As a starting point, neither. Keep going older until the next step can't do what you want to do.

I don't think there would be much practical difference between 7xx versus 9xx series. Depending on the system, it will likely be CPU bound. My own GTX 980Ti doesn't break a sweat running XP era games.

And Far Cry works fine in my experience with that 980 Ti. The only issue I had was having to limit the frame rate, otherwise it tries to max out FPS at the main menu (hundreds of frames a second).

If you dual boot with a more modern OS or want to keep that option open for the future, I would go with the 9XX series.

Yeah I'll just go 9xx, thanks. I think I was expecting a similar situation like with 98 and the later cards losing table fog and palleted textures but for XP it doesn't seem as bad (no doubt there are some edge cases here and there). I also need to look into which version of XP to use, initially I was just going to go with XP SP3 but then I remember some discussion on people preferring SP2 or even earlier. Will have to experiment.

900 series: trade compatibility with overkill FPS in XP, outdone by the 10 series in Vista.

vvbee wrote on 2025-10-03, 18:37:

As a starting point, neither. Keep going older until the next step can't do what you want to do.

In your thread about Windows XP GPUs didn't you find the Radeon HD 7750 to be a good balance of compatibility and performance going way back to pre-XP games? If that's still the case, I'd think that any GCN 1st gen card would offer a similar level of compatibility, and probably be a good alternative to Kepler or Maxwell based cards. An HD 7970 performs pretty close to the GTX 770 in a lot of cases, so could be a great option with few compromises.

Of course, compatibility should still be evaluated on a game by game basis. If he can get a GTX 970, GTX 770 or HD 7970 for cheap and it ends up being able to run everything he wants to run without any problems, then that's the ideal card for his system.

Also depends what kind of monitor and CPU he is running. Maxing out at 1080P 60Hz and using a Pentium D will make all of these rather pointlessly overpowered.

EDIT: Forgot about Physx. I feel like there was a way to use a Radeon with an Nvidia GPU dedicated to Physx, but that may have been limited to a specific driver version or required some hacks.

Is a GTX 980 Ti overkill for Windows XP? I believe yes. But if I'm dual booting with Windows 7 64-Bit, I'm thrilled to have the extra horsepower.

Before I acquired a 980 Ti, I was perfectly happy with an AMD r9 280X, and in most cases, even an R9 270.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-10-04, 01:46:

In your thread about Windows XP GPUs didn't you find the Radeon HD 7750 to be a good balance of compatibility and performance going way back to pre-XP games? If that's still the case, I'd think that any GCN 1st gen card would offer a similar level of compatibility, and probably be a good alternative to Kepler or Maxwell based cards. An HD 7970 performs pretty close to the GTX 770 in a lot of cases, so could be a great option with few compromises.

I don't think all GCN 1 cards would have equal compatibility, but dual booting with two GPUs is the way to go here.

The more overkill a GPU is, the less hard it will have to work, and hopefully that means it will be quieter and last longer. Thats of course assuming its not running at an uncapped framerate. I know some people dont like vsync due to added latency, but I really don't like seeing the screen tearing. Also some games (GTA III for instance) really don't like running at high frame rate.

I use a 980TI in my XP computer. I'll install Far Cry and see what happens, I've got Forceware version 368.81 installed btw.

specs:
Intel Core i7-4790K
Asus Z97M-Plus
16GB 2400 MHZ DDR3 (2x8GB)
Geforce GTX980TI 6GB
Realtek Audio (got the onboard optical out working)
240GB Kingston sata SSD (XP)
250GB WD sata SSD (Vista)

Revamped my XP/Vista machine

EDIT - I have installed Far Cry along with the official 1.4 patch and it seems to work fine. Visuals are good, I've set it to max everything and have v-sync turned on. 1152x864 resolution.

EDIT 2 - Took me a second to find the screenshot button and where it saves screenshots! Attached the one I took.

Compare a system running the 980 Ti in XP and Vista/7 to a system running the HD 7750 in XP and the GTX 1070 in Vista/7. The latter system will have much broader compatibility in older DX and better FPS and efficiency in later DX, also strong support for SSAA across the entire DX range. What's left for the 980 system, lower idle power consumption?

