it did not work at all in hardware 3d mode on any dx5 game I tried on XP. dx6 was fine but it was also fine on my titian x with 3xx drivers. the only thing I edited was adding the link... good lord the trolls here are bad, blocked.

old school gamer man wrote on 2025-08-01, 17:28:

it did not work at all in hardware 3d mode on any dx5 game I tried on XP. dx6 was fine but it was also fine on my titian x with 3xx drivers. the only thing I edited was adding the link... good lord the trolls here are bad, blocked.

Even cards of the correct era that supported those early versions of Direct3D when they were new would have various rendering issues in different games. Glide was often the better choice on something that just worked correctly.

SScorpio wrote on 2025-08-01, 17:54:

old school gamer man wrote on 2025-08-01, 17:28:

it did not work at all in hardware 3d mode on any dx5 game I tried on XP. dx6 was fine but it was also fine on my titian x with 3xx drivers. the only thing I edited was adding the link... good lord the trolls here are bad, blocked.

Even cards of the correct era that supported those early versions of Direct3D when they were new would have various rendering issues in different games. Glide was often the better choice on something that just worked correctly.

indeed. dx5 and back was a mess.

old school gamer man wrote on 2025-08-01, 17:28:

the only thing I edited was adding the link... good lord the trolls here are bad, blocked.

Just for clarity's sake he wrote using GTX 580 and I happened to saw it before he edited it out. Which he is now for some genuinely baffling reason hiding, calling me a troll and blocking me.

Alrighty then 👍

Driver 260.99 can be installed for the NVS 300 with an INF modification. Out of the 26 games I tested with the officially supported 280.26, four didn't work. With 260.99, three of the four work, don't know about the other 22.

Even with the older driver several older games have menu issues and you still need workarounds for 640 x 480. Peak broad DX compatibility for Nvidia looks to be somewhere in the 7000-9000 series range, ignoring dithering which I don't care about. But at that point the Radeons of the ~2010s are a better option.

On undervolting. The 5770 at default 1125 mV core with an undervolted Phenom II in 3DMark 2000, 109 W system draw with vsync and 125 W without vsync. The Radeon undervolted to 1065 mV which is about the lowest without issues in games, 105 W and 120 W. So 5% undervolting headroom which gave a 3% reduction in system draw. Underclocking the core to 600 MHz allowed for 900 mV, 98 W with vsync on, for an absolute best case scenario of 10% reduction in system draw from undervolting and underclocking the card. The 7750 at default clocks and voltage, 91 W with vsync on, i.e. still 7% better than the maximally undevolted and underclocked 5770, which itself was an efficient card.

So by default a less efficient card will remain less efficient whether you undervolt it. Of course I only tested in 3DMark 2000 and with this one card, you can run your own tests and return with the results.

vvbee wrote on 2025-08-03, 16:30:

So by default a less efficient card will remain less efficient whether you undervolt it. Of course I only tested in 3DMark 2000 and with this one card, you can run your own tests and return with the results.

That makes sense for 3Dmark 2000, which isn't using much computational power on the card (ie. no pixel shaders). Results would be more dramatic if you ran something that was heavy on shaders. On XP, I think you can run GPU Caps Viewer 1.44, which has eg. OpenGL 2.1 Shadertoy Rhodium

Another two video cards that is good for performance but not steller:

HD7770 is 80W - had this in use in family's computer. Decent performance on 1280X1024 monitor.
GTX750 is 55W had this in a computer at work, good enough as I don't play games anyway.
GTX960 is 120W

Back in the day was HD3650 but not as good since I had to cut back on few settings.

Cheers,

Has anyone actually tried running DX6 and DX7 games on DX11+ era Radeon cards? Discussing efficiency first before knowing if the games even work seems a bit premature.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-08-03, 18:07:

Has anyone actually tried running DX6 and DX7 games on DX11+ era Radeon cards? Discussing efficiency first before knowing if the games even work seems a bit premature.

Sure, problems are rather exceptional.

bakemono wrote on 2025-08-03, 17:02:

vvbee wrote on 2025-08-03, 16:30:

So by default a less efficient card will remain less efficient whether you undervolt it. Of course I only tested in 3DMark 2000 and with this one card, you can run your own tests and return with the results.

