The state of AMD vs Nvidia in XP, and legacy games?

[sheh]

Am I correct in assuming Nvidia are currently a better choice when it comes to XP support? Both in current and previous generation cards.

What about old games, all the way to Win9x era. Is there any advantage?

 

[Leyawiin]

As far as drivers go for the card in general Nvidia is supporting XP right up to current. AMD's newest driver is from back in April. With the games, I doubt it really matters if they're old - most bug fixes have been taken care of long ago.

 

[sheh]

But I wonder how it works in practice. Maybe AMD perfected their XP support already, while Nvidia is buggy. Are there any features missing in either's XP drivers compared with the NT6 ones?

For legacy, I don't know. I always had the impression Nvidia were better, but it's more of a vague impression.

 

[dguy6789]

It is unlikely that there is any difference.

 

[digitaldurandal]

I wonder what kind of support we can get for Windows 3.1

 

[Leyawiin]

Maybe AMD perfected their XP support already, while Nvidia is buggy.

lol - no

 

[SPBHM]

I remember AMD taking a while to release a GCN driver for XP, not sure how it is now, but when I was using my HD 5000 card they started removing some stuff, like they had OpenCL working and removed it at some point,

as for 9x era games it varies from game to game I think, I remember having trouble to play MGS with a Geforce 8 and it worked fine with my Radeon, but by now there is probably some patch solving the problem.

last time I used XP I was trying to play some old emulators, but the directdraw performance from my Radeon was horrible on windows 8, and it worked beautifully using XP...

 

[skipsneeky2]

Only big thing i have noticed on xp over 7/8.1 on the most recent of Nvidia drivers is that Xp doesn't allow you to force maximum performance.The power option as a whole is missing in Xp.

This was a few months back when my cousin and a buddy of mine ran both a 9500gt and a gtx650 and both ran Xp.I ran Xp for a brief time last year on my 770 and the experience was the same for me as well.

 

[ilkhan]

The answer to this question is get off the teenage operating system.

 

[Racan]

The answer to this question is get off the teenage operating system.

Yep, especially now when you have GOG and Steam releasing legacy games for modern OSes.

 

[CP5670]

There are good reasons to keep an XP install for old games even if it's not your main OS. Even some of the GoG games work better in XP due the DirectDraw 30fps bug in 8.1.

For the 970/980, you have to add the cards manually to the Nvidia driver's inf file, but they work fine (the original driver release didn't require even this). The XP drivers might not be maintained as well as the 7/8.1 drivers and do have some bugs that have been fixed long ago in the latter, but they do the job for the games that require XP. I don't have any recent experience with AMD's XP drivers.

 

[SlickR12345]

It should be about the same. Don't expect big support lasting through 2015 though. Both companies will probably be focusing a lot on Windows 10.

Again both companies should have pretty much the same support and stability.

 

[Bateluer]

This should help you out.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16832416776

 

[sheh]

Thanks.

This setup isn't for D3D 10+ games, but for older stuff from a few years ago and all the way back to the late 90s and early 2000s. Whether I move that computer to NT6 or not, I'd still appreciate decent XP and legacy games support.

GoG releases are sometimes an option, but in other cases I prefer the original releases. I definitely avoid if I can Steam releases of old games, assuming no improvements.

Any good articles to read on that Win8 DDraw 30fps bug?

 

[CP5670]

Not sure about articles, but it affects many games from the DX5-7 era. The game gets locked at 30fps or 15fps. There are several custom ddraw.dlls out there to fix this, mostly meant for specific games. None of them work everywhere, and some games don't work with any of them, but I try them all when I encounter a broken game. There is Aqrit's ddraw, ddhack, WineD3D (older versions only), DXGL and cnc-ddraw. Running the game in a window or borderless window also gets around it, but most old games can't do that properly.

Note that quite a few GoG releases have this problem too. I don't think they really test the games on 8.1.

 

[sheh]

Win80 is okay?

 

[DaveSimmons]

For some 90s games that are 2D or early 3D, a virtual machine running XP or 98 might work.

I should try that with Blood 2. The GoG version is a crash-fest running on Windows 7,