Quadro M6000 has tighter power budget and also it's a pain to tweak the clocks and power, because all Quadro Maxwell cards are locked.
I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.
Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2025-02-28, 14:37: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.
I did extensive testing on Athlon 64 socket 754 and cards newer than GeForce GTX 2xx don't work properly in Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2. There is a major performance drop in FPS. This may not be noticable on newer CPU, perhaps due to instruction set optimization in NVidia driver, not available on socket 754. It doesn't matter what driver is used.
I will verify in a few months whether this problem also affects Phenom X4 which will get a better GPU. Phenom has L3 cache unlike dual core CPUs from that era like Athlon 64 X2.
For Athlon 64 socket 754 the best cards are GeForce 9800 GT or GeForce 2xx. It doesn't matter much as the CPU is too weak to benefit from 2xx. One of few games where it benefits is FIFA 2007, during game introduction with view on the whole stadium. In general, it leads to extreme variance in FPS when in CPU easy scenes it can render many FPS, but then falling sharply in CPU heavy scenes when CPU gets overloaded. 2xx will provide no benefit in CPU heavy games.
Usage of PCIe GPU in Athlon 64 socket 754 extends its usability by about 2 years over a similar Athlon XP with an AGP card. Late Windows XP era absolutely needs a fast dual core CPU for any racing or FPS game.
Pentium III 900E, ECS P6BXT-A+, 384MB RAM, GeForce FX 5600 128MB, Voodoo 2 12MB, Yamaha SM718 ISA
Athlon 64 3400+, Gigabyte GA-K8NE, 2GB RAM, GeForce GTX 260 896MB, Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS
Phenom II X6 1100, Asus 990FX, 32GB RAM, GeForce GTX 980 Ti
AlexZ wrote on 2025-06-10, 19:59:I did extensive testing on Athlon 64 socket 754 and cards newer than GeForce GTX 2xx don't work properly in Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2. There is a major performance drop in FPS. This may not be noticable on newer CPU, perhaps due to instruction set optimization in NVidia driver, not available on socket 754. It doesn't matter what driver is used.
It's possible that this is indeed related to the drivers expecting missing CPU instructions, or it could be some platform specific issue.
As mentioned before, that game ran just fine on my i5-3570K + GTX 970 with Nvidia drivers 355.98. I didn't test it with my new GTX 980 Ti yet, but there shouldn't be any difference.
