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The frustrations of the GPU market

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Reply 161 of 191, by BEEN_Nath_58

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swaaye wrote on 2022-10-13, 20:13:
BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2022-10-13, 18:04:

Looking at their D3D9 driver performance, I would stick with my Nvidia 10 series still.

The Intel driver for Xe GPUs doesn't have D3D9 performance at all. It uses d3d9on12. But you can also try dxvk or dgvoodoo2. I think these are probably good enough for most people considering those old games don't ask a lot of a modern machine. An IGP is good enough for most of them. And the wrappers are always improving whereas I can see the native D3D9 drivers regressing because AMD/NV don't care (see threads of people here using specific older drivers).

I was thinking how is D3D1-8 and DirectDraw performance. I know most would say it doesn't matter 😂, but I just wonder if it ends up not having a supported driver for it too.

previously known as Discrete_BOB_058

Reply 162 of 191, by Geri

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BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2022-10-14, 20:32:

I was thinking how is D3D1-8 and DirectDraw performance. I know most would say it doesn't matter 😂, but I just wonder if it ends up not having a supported driver for it too.

Unfortunately, d3d 4/5/6 works on newer operating systems and video cards only on paper.
There is no performance because 90% of the games will crash.
If you want to play with such titles, either use a wrapper, or put a windows9x pc together with savage4/matrox g200/voodoo3/riva128/sis300/laguna3d.

TitaniumGL the OpenGL to D3D wrapper:
http://users.atw.hu/titaniumgl/index.html

Reply 163 of 191, by BEEN_Nath_58

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Geri wrote on 2022-10-15, 11:26:
Unfortunately, d3d 4/5/6 works on newer operating systems and video cards only on paper. There is no performance because 90% of […]
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BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2022-10-14, 20:32:

I was thinking how is D3D1-8 and DirectDraw performance. I know most would say it doesn't matter 😂, but I just wonder if it ends up not having a supported driver for it too.

Unfortunately, d3d 4/5/6 works on newer operating systems and video cards only on paper.
There is no performance because 90% of the games will crash.
If you want to play with such titles, either use a wrapper, or put a windows9x pc together with savage4/matrox g200/voodoo3/riva128/sis300/laguna3d.

I would have believed it if it was 2013 or so, but at this stage, even without wrappers, the "90% games will crash" should be at "25% games will crash" at most.

Using very bad drivers doesn't make this percentage useful, neither do externally modded drivers. I have tested 746 pre-D3D8 games in the last 3 years, out of which 662 work on Windows 10 or Windows 11. In the 662 , 74 needed dgVoodoo2 to dislodge major graphical artefacts, 21 (initially 36) was helped by DirectDrawCompat, everything else was possible by native DirectDraw and/or DxWnd. A very small number are present here

I am going to put some names: MechWarrior 2 (DDraw2), NFS1 (DDraw2), Zork Nemesis (DDraw1), NFS3 (D3D5), Turok2 (D3D6), NFS4 (D3D6), GTA1 (DDraw5), Nuclear Strike, etc contributes to "90% games will crash" as you mentioned. They may be helped by patches/mods/dx9 transformation mods/ScummVM.

Unfortunately, they contribute 0% to my incompatibility list, all of them possible to be run even without a wrapper. You need the knowledge to modify GDI BitBlt return values (Mech2), skip unnecessary exceptions (Mech2, NFS6 on D3D6), remapping Z-buffer order faking fake floppy (Zork Nemesis), disable masking of 16-bit color modes (Turok 2), asynchronized refresh of screen (Desert Strike, hilariously this does a better job than my Win98 PCEM), things that DxWnd provide so that "d3d 4/5/6 works on newer operating systems and video cards only on paper" isn't a reality but "d3d 4/5/6 works on newer operating systems and video cards *quite* correctly" is the reality.

Another game that should be in your list is Jane's Longbow, the game wants direct hardware access for videos, uses 9x heap manager, has broken Vsync, etc, which isn't in my list because it was easy to fix them all (except the videos which need a 60 second wait after process creation, something I can't understand how to achieve normally).

Yet the place where I got "major graphical issues" (not necessarily a crash) are D3D Ramp or D3D RGB games, or them being used with D3D Immediate Mode. Many got fixed with dgVoodoo2, but the no of tested Immediate Mode games should be only close to 50 (unfortunately I don't track them). Other set of games that cause me issues is Ubi Soft and Sierra games from 90s but fortunately there are communities to fix them, and I can focus on other games where solutions don't exist.

The names I listed are small in number, maybe less than your tested games where you got 90% incompatibility or the site which had said that, but in either way I hope the age of these games are enough to convince you that the percentage is lower. Unless that game uses exotic specific hardware features like Table fog or palletted textures, for which I will need dgVoodoo2 and violating my native DDraw/DxWnd promise, I will be happy to test some "well-known" games in the "90% incompatibility list", with hope I can increase my library too.

previously known as Discrete_BOB_058

Reply 164 of 191, by Geri

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BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2022-10-15, 15:47:

I would have believed it if it was 2013 or so, but at this stage, even without wrappers, the "90% games will crash" should be at "25% games will crash" at most.

