nvidia or ati for older games?

[Magic Carpet]

Battlefield 1942 era. Whose got the best drivers to handle old games without ridiculous amount of glitches?

Thanks.

 

[Oyeve]

I recall playing older games, like win95 games, Nvdia would always glitch on me. This was years and years ago so I can only speak from my experiences. I have, for the last 1-12 years or so, been an ATI guy.

 

[Anarchist420]

I don't know how old Battlefield 1942 is, but nvidia is much better with older games (although far from perfect). I don't think that AMD emulates all the legacy fixed functions yet and I know that Shadowman only supports 16 bit zbuffer on AMD, while you can choose 24 bit or 16 bit with an nvidia GPU.

 

[Magic Carpet]

I've recently played BF1942 with Geforce 6200 (280 drivers pci-e )and Radeon 9600 XT (10.2 drivers agp). The geforce card couldn't display the shadows properly, quite annoying watching a black box trailing my Tiger. The 9600 XT card on the other hand had absolutely perfect and vivid picture at 1680x1050. I was suprised for such an old card to produce such a quality picture. BF1942 is circa 2002 I believe.

Anyway, I am planning to get a new card that would occasionally be used for playing old games. I also suspect that as the gap widens, the support slowly drops so I might end up having two boxes and I'd rather not want to.

Thanks for your feedback, guys.

 

[GaiaHunter]

I from time to time play old games, like Mechwarrior 4, Starlancer, No one lives forever, SW Kotor, among others.

I can't talk about NVIDIA, but didn't have any problems with either a 4850 and a 6850 so far.

 

[Ancalagon44]

I know modern AMD drivers have problems with OpenGL rendering that Nvidia cards dont. Causes issues in eDuke32, and ports of the Quake/Doom engines that use OpenGL. I think there are workarounds for it though.

 

[Anarchist420]

I've recently played BF1942 with Geforce 6200 (280 drivers pci-e )and Radeon 9600 XT (10.2 drivers agp). The geforce card couldn't display the shadows properly, quite annoying watching a black box trailing my Tiger. The 9600 XT card on the other hand had absolutely perfect and vivid picture at 1680x1050. I was suprised for such an old card to produce such a quality picture. BF1942 is circa 2002 I believe.

Anyway, I am planning to get a new card that would occasionally be used for playing old games. I also suspect that as the gap widens, the support slowly drops so I might end up having two boxes and I'd rather not want to.

Thanks for your feedback, guys.

Pretty much anything can be done on DX11 GPUs via emulation, it's just that neither ATi nor nvidia have much will to make older games play 100% perfectly.

I believe that nvidia and AMD used to render shadows quite differently and you could always submit a bug report to nvidia.

I think within the next 5 years we'll probably see the 3dfx Voodoo5 emulated as a virtual device. If I'm not mistaken, the original Voodoo is already emulated, but I'm not interested because Voodoo Graphics didn't support AA.

 

[Magic Carpet]

Pretty much anything can be done on DX11 GPUs via emulation, it's just that neither ATi nor nvidia have much will to make older games play 100% perfectly.

The will, that's the thing. The thing is, it's easy to go back with an old driver for some ancient game's compatibility sake but then you would really be limited by the cards choice. As the newer cards aren't supported in older Detonator and vice-versa.

I believe that nvidia and AMD used to render shadows quite differently and you could always submit a bug report to nvidia.

Before I do that, I eager to add WinXP to my equation.

I think within the next 5 years we'll probably see the 3dfx Voodoo5 emulated as a virtual device. If I'm not mistaken, the original Voodoo is already emulated, but I'm not interested because Voodoo Graphics didn't support AA.

I hope, Mr Jensen is reading this too. Yeah, only V5 had Full Screen Anti Aliasing. Imagine an nVIDIA graphics card with Glide support. That would be WICKED SICK

 

[FalseChristian]

ATI GPUs don't render older OpenGL games like GLQuake or Quake2. That's why I only buy nVidia GPUs as they play these older games just wonderfully.

 

[Will Robinson]

I've recently played BF1942 with Geforce 6200 (280 drivers pci-e )and Radeon 9600 XT (10.2 drivers agp). The geforce card couldn't display the shadows properly, quite annoying watching a black box trailing my Tiger. The 9600 XT card on the other hand had absolutely perfect and vivid picture at 1680x1050. I was suprised for such an old card to produce such a quality picture. BF1942 is circa 2002 I believe.

Anyway, I am planning to get a new card that would occasionally be used for playing old games. I also suspect that as the gap widens, the support slowly drops so I might end up having two boxes and I'd rather not want to.

Thanks for your feedback, guys.

9600XT was a great card for that game.
AMD is the best choice for your requirements in my opinion.

 

[BFG10K]

Compatibility wise nVidia is pretty good, but their OpenGL performance (especially in source ports and Doom 3 based games) is very slow on Fermi products.

 

[Arkadrel]

I thought fermi broke alot of "older" games, due to new architecture having some issues doing things their older cards did (and Nvidia not doing drivers for old games, even TWIMTBP titles