I use a Radeon 5850 is my main XP machine, but some games don't work with it, so I have another XP machine with a Geforce 560 that works with everything.

kolderman wrote on 2019-12-30, 22:49:

I use a Radeon 5850 is my main XP machine, but some games don't work with it, so I have another XP machine with a Geforce 560 that works with everything.

could you list some games that work with the 560 and not the 5850?

imo, too new for XP is hardware that doesn't have drivers!
XP was popular until at least 2014 and could run most new games until at least 2011.

Star Wars: Republic Commando

SPBHM wrote on 2019-12-30, 23:12:

imo, too new for XP is hardware that doesn't have drivers!
XP was popular until at least 2014 and could run most new games until at least 2011.

It's not just about drivers for the OS. IIRC, Nvidia cards through the GeForce 6 Series shipped with Win9X/ME drivers. However, a GeForce 6 simply will not run certain Win9X games well. For instance, my GeForce 6800 would not render circles correctly in Jane's USAF, and my Geforce 4 Ti4200 8x AGP has problems with that game as well as Combat Flight Simulator 2, either rendering errors or odd stutters and such. However, if you downgrade to the original run of the GeForce 4 (~Q1-Q2 2002) or go back even further in Nvidia's lineup rendering and performance improves.

My understanding is that while there is backwards compatibility in DirectX, the compatibility isn't perfect. Thus, certain operations may not perform as well on a newer card. I would not be surprised if the same applied in Windows XP if you are trying to use a newer card with DirectX 8 or 9.

it's far less of a problem with XP from my experience

kolderman wrote on 2019-12-31, 00:50:

Star Wars: Republic Commando

thanks, I'll try that when I can, I remember playing this with a Radeon but it was a while back,
but it's a dx8 game, when testing my 7850 on XP DX8 compatibility looked to have a few issues, I mean I managed to get all the games I tried working fine, but for that I had to use different driver versions with some games.

Could also be smp those quake III games don't like more than a single core.

If you're looking for a video card that would be more compatible with XP, but still somewhat newer, you could try a GeForce 8800, 9800, or 280 (multiple versions of these exist with varying performance). These cards are from the Windows Vista era (DirectX 10), but they should handle XP gaming better than your current Radeon. I have a 9500 GT 1GB in my main XP PC and it handles XP games very well for a lower-end 2008 graphics card.