Reply 20 of 26, by alexanrs
wrote:Without knowing specifically the amount of performance needed to max out fps with no dips & full effects, my rough guide would be to triple the era's top CPU & GPU performance. Practically every CPU can scale down to piv 2.0 speed so no problem with setting to slow speed if needed. If you're like everyone else and skip a vista rig, then you're looking at covering 01 to 08. So, whatever is 3x the speed of an i7 965 & gtx280. CPUs in the timeline below are the fastest for a given year.
Can you even triple an i7 965 with XP-compatible hardware without a REALLY high end Sandy Bridge-E or multi-processor Xeon? And also... by the end of XP era 60fps@1080p was already a thing, and you don't need go faster than that. Oh, and XP-era games aren't optimized for quad-core processors, a dual-core with hyperthreading is more than enough to extract performance
Also, ignoring Vista or not back then, unless you are doing things just for nostalgia you are better off with a Win7 machine for Vista-era games, as that will allow you to use DirextX 10 renderers for games that have those. A XP machine doesn't really have to cover those. And please do remember that no performance jump happened since the Core2Duo era.