First post, by bytesaber
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Does it make any sense to purposely downgrade to a Geforce 4 card to try and see what life was like before DirectX 9 showed up? Geforce 4 is listed as a DirectX 8.0 supported chip. So if I wanted to taste life before DirectX 9.0c, is it just a simple matter of installing the older card, install Windows XP, and don't upgrade it beyond DirectX 8.1 and try a game? And if so, what is a DirectX 8.0 - 8.1 specific game? What works of art are out there that cherished 8.0 - 8.1 ?
I found 2 other threads with valuable information.
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How does one determine what DirectX version a game was designed for? Games don't typically list "this was designed by developers using DirectX 8.0". Instead it usually lists minimum supported cards. Which could just be "sure it will still work on an older card, you just won't see everything we programmed the game to do." But they still don't say which DirectX version it's really intended for. It seems to leave speculation open. Is there a solid way to determine a game's D3D platform version?
Would getting an old DirectX 8.0 game running on newer Windows, with a newer GPU, show me the same thing? Is it true that newer DirectX versions emulate older version instruction, and if so, "might look and feel different" because it's kinda being emulated?
Is there a way to test DX specific effects? Such as some kind of 3DMark that demonstrates "now that you have an 8.0 capable card, let me you show you this cool fog effect your DX7 card never could."
Could DirectX 8.0 effects be shown on DirectX 7 or DirectX 6 cards but just perform really bad? Meaning... you can still see newer D3D version "stuff" but just not actually enjoy performance?
I'm not sure if these questions really make sense. I welcome being told that I'm way off base or just being silly. In general, I'm trying to see if there is a nice hard edge of visual experience to directly look at and enjoy exploring for different levels of DirectX gaming. Or if it's just always a grey area of general acceptance we never really could corner.