eh.. play the PS2 ver 😀

yeah it's basically a different game and considered the superior one,
HP2 had the version on PC, Xbox, GC from one studio and the PS2 from another,

anyway, the driver situation with the HD 7850 for HP2 is that the earlier ones work fine (I tried 12.4 and 12.8 ),
while newer ones add some glitches,
now Mafia is another DX8 game, and the driver versions that work well with HP2 perform poorly on Mafia (high CPU usage and low framerate), and the ones that glitch on HP2 perform well on Mafia it seems (like 13.9)... 😵

Reply 155 of 241, by duga3

User metadata
Rank Member
Rank
Member

"3D Analyze" program contains "Mafia shadow fix" option by the way. Possibly even WFP contains this shadow fix (WFP is Win7+ only though).

98/XP multi-boot system with P55 chipset (build log)
Screenshots
10Hz FM

Reply 156 of 241, by God Of Gaming

User metadata
Rank Member
Rank
Member
SPBHM wrote:
is this the problem you experienced? […]
Show full quote
God Of Gaming wrote:

Should be the driver, because confirmed with other people with different cards including a guy with HD 5670 that we were all experiencing the same problems, so I suppose hardware had nothing to do with it and it was just because we were using the latest drivers

is this the problem you experienced?

SeriousSam_2019_08_15_20_42_36_748.jpg

this is a "7850" (r7 370) under windows 10 x64 with driver 19.4 on an i5

now this

SeriousSam_2019_08_15_20_49_00_218.jpg

is the 7850 under windows xp sp3 with catalyst 12.8 and the C2D

the glitch is very clear on the newer setup if you are looking for it, on the 12.8 setup I was unable to find it, seems like the bug was added at some point after 12.8,
I should test newer drivers on XP to be sure, but I think this considering what you've said would indicate as that being the case?

Someone finally found a solution for this, gap_iDepthBits=24 or 32 (default is 0), with that serious sam opengl should display fine on modern amd drivers, someone shuld add this to the pcgamingwiki page

1999 Dream PC project | DirectX 8 PC project | 2003 Dream PC project

Reply 157 of 241, by God Of Gaming

User metadata
Rank Member
Rank
Member

After my gtx 780 died last summer and I upgraded to gtx 980, I noticed slight issues in a few games on XP, so Im no longer sure the maxwells are the best XP cards. Using same driver for 780 and 980, the 368.81, since upgrading to the 980 I've noticed call of duty 2 and 4 wouldnt let me change any graphics settings in-game (after apply, game crashes and after restarting it, the settings arent saved) and the only solution is to manually edit the settings into the cfg files. Serious Sam 2 refuses to switch to resolutions above 1024x768 in direct3d mode, switching to opengl lets me use higher resolutions but theres some visual artefacts (likely caused by opengl mode not working properly in that game rather than the graphics card itself). I've only tested 6 games on winXP since getting the 980, but when half of them show issues (even if not game-breaking ones) Im getting concerned if the maxwell would really be the best XP gpu, other games further down the line might have more serious and game-breaking issues? Anyone noticed any other? Could it be that not maxwell but kepler is the best for XP after all?

1999 Dream PC project | DirectX 8 PC project | 2003 Dream PC project

Reply 158 of 241, by Sinbad77

User metadata
Rank Newbie
Rank
Newbie

Tried Serious Sam 2 today with my just arrived GTX 970 with Geforce driver 368.81 and setting resolution to 1600x1200 works fine. No glitches, no crashes whatsoever. I'll be trying some other games the next couple of days.