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.

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.

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.

Sombrero wrote on 2024-12-01, 10:51:

pilipali wrote on 2024-12-01, 10:16:

Any idea what might be the best WinXP drivers for GTX 285 and 580 in terms of compatibility with dx5-8 games?

Can't say are they the "best" but I had generally alright compatibility with DirectX 6-8 using Nvidia 260.99 driver with 9800 GTX+, so I suggest giving those a try with the GTX 285. I think compatibilty with older games started to go downhill with later drivers. Don't expect DX5-6 compatibility to be 100% though.

With the 580 you could just as well use last driver released for it (368.81), too new card for older more compatible drivers but still mostly fine with DirectX 7+ games.

Any idea, if 580 could be coerced to use the 259.xx/260.xx drivers that 480 still supported with an ini-mod?

On the subject of compatibility, it's not always so straightforward as it seems, sometimes newer hardware can paradoxically have better backwards compatibility than older.

I recently ran into an interesting situation where Trespasser (1998) runs flawlessly on a Titan X with 355.98 drivers in Direct3D Mode, but will not render at all on GeForce 6/7 GPU's with contemporary drivers. This was the case for me both "back in the day" (6800 GS and 7800 GS) and when i recently rebuilt an LGA 775 platform with a 7900 GTX.

For all NVidia GPUs from 4xx you need very late drivers like 355.98. 2xx drivers break games like Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2 (dx8). It is unrelated to instruction set, the problem is in driver and it remained there for a very long time. If you want great compatibility, use NVidia GTX 2xx with driver 197.77.

GTX 470/480 are supported by Forceware 197.17

pilipali wrote on Yesterday, 14:21:

Any idea, if 580 could be coerced to use the 259.xx/260.xx drivers that 480 still supported with an ini-mod?

As a rule: "If it is the same architecture, the answer to your question is yes".

4/5 series were the same architecture AFIK.