Newest GPU 98 supports is Geforce 6000 series (eg 6600, 6800). After that, not supported. Geforce 6xx series is the last for XP as you indicated.

Cheers,

560ti is the sweet spot IMO.

I should probably mention I meant running Win9x era games on XP rather than dual booting the OSes
And Geforce 6xx? I said GTX 960

Saidian wrote on 2023-04-15, 23:17:

I should probably mention I meant running Win9x era games on XP rather than dual booting the OSes
And Geforce 6xx? I said GTX 960

He's right though.

Games that was made for 98SE rarely worked on XP. Hence we build computers purely for 98SE due to GPU compatibility and rest of hardware is limited. Best spot is 4200Ti and 42.xx driver. FX 5600, 5800 and 5900 also supports this but expensive.

When you say XP, I talk about GPU 9xx series is correct, but you injected 98SE to play on, that's the real intention to educate you on just to let you know.

Cheers,

Ah I see, guess I still need to do some thinking and decide which I want more

Most windows 98 games you actually want to play will work just fine in windows XP - albeit with patches and wrappers. Quake II, Quake III, unreal, unreal tournament, diablo, starcraft, half life, thief 1 and 2, ect and ect and on and on are all going to work just fine on XP or even a windows 10/11 machine.

The troublesome games are all between 1998-2001. Any earlier and you can almost always play it in DOSbox, and any later it likely uses new enough versions of directx. For sure there are titles that you won't get to work in XP, but chances are better than not that if it was a good game from that era there exists a GoG version that will run just fine.

If you have faster CPU (like haswell or even sandy bridge) then you can try PCem. It's a proper PC emulator. My haswell based XP machine can emulate a pentium MMX at 166mhz pretty well with a voodoo 2. The performance isn't great, but it will be good enough to play many of the games that don't work in XP.

As for the optimal GPU for XP games that's tough to answer. It's less about architecture and more about drivers, and it can get very specific. I don't see a good reason to believe an earlier card than the gtx 960 is more compatible in any meaningful way. Older GPUs also had bugs and bad patches/driver versions too, so it's not even like going older always equals more better. Just play the games you want to play and be willing to go to places like the pcgamingwiki or the archive on these forums if and when you ran into problems.

You will do fine. XP is an excellent platform for reto prc gaming.

I use a gtx970 for the xp/win7 machine (the card i already had in my main pc so there was no point in selling it), work's great.

mothergoose729 wrote on 2023-04-15, 23:48:

Most windows 98 games you actually want to play will work just fine in windows XP - albeit with patches and wrappers. Quake II, […]
Show full quote

Most windows 98 games you actually want to play will work just fine in windows XP - albeit with patches and wrappers. Quake II, Quake III, unreal, unreal tournament, diablo, starcraft, half life, thief 1 and 2, ect and ect and on and on are all going to work just fine on XP or even a windows 10/11 machine.

The troublesome games are all between 1998-2001. Any earlier and you can almost always play it in DOSbox, and any later it likely uses new enough versions of directx. For sure there are titles that you won't get to work in XP, but chances are better than not that if it was a good game from that era there exists a GoG version that will run just fine.

If you have faster CPU (like haswell or even sandy bridge) then you can try PCem. It's a proper PC emulator. My haswell based XP machine can emulate a pentium MMX at 166mhz pretty well with a voodoo 2. The performance isn't great, but it will be good enough to play many of the games that don't work in XP.

As for the optimal GPU for XP games that's tough to answer. It's less about architecture and more about drivers, and it can get very specific. I don't see a good reason to believe an earlier card than the gtx 960 is more compatible in any meaningful way. Older GPUs also had bugs and bad patches/driver versions too, so it's not even like going older always equals more better. Just play the games you want to play and be willing to go to places like the pcgamingwiki or the archive on these forums if and when you ran into problems.

You will do fine. XP is an excellent platform for reto prc gaming.

Yeh Windows XP is by far the more nostalgic OS for me as I became a teenager not long after it was released. I enjoy tinkering with stuff (if at perhaps a slower learning pace than most) but I was a bit nervous about having my real hardware Retro Machine having an issue and being stuck with an OS I didn't use as a youngster.

I have a fairly high spec Laptop as my modern system (Ryzen 7, 16gb DDR4, 3070ti mobile) so I think PCem for DOS/Win9x will be the way for me. And yeh I know I could probably play most XP games on my modern machine but I wanna satisfy the nostalgia.

Saidian wrote on 2023-04-15, 22:59:

I will likely want to play some Win9x games however so just wondering if I should go for an older card for as smooth experience as possible (I know it won't be 100% perfect)?

All DX10 hardware level cards (Radeon 2900XT/GeForce 8800GTX and newer) are not capable of applying dithering in 16-bit color. So old Win9x era games, which are not aware of 32-bit color modes, will have banding issues.

Last best Nvidia card that can do 16-bit dithering is GeForce 7900GTX (or GeForce 7950GX2, if you want SLI).
Last best ATi card that can do 16-bit dithering is Radeon 1950XTX. Radeon X1xxx series can do very smooth dithering pattern when applying transparency anti-aliasing.