I believe a GTX 780 Ti is your best bet to acquire one, a Titan card based on the same architecture also qualifies, but a lot harder to come by.

GTX 900 series can also work, but for XP you need modified drivers.

GTX 900 series can also work, but for XP you need modified drivers.

For GM204 and GM200-based GPU's, i.e. 970 and up, then this is true. I believe the GTX 960 and lower are part of the drivers INF files to begin with. I did hear that there is a single XP driver that has the GTX 970 and 980 device ID's already in the INF file, but if not then its literally a couple of lines to be added. I'd expect Kepler to be more stable and compatible with XP anyway, as there are older drivers to choose from.

Maxwell is the latest GPU architecture that is supported in XP. You will need to perform a simple INF mode to get the higher end cards working. 980ti is pretty fast for DX11.

Have a dual boot xp/7 running: intel 4790k and a gtx 980ti. Fast in both and fully compatible.

Nvme was a hassle so I went with a sata ssd instead, it's plenty fast.

I ended up getting a Sapphire Dual-X Radeon HD 7870 for $15 locally for this project. That leaves me with XP drivers ranging from 12.2/12.3 to 14.4, I had heard that 12.4 is one of the better drivers to use for GCN so that's probably what I'm going to start with. As for Windows 7, it probably doesn't matter all that much especially because there's many more drivers going up to 2021 for Windows 7/8/10 and if the latest one is no good, then there's nearly 10 years of Windows 7 drivers made for GCN 1.

Best for GCN would be iCafe driver that dropped all TeraScale legacy GPUs.

I take it that's 22.1.1 iCafe for Windows 7? I just went and downloaded that, and also the iCafe driver for XP dated 2015-09-30. Not sure how the latter will compare to 12.4 and 14.4 for XP, but it's worth a shot I guess.

UPDATE 2026-08-01: I built my Windows 7 system a couple months ago and have been using it on occasion. It has been very nice, though Radeon driver 17.4.4 was not the best experience due to the way fullscreen was configured not working correctly - and also in Vegas Pro 11, MainConcept AVC rendering would fail entirely due to broken legacy OpenCL implementations. So I rolled back to driver 14.9 just so I'd have working legacy OpenCL whenever I do render videos with this system. Whatever games I do play on this system should work just as well as they did on 17.4.4.

Edit, 2026-08-03: I tried driver 14.9, no dice. There could potentially be something wrong with my 7870, because i never had THIS MANY problems with any other hardware on Vegas Pro 11 - either that or it's just typical AMD being AMD.

Edit, 2026-08-05: the 7870 did nothing wrong, because I'm having the exact same problems with the GTX 760. In fact, the 760 is a less pleasant experience overall due to how the GPU audio drivers are and the fact the HDMI port just doesn't work on mine (have to bypass it using a DP or DVI adapter). I'm blaming it all on Vegas Pro 11's outdated code. Though at this point this post has pretty much strayed away from GPU's so oops, guess I'm done with this one.

As for XP, I never ended up installing it on this system. Whenever I do multi-boots, there always ends up being unintentional favoritism to one part of the config. On my 775i65G, I have a dual-boot between 98SE and XP - yet I boot into XP 99% of the time I fire that system up. I guess it's just peace of mind that I can throw XP on this one if that's what I want. I've also started collecting more GPU's, so if this 7870 goes the way of the dodo I have a GTX 760 I can switch to.