Xero wrote on 2022-02-06, 19:36:
I have been playing around with some more graphics cards in machines of this era - I'm finding the FX series to be about the absolute highest that makes sense - i do have a 6800gt that works too, but it seems a bit wasteful in terms of being cpu bound. On the flip side, if I was targetting older DOS stuff too, I'd probably want a TNT2 in there.
I chose the GF4 Ti4200 as it is the best option to run the Win98 games listed above, as well for it's good DOS compatibility. I have a FX5500, but it needs DirectX 9 and higher NVIDIA drivers, which would probably break some compatibility.
pentiumspeed wrote on 2022-02-06, 22:16:
What? These games quit working after upgrading to windows XP SP3?
How come?
This is what I'm having in mind to have old games for XP SP3.
mothergoose729 wrote on 2022-02-07, 00:13:
Thief and Thief 2 use 8 bit textures and have various problems with even geforce fx cards. I don't think it has anything to do with XP3. Of course there are community patches that fix all of that.
Most or all of the games can be made to run one way or another. Splinter cell has a lot of graphical issues. You can play it, but the lighting and effects are only exactly right on geforce 4 or fx cards, and I think even then only at 640x480 resolution. It's just a bad port though so it has problems on any computer. If you care about the game IMO you want the OG Xbox version.
Truthfully speaking, it may have not been WinXP SP3 that broke the games. During that period, I was constantly upgrading everything: OS, drivers, CPU, RAM, GPU, motherboard even. Anything to squeeze maximum performance to be able to play the latest games. It 's very much possible that any one of the following upgrades broke those games:
- WinXP upgrade from SP2 to SP3
- NVIDIA driver version > 45.23
- Latest DirectX 9.0c version
- CPU freq > 2 GHz
- RAM > 2 GB
- GPU upgrade from GF3 Ti200 to 9600XT and then 7950GT
But in my mind, it all broke when I upgraded to WinXP SP3 😀