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.
Retro game fanatic.
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