God Of Gaming wrote on 2024-12-24, 07:24:

However if you have both a win98 retro gaming PC and a winXP retro gaming PC, probably makes more sense to install those dx5-6 games on the win98 pc, and not downgrade the winXP PC to an older slower graphics card just to gain compatibility for them?

i never want to revisit win9x ever again.
nothing but bad memories of random crashing and stuff

to me it seems like a modern pc with win11 + dgvoodoo2 might just be the best pc for win98 era games

pilipali wrote on 2024-12-28, 14:28:

i never want to revisit win9x ever again.
nothing but bad memories of random crashing and stuff

to me it seems like a modern pc with win11 + dgvoodoo2 might just be the best pc for win98 era games

I think the situation is different now. With a PC in the 90s, you probably installed a whole load of things, used early buggy drivers, and maybe tweaked hardware often and updated the OS frequently. These days you can choose a known good combination of hardware and drivers, install Service Pack 3, and then enjoy your games. I have mostly had trouble-free experience with Win9x OS stability in my Retro builds.

RetroPCCupboard wrote on 2024-12-28, 14:55:

install Service Pack 3

No.

If anything, this so called "unofficial service pack for Win98" will cause a slew of problems while solving nothing. Do a forum search on that and see what comes up.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-12-28, 15:01:

RetroPCCupboard wrote on 2024-12-28, 14:55:

install Service Pack 3

No.

If anything, this so called "unofficial service pack for Win98" will cause a slew of problems while solving nothing. Do a forum search on that and see what comes up.

Fair enough. I have only noticed one issue, which is that folders default to a blank Web view. Easy enough to fix that. But, yeah, use an official service pack if you prefer

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2024-12-24, 20:15:

GTX 285 renders Crysis below 30 fps in some heavy scenes.

GTX 580 lightning from MSI renders Crysis under 30 FPS on the snow level and the last level at 1080 max settings including AA! GtX 780TI is the first card I personally played with that renders Crysis at 60FPS average at 1080p maxed out on those levels!

nd22 wrote on 2025-01-14, 11:20:

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2024-12-24, 20:15:

GTX 285 renders Crysis below 30 fps in some heavy scenes.

GTX 580 lightning from MSI renders Crysis under 30 FPS on the snow level and the last level at 1080 max settings including AA! GtX 780TI is the first card I personally played with that renders Crysis at 60FPS average at 1080p maxed out on those levels!

I plan to play Crysis on my 980 Ti, 3770k, X-Fi build under Windows 7. Hopefully at 1440p. I've not played Crysis beyond the first 30 mins or so into the game. Are games that can use DirectX 10 really considered XP games? It's fun to test them, just to see how it does, but I think it can't be the best way to play the game.

For me an XP build should be able to cope with games like Elder Scrolls Oblivion, Halflife 2, F.E.A.R, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Quake 4, DOOM3, Age of Empires III, Prince of Persia (Sands of Time, Warrior within and Two Thrones), UT 2004, FarCry, Sims 2.... etc.

Maybe those games are not on everyone's lists. But for me, those are games I played in the past and want to again.

Ideally I also want to play Metal Gear Solid 2 Substance, but that's a very fussy game. I think I've only managed to get it to work on Geforce 4600... Possibly the 6800 as well, but can't remember.

RetroPCCupboard wrote on 2025-01-14, 12:20:

I plan to play Crysis on my 980 Ti, 3770k, X-Fi build under Windows 7. Hopefully at 1440p. I've not played Crysis beyond the f […]
Show full quote

I plan to play Crysis on my 980 Ti, 3770k, X-Fi build under Windows 7. Hopefully at 1440p. I've not played Crysis beyond the first 30 mins or so into the game. Are games that can use DirectX 10 really considered XP games? It's fun to test them, just to see how it does, but I think it can't be the best way to play the game.

For me an XP build should be able to cope with games like Elder Scrolls Oblivion, Halflife 2, F.E.A.R, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Quake 4, DOOM3, Age of Empires III, Prince of Persia (Sands of Time, Warrior within and Two Thrones), UT 2004, FarCry, Sims 2.... etc.

Maybe those games are not on everyone's lists. But for me, those are games I played in the past and want to again.

Ideally I also want to play Metal Gear Solid 2 Substance, but that's a very fussy game. I think I've only managed to get it to work on Geforce 4600... Possibly the 6800 as well, but can't remember.

Using a i5-4690 (non-k) and GTX 960 I was able to get 100 FPS in Crysis pretty consistently at 1080p high settings. Although Max settings in theory only work in Vista and higher it's pretty easy to enable them - but I only learned that after finishing the game. You can also enable hardware EAX using a pretty simple tweak to the ini file. The only exception is the Ascension level, where even on that system it chugged into the 30s - I'd strongly recommend using the patch for that level.

It doesn't break a sweat in any of those other games, and yours definitely won't. I don't know about Metal Gear 2, kind of curious to try it on my 7900 GS.

ubertrout wrote on 2025-01-15, 20:13:

You can also enable hardware EAX using a pretty simple tweak to the ini file.

How exactly? Last I was looking into this it was using some form of software eax over fmod and I couldnt find a way to switch to proper directsound3d

God Of Gaming wrote on 2025-01-17, 11:46:

How exactly? Last I was looking into this it was using some form of software eax over fmod and I couldnt find a way to switch to proper directsound3d

I assume its this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Crysis/comments/1evh … inxp/?rdt=61792

I haven't tried though.

I found out GeForce GTX 480 has issues when playing DirectX 8.1 games such as Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2 on Athlon 64 3400+. There is a major FPS drop over GeForce 9800 GT using the same driver version (260.89) making the game unplayable. There are also graphical glitches like billinear filtering missing in some parts of the road. The filtering issue gets fixed in 306.81 but performance issue does not.