That makes sense for 3Dmark 2000, which isn't using much computational power on the card (ie. no pixel shaders). Results would be more dramatic if you ran something that was heavy on shaders. On XP, I think you can run GPU Caps Viewer 1.44, which has eg. OpenGL 2.1 Shadertoy Rhodium

They wouldn't be more dramatic, they'd be about the 5% as a best case scenario since that's how much you're throttling the power. You need to reduce system draw by about 20% for the 5770 to match the baseline of the 7750, and that can't happen with these numbers.

vvbee wrote on 2025-08-03, 16:30:

On undervolting. The 5770 at default 1125 mV core with an undervolted Phenom II in 3DMark 2000, 109 W system draw with vsync and 125 W without vsync.

If your goal is the best possible power efficiency, then I suggest using different platform. For example Ivy Bridge Core i3 or Core i5 will be faster and much less power hungry. Compatibility with XP is still good and price is low.

Just interested in GPU efficiency. For minimal total draw you could probably set up a low power Linux box and run most of DX6-9 through Wine with integrated graphics.

Older games I've seen that consistently have issues on newer Radeons in XP, probably extrapolatable to other similar games:

DX7: Gothic 2 (low FPS)
DX7: Operation Flashpoint (low FPS)
DX7: F1 2000 (heavy glitches or low FPS)
DX6: Sports Car GT (heavy glitches or low FPS)
DX5: Monster Truck Madness 2 (heavy glitches)
DX5?: Castrol Honda Superbike World Champions (heavy glitches)

Nvidia driver 260.99 can run the first five better but has its own problems.

If the question is purely performance per watt, then I think the search pretty much ends at some kind of Maxwell based nvidia card depending on what performance level you want. Either a 750 Ti for lowest power consumption with a practical amount of overkill performance, or a GTX 950 to 980 for comparable efficiency with a higher performance ceiling. Or even a K620, GTX 745 or K1200 if you need a small system that uses as little power as possible (the K620 only pulls about 20W in real world testing).

AMD was far behind in efficiency when Maxwell was available, so unless there is a massive improvement in compatibility using a Radeon for early D3D titles (which just seems unlikely since they tended to have less resources to extend support for older games or GPUs) I don't see how they could really be in the running for most efficient.

This thread has a lot of overlap with the discussion in this one from last year where a lot of testing and research was done with regarding to small, efficient GPUs being crammed into small PCs.

In this thread Maxwell has been excluded for poor backwards compatibility, though people will keep recommending them out of habit. Nvidia cards compatible with driver 260.99 from late 2010 are more promising than the later ones. Probably need to go back a couple more years for the really compatible ones, but then DX9 performance suffers.

vvbee wrote on 2025-08-04, 03:25:

In this thread Maxwell has been excluded for poor backwards compatibility, though people will keep recommending them out of habit. Nvidia cards compatible with driver 260.99 from late 2010 are more promising than the later ones. Probably need to go back a couple more years for the really compatible ones, but then DX9 performance suffers.

Oh, I see. Sorry, I have skimmed over the thread but I missed Maxwell being ruled out completely. If compatibility is the primary issue (since it overrules efficiency), have you posted a list of the games you're testing for compatibility? I would be curious to test some myself if I ever get around to putting together my old 2500K PC specifically for high end XP GPU testing.

Also, it is surprising to me that the HD7750 works well all the way back to DX6 games when Maxwell cards do not. AMD\ATI and Nvidia certainly have odd track records of software compatibility over the years.

I am honestly surprised that anything made after ~2004 from either camp works well for DX5 and DX6 games. I remember starting to have issues with some games even from 2000-2001 once I moved to a 6800 GT, and once the DX10 era came there were even more issues with games from that time period. I don't think I tried running too many pre-DX7 games beyond that point though without building a dedicated retro PC.

Efficiency is the primary issue and DX6-9 is what needs to run. Nvidia were always second in legacy support, in that sense it's more interesting to find compatible Nvidias.

Late to the party, but Phil has a video related to this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlGsffEoWOM

NVIDIA GTX 750 Ti was his solution...

nfraser01 wrote on 2025-08-04, 16:07:

Late to the party, but Phil has a video related to this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlGsffEoWOM

NVIDIA GTX 750 Ti was his solution...

Some viewer comments at the top there:

I used a 750ti for my own XP build but I then switched to a Radeon 5870. While the 750 was incredibly good at it, it suffers from compatibility issue with older window 98 games.

Can confirm. Currently, I'm using GT 750ti for my XP machine, it's very fast and powerful for DirectX 9 games but compatibility with older DirectX 8 and earlier games is very bad. Some games work fine, but some can't render at all. I also tried GT 730 with various drivers - all the same result.

This topic starts to feel similar to that other topic years ago, when trying to argue that Creative SoundBlaster AWE is not the best solution in certain use cases...
Edit: typo.