I tried to play about 20, including old pc versions of final fantasys, b c class games, racing games (1nsane / f197) and various old games and other type of 3d software from my old cyrix setup. Only 2 of them was able to run normally. Some ran with software rendering instead. Thats 90% failure rate. Most of them just crash, some of them seems to start but they are not usable beyond the menu. Some of them complain about missing features even if the feature is there. Some indeed can be patched to run. Your testing methodology is a little bit questionable as its hard to imagine you actually played that~800 games beyond pressing enter on it, and moving around for a few minutes before ruling it perfect meanwhile in reality it was waiting with a corrupted heap to segfault at your face.

TitaniumGL the OpenGL to D3D wrapper:
http://users.atw.hu/titaniumgl/index.html

Reply 165 of 191, by BEEN_Nath_58

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Geri wrote on 2022-10-15, 16:13:
BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2022-10-15, 15:47:

I would have believed it if it was 2013 or so, but at this stage, even without wrappers, the "90% games will crash" should be at "25% games will crash" at most.

I tried to play about 20, including old pc versions of final fantasys, b c class games, racing games (1nsane / f197) and various old games and other type of 3d software from my old cyrix setup. Only 2 of them was able to run normally. Some ran with software rendering instead. Thats 90% failure rate. Most of them just crash, some of them seems to start but they are not usable beyond the menu. Some of them complain about missing features even if the feature is there. Some indeed can be patched to run.

The 100 or so is still greater than the 20 in the link I posted. I play 3 or 4 maps in them, or if they are mission games, play few missions (for eg I finished 3 in Rainbow Six and then quit), for racing, I race around a few tracks in cockpit view or 3rd person view (example Grand Prix), for level games, I play 1 or 2 or the entire game depending on the difficulty (Frogger 1 and 2).

My test is not claiming that those games will absolutely run but a proof that it isn't always DirectX at a fault, even Dege has said in DxWnd SourceForge forum that he has to fix driver bugs to fix Direct3D (sigh).

Geri wrote on 2022-10-15, 16:13:
BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2022-10-15, 15:47:

I would have believed it if it was 2013 or so, but at this stage, even without wrappers, the "90% games will crash" should be at "25% games will crash" at most.

Your testing methodology is a little bit questionable as its hard to imagine you actually played that~800 games beyond pressing enter on it, and moving around for a few minutes before ruling it perfect meanwhile in reality it was waiting with a corrupted heap to segfault at your face.

With that testing methodology, I wouldn't have mentioned Jane's Longbow, or even Longbow 2. The former claims to be fixed using a HEAP_PERCENT=100 in CA.INI but the claimers never tested the training missions which is an entire different story. For Longbow 2, there is no solution to "reading books" which returns with a "corrupted heap to segfault at your face", which I have documented. Both get fixed using the shim:Emulate9xHeap in DxWnd or EmulateHeap shim in MS Application Compatibility Toolkit. The former's heap corruption comes from the graphics memory stack if you must know.

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Reply 166 of 191, by Geri

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BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2022-10-15, 16:22:

My test is not claiming that those games will absolutely run but a proof that it isn't always DirectX at a fault

I agree with that wording, i have also worded in my original reply when i said ,,the game will crash'' as its not necessarily the fault of the directx drivers itself, in a lot of cases its due to how the game is interacting with the system libraries. The thing is, if a game requires special patches and random obscoure entries is already far from being ,,functioning correcly'' is already at the same level of using wrappers so i would maintain my original oppinion about recommending win98pc with a matrox g200.

TitaniumGL the OpenGL to D3D wrapper:
http://users.atw.hu/titaniumgl/index.html

Reply 167 of 191, by BEEN_Nath_58

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Geri wrote on 2022-10-15, 17:23:
BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2022-10-15, 16:22:

My test is not claiming that those games will absolutely run but a proof that it isn't always DirectX at a fault

I agree with that wording, i have also worded in my original reply when i said ,,the game will crash'' as its not necessarily the fault of the directx drivers itself, in a lot of cases its due to how the game is interacting with the system libraries. The thing is, if a game requires special patches and random obscoure entries is already far from being ,,functioning correcly'' is already at the same level of using wrappers so i would maintain my original oppinion about recommending win98pc with a matrox g200.

The actual convo was about what Intel will do with pre-D3D8 driver. Your opinion can and is followed by many around, but I am hoping Intel, as a vendor competing with AMD and NV, doesn't think of 0% legacy compatibility. Better they just copy what the 12th Gen Intel UHDs support and put it in the Arc drivers.