If you would like to cover DirectX 8.1 games accurately as well then stay away from the new cards like GTX 480 and later.

AlexZ wrote on 2025-02-28, 13:07:

I found out GeForce GTX 480 has issues when playing DirectX 8.1 games such as Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2 on Athlon 64 3400+. There is a major FPS drop over GeForce 9800 GT using the same driver version (260.89) making the game unplayable. There are also graphical glitches like billinear filtering missing in some parts of the road. The filtering issue gets fixed in 306.81 but performance issue does not.

I just tried NFSHP2 on my i5 3570K + GTX 970 rig using 355.98 drivers under WinXP. On that setup, I'm getting 300+ FPS at 1600x1200 with all in-game setting maxed and V-Sync turned off. With V-Sync turned on and 8xSGSSAA forced via Nvidia Profile Inspector, I get a locked 60 FPS and less than 30% GPU utilization.

If you would like to cover DirectX 8.1 games accurately as well then stay away from the new cards like GTX 480 and later.

I don't think it's good to generalize like that based on one problematic game. I've tried several other DirectX 8.1 titles (e.g. Unreal 2, WarCraft 3 and Morrowind) on the system mentioned above, and they all worked properly.

There is definitely some kind of emulation going on on GTX 480 as opposed to 9800 GT. Maybe because your GPU and CPU is much faster it isn't noticable.

Enabling the "very high" graphics options for Crysis through modified config files on Windows XP (dx 9) was a very simple task. The game is actually running better on dx 9 than dx 10 mode and the image quality is literally indistinguishable between them. To be honest modifying the configs seems mandatory for at least a decade now (with the hardware options being able to max it out being easily available) cause you can tweak the game to look even better than the "very high" settings.

Also a very important detail for anybody interested: enabling Transparency Anti Aliasing through Nvidia control panel or Nvidia Inspector together with the in-game msaa makes the game look phenomenal even by today's standards. This way you can eliminate all the Aliasing that the ample vegetation of the game has together with msaa that doesn't fix this issue. Mind you that this is a pretty taxing procedure though, so you really need a gtx 780, Titan, 780 ti, Titan Black, 970, 980, 980 ti, Titan X to do that and maintain consistent high framerate.

With my Gtx 970 and i5-3570k (using modified -beyond very high- configs and 8xMsaa in conjunction with 8xTrssaa) i get 57 fps in the gpu benchmark and almost 62 fps in the cpu benchmark.

Dimos wrote on 2025-03-19, 11:26:

Enabling the "very high" graphics options for Crysis through modified config files on Windows XP (dx 9) was a very simple task. The game is actually running better on dx 9 than dx 10 mode and the image quality is literally indistinguishable between them. To be honest modifying the configs seems mandatory for at least a decade now (with the hardware options being able to max it out being easily available) cause you can tweak the game to look even better than the "very high" settings.

Also a very important detail for anybody interested: enabling Transparency Anti Aliasing through Nvidia control panel or Nvidia Inspector together with the in-game msaa makes the game look phenomenal even by today's standards. This way you can eliminate all the Aliasing that the ample vegetation of the game has together with msaa that doesn't fix this issue. Mind you that this is a pretty taxing procedure though, so you really need a gtx 780, Titan, 780 ti, Titan Black, 970, 980, 980 ti, Titan X to do that and maintain consistent high framerate.

With my Gtx 970 and i5-3570k (using modified -beyond very high- configs and 8xMsaa in conjunction with 8xTrssaa) i get 57 fps in the gpu benchmark and almost 62 fps in the cpu benchmark.

Curious to try this! I only have a 960 in mine but it's currently on a CRT which tops out at 1280x1024 so it might be doable.

At that resolution it's definitely doable. For a brief time period (a couple of months actually), i had an Asus Strix 960 installed in my rig and with exactly the same settings, with 4xmsaa and 8xTrssaa at 1920x1080, the same benchmarks gave me around 54 fps. So in your case you might hit almost 60fps.

I also wonder if anyone here has a Quadro M6000. I know it works with the usual driver inf mod as the other Maxwell gpus and from a brief look at some gaming benchmarks from that time it seems that it performs (almost) on par with the Titan X and that was with the Quadro drivers, which of course are not optimized for gaming, rather than workstation work, which after all is the purpose of the Quadro series of cards. It would be very interesting to learn if anyone has ever tried this card with XP for the purpose of also gaming with it and what was the outcome.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HIzFAfK17G4

I don't see why xp would be much different if the drivers load.

It wouldn't. The Quadro is expected to be more than capable in gaming situations, although not oriented towards that, the real question is how it performs compared to the 980ti and the Titan X and also how it would perform with the modded Geforce drivers compared to the (workstation oriented) Quadro drivers. I 've read somewhere that if you tried to install (original, unmodded) Geforce drivers with a Quadro card then it is automatically recognised as a Quadro one and instead the Quadro drivers get installed somehow. But since we are talking about modded drivers with XP, then the Geforce (gaming oriented) drivers should be installed. As i said before i remember some (not very extensive) gaming benchmarks that showed an M6000 Quadro performing (almost) equally with the Titan X. That was with the Quadro drivers of course. So with the Geforce ones, what would be the outcome? If anybody here has/had an M6000 and used it for gaming purposes on XP, then i 'd really like to give us some info.

Per the specs, the Quadro 6000 should be just about the same. I'm basing this off of techpowerup.

However, my Titan X is reporting clocks of I think 1372 1392 for the GPU during benching while techpowerup says that the max boost clock is 1089.

The boost clock that gets reported for each retail board of a gpu is the minimum, guaranteed, frequency that the specific board will reach when the boost clock is activated. Depending on thermals, silicon lottery etc. that frequency could be a little above that or much higher.