My late Windows XP computer is a P5Q Pro Turbo with a Xeon X5460. I had a two gigabyte HD 7850, but when playing Half Life 2 it would have weird issues when using the flashlight in dark areas. I tried different driver versions to see if I could eliminate that, but I was never able to. I picked up a one gigabyte HD 6850 and I'm using the Catalyst 13.9 driver; this eliminated all issues with Half Life 2. Benchmarks: 3D 03 67,826, 3D 06 17,637, 3D 2001 51,935.

Yes I think I've heard that 2GB is "too much" for WinXP (can cause issues, and/or is just unnecessary...) But I'm no expert - could be unrelated. Thanks for the reply!

The E6600 will be holding back the CPU, I would suggest getting a Core 2 Duo E8500 as the best value fast CPU if you're doing strictly XP gaming (a Core 2 Quad if you're going to use Windows 7 too).

In vice city you may need a frame limiter - or at least try the game with the built in frame limiter turned on. GTA 3, VC and San Andreas have physics engines that run at 30fps (well "25 minus 5 fps") so the power is not really needed anyway. In 3 the menu won't load up properly (it will be invisible but navigatiable) if you run the game on modern hardware so hundreds of frames in the menu. Toggling my MSI afterburner frame limiter makes it appear and disappear.

Just a thought what is your power supply? It might be struggling if crashes happen once vsync is turned off

Here's some specs pulled from the internet, from a post and not from the box.

PC Minimum System Requirements
===========================
Intel Pentium 3 933 MHz or AMD Athlon XP 1.2 GHz
256 MB of RAM (For Windows 98 / Windows ME)
nVidia Geforce 2 or ATI Radeon 7500 with 32 MB Video RAM
DirectX 8.1

Recomended System Requirements
==============================
Intel Pentium 4 with 1.4 GHz or AMD Athlon XP with 1.5 GHz
512 MB of RAM (Windows 2000 Pro / Windows XP Pro)
Nvidia Geforce 3 or ATI Radeon 8500 with 64 MB Video Ram
DirectX 9.0c

The CPU should be OK and you're using an ssd, your hardware shouldn't be holding you back. Maybe try a monitoring tool and see if that reveals something when it lags. Also try playing without AA and see if that changes anything.

Cards usually whistle under load so idle could be a sign of an impending hardware failure. Is it consistent and just gets drowned out by other noise, or does it go away under load? Try more tests and see if a consistent issue emerges when the card is pushed. Crashing is a good sign of a problem.

I'm using a 3 Gb Radeon 7970 with Catalyst 14.4 (have not tried 13.12) in my 32-bit WinXP machine. For a CPU I'm running an AMD FX-8320 with one core per module disabled. I run at 2560 x 1440 where possible, and the 7970 has pretty nice performance. Eg it can push decently high levels of forced AA etc in games like Bioshock and be running at 100+ FPS or be in the 50 - 60 FPS range in Crysis with high setttings. At a guess a 7850 would be about 2/3 the performance of a 7970 on average, so should still be pretty good. I've got 4 Gb RAM installed and this plus the 3 GB VRAM of the 7970 does not cause any issues at all.

The other card I have installed in my WinXP machine is a GTX 780 - mostly to avoid rendering issues with Star Wars KOTOR, but I do test it out on other games as well. The GTX 780 can definitely push higher FPS than the 7970, although sometimes I find that a particular setting in the Catalyst Control Panel will kill performance on the 7970 more than I'd expect. Tweak that and FPS shoots back up.

From what I remember Phil doesn't use Snappy Driver Installer for video card drivers, but has a separate manual installation fix for Radeon cards (navigate to the driver file via Device Manager manual driver update).

Cheers,

John

I thought 7850s were 2GB. Anyway I think I use 13.12 or something and seems fine.

Thanks for the comments - Power supply is the original OEM DELL 375W

From what I can see, the ASUS Radeon HD 7850 comes in 1GB and 2GB models:

1GB (and 1 fan): https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/asus-hd … -directcu.b1241

2GB (and 2 fan): https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/asus-hd … rectcu-ii.b1683

I heard Phil say to use snappy driver here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTFv4x8srL0&t=3m4s

Sounded similar to my situation, so I went with it. (WinXP, AMD Radeon, 14.4 pack 2, everything installed except actual video driver)

But in searching for that clip, I heard him say the same thing you mention, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5QjZJvook8&t=11m23s

So may try that approach as well in future.

In GTA VC I turned on the frame limiter through the game settings, and that got it working. I previously had Vsync forced ON in the catalyst control panel, but I guess the game is not affected by the driver setting. Or maybe Vsync was still allowing too many frames (like if it picked 120fps). No idea.

As for the card - after using it for a longer duration (20-30 minutes) I noticed a strong burning smell coming from it 🤣 so I contacted the seller and they were kind enough to issue a full refund.

Thanks for your help everyone!

gta vc (and iii and sa), half life 2 and dozens of other games from the xp era i have found will run just fine in windows 7 64 bit with whatever drivers windows 7 wants for various graphics cards that are from the windows 7 era

that's cd/dvd installed games rather than gog etc

so that's another option, in case ever needed

Try driver 12.4
https://pixelworkbench.com/2022/05/17/amd-cat … ystery-deepens/

For optimal performance with 13.x and 14.x drivers on GCN graphics cards (hd7000 series) you need not just a faster cpu but a newer cpu generation, like Sandy Bridge.

Also the 14.4 drivers have a common problem with installation, you need to run the installer to extract the package, and then install the driver manually from device manager using the location where the driver package was extracted.

Alternative WinXP drivers (bottom of the page) : LINK

Source for above info : LINK
They should fix "no install" issue for some cards.

Awesome, thanks for for the help! Haven't had a chance to look at this in a little while. Will hopefully be back to it again soon!