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Reply 168 of 191, by Geri

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BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2022-10-15, 17:47:

I am hoping Intel, as a vendor competing with AMD and NV, doesn't think of 0% legacy compatibility

Its important to note at this point that Intel only has Win10 and Win11 drivers for arc, no drivers were released for Windows7 or Windows8 for ARC as far as i can see. This alone is very talkative about support for any type of old environment. Its not a surprise they threw their d3d9 driver and switched to a wrapper instead. I think the game and cad software developers who would like to have great compatibility across multiple generations of various platforms, already went with opengl or even switched to linux alltogether. Windows is becoming more like a content consumption oriented platform since win8, similar to android and iphones, ipads. The another aspect of windows is: the entire operating system is targeted towards online operation, even system profiles are now stored on the microsoft cloud, even their office is now targeting online operation and heavily based on their cloud system. You have less control any more over your system to install or uninstall drivers, observe, enable, disable system services, its the opposite way: the platform is having a control over you. And on such a system, gaming will also change into this direction, where players will choose one of the newest, popular and professionally marketinged game titles to play (steam, google play), just like when the western people consuming the newest trendy movies on online film rentals. On such a platform, being able to run old games are not important, and as an user, you can just install an older video card with older operating system to enjoy old video games.

If this is good or bad, thats obviously another question.

TitaniumGL the OpenGL to D3D wrapper:
http://users.atw.hu/titaniumgl/index.html

Reply 169 of 191, by BEEN_Nath_58

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Meanwhile Nvidia unlaunched their 12GB RTX 4080 as they acknowledged their weird naming scheme
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/12g … -4080-unlaunch/

previously known as Discrete_BOB_058

Reply 170 of 191, by gaffa2002

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Geri wrote on 2022-10-15, 18:06:

If this is good or bad, thats obviously another question.

You mean everything becoming a service?
In theory that would be wonderful, but in practice the tech industry already made it very clear that the reason behind it is just to find more ways to take money from people so they can keep what they already have.
Instead of buying a new GPU, people will have to subscribe to some realtime graphics rendering service. Bet the corporate drones will come up with some nice buzzword for that... GaaS (Graphics as a Service) or something.

LO-RES, HI-FUN

My DOS/ Win98 PC specs

EP-7KXA Motherboard
Athlon Thunderbird 750mhz
256Mb PC100 RAM
Geforce 4 MX440 64MB AGP (128 bit)
Sound Blaster AWE 64 CT4500 (ISA)
32GB HDD

Reply 172 of 191, by gaffa2002

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swaaye wrote on 2022-10-15, 19:02:

That is the game streaming services. I'm not sure how popular they are but I hear the Xbox one is fairly so.

Nah, a game streaming service gives you the games and the processing power required to run them. Why have one game streaming service if you can split it into a lot of other services and charge for each one?
Processing as a service, storage as a service, having to have a separate account to play each game... oh crap, those already exist 🙁
We are getting to the point of having everything on the internet, so why not having our own PCs on the internet, too?

LO-RES, HI-FUN

My DOS/ Win98 PC specs

EP-7KXA Motherboard
Athlon Thunderbird 750mhz
256Mb PC100 RAM
Geforce 4 MX440 64MB AGP (128 bit)
Sound Blaster AWE 64 CT4500 (ISA)
32GB HDD

Reply 173 of 191, by appiah4

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In other news I ended up grabbing a cheap RX 6700XT from a miner who got it 4 months ago for a rig he's dismantling now due to eth merge and electricity prices. Fuck miners.

Retronautics: A digital gallery of my retro computers, hardware and projects.

Reply 177 of 191, by The Serpent Rider

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Old scenario - scalpers buy whole limited stock to resell for higher price. Apparently even new Intel Arc cards were targeted, due to low quantity. Won't be a problem within few month, unless we'll have another crazy GPU mining fever suddenly.

I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.

Reply 178 of 191, by BitWrangler

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Wow, 8 months make a difference huh?

Now seems like Ark weren't so bad for midrange and are available at decent price, among other things.


I am trying to figure out the current mid-end used market though. Seems weird. GTX1650 and 1660 seem to be holding value even though they're 4 gens behind now? But AMD RX570s seem to have dropped like a stone, half the price of a 1650 and a third faster by the numbers, what gives, are they dying like 9800Pros or something???

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.

Reply 179 of 191, by Pierre32

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BitWrangler wrote on 2023-06-02, 23:30:

Wow, 8 months make a difference huh?

Now seems like Ark weren't so bad for midrange and are available at decent price, among other things.

Yep. Me then:

Pierre32 wrote on 2022-10-13, 21:06:

Yep, not only did the Arc cards sell out instantly (or, only go up for preorder in Australia) I'm hardly finding any chatter around the web from excited unboxers. Feels like they only shipped 100 of them.

Me now:

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I love this build. Driver support has been great, and I haven't had issues with anything I've played at 1440p (except Death Stranding which is a dog anyway). Currently installed games, for the record:

Alien Isolation, Arma III, Battlefield BC2, BeamNG Drive, DayZ, Death Stranding, Doom 64*, GTR2, HL2, Powerslave*, Quake*, Scorn, Shadowman*, Terminator: Resistance.

* Nightdive remakes