I haven't used my XP machine lately so while I was on it I installed Crysis as well, I'd say it's running just as good as Far Cry with maxed out settings and same resolution.

vvbee wrote on 2025-10-04, 01:20:

900 series: trade compatibility with overkill FPS in XP, outdone by the 10 series in Vista.

Are you sure Vista has GTX 10-series support ?
I don't see a official driver, but maybe you can force Win7 driver onto it ?

There is only one way to decide Kepler vs. Maxwell in this case :
Do you actually need Maxwell to play games at detail setting you want ?
If you need pure speed - Maxwell, if you need a bit more compatibility and can go by with slower GPU - Kepler.

I wonder if there is compatibility advantage to really old main driver (for example 306.81) for early Kepler vs. later, and more DX11 purpose one on WinXP...

agent_x007 wrote on 2025-10-04, 10:29:

Are you sure Vista has GTX 10-series support ?
I don't see a official driver, but maybe you can force Win7 driver onto it ?

https://retrosystemsrevival.blogspot.com/2020 … an-x-vista.html
https://msfn.org/board/topic/176707-nvidia-dr … stall-on-vista/

vvbee wrote on 2025-10-04, 17:11:

https://retrosystemsrevival.blogspot.com/2020 … an-x-vista.html
https://msfn.org/board/topic/176707-nvidia-dr … stall-on-vista/

Oh, nice !
RIP Titan Xp owners though 😁

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-10-04, 01:46:

Also depends what kind of monitor and CPU he is running. Maxing out at 1080P 60Hz and using a Pentium D will make all of these rather pointlessly overpowered.

I'll be using a Phenom II X6 1100T (I got this really cheap, initially I wanted a X4 but those cost more by comparison) with a AM3+ board (ASUS M5A97). I fully expect the GPU to be bottlenecked regardless by this CPU and the MB is only PCIe 2.0, however I've seen a lot of these later GPUs going really cheap (780 and 980 for like £20-£30). Between these two generations is there really any difference regarding compatibility? Something like GTX 2xx I can understand but obviously haven't really looked into this too much. Regardless of the bottleneck though I would hope these later cards will be able to handle Physx a bit better but not sure.

RetroPCCupboard wrote on 2025-10-04, 06:27:

The more overkill a GPU is, the less hard it will have to work, and hopefully that means it will be quieter and last longer. Thats of course assuming its not running at an uncapped framerate. I know some people dont like vsync due to added latency, but I really don't like seeing the screen tearing. Also some games (GTA III for instance) really don't like running at high frame rate.

This is another nice benefit, yes.

pete8475 wrote on 2025-10-04, 06:34:

specs: Intel Core i7-4790K Asus Z97M-Plus 16GB 2400 MHZ DDR3 (2x8GB) Geforce GTX980TI 6GB Realtek Audio (got the onboard optical […]
Show full quote

specs:
Intel Core i7-4790K
Asus Z97M-Plus
16GB 2400 MHZ DDR3 (2x8GB)
Geforce GTX980TI 6GB
Realtek Audio (got the onboard optical out working)
240GB Kingston sata SSD (XP)
250GB WD sata SSD (Vista)

Nice, the 4790K will leave my Phenom II in the dust but I was more interested in the compatibility, this is good to see.

Of course, having multiple GPUs would be the best option and getting an earlier ATI card might be worth it for me for certain games, for example games using ATI TruForm 🤣

Maxwell supports few of the DX versions that could run on XP so on this path multiple GPUs is what you'll end up doing.

vvbee wrote on Yesterday, 06:30:

Maxwell supports few of the DX versions that could run on XP so on this path multiple GPUs is what you'll end up doing.

Couple of things to note here. Windows XP shipped with DirectX 8.1 at launch, and DirectX 9 was released one year later. Therefore, most WinXP era games are either DX8 or DX9. Those DirectX versions will generally work just fine on GTX 9xx cards.

Now, if one wants to play DirectX 7 (or older) titles under WinXP, that will likely be more problematic on the aforementioned cards. But such games are from the Win9x era, and they were coded with very different hardware in mind. Personally, I would dual boot WinXP with Win7 (or Win10) and play potentially troublesome pre-2001 games on that OS using a modern wrapper like dgVoodoo2. But to each their own.

Not unusual for DX9 games to support Windows 98 and then Vista came along, the idea of an exclusive XP era is a red herring in this context. To play DX7 what you actually need is to select hardware that supports it, and you'll come around to this one way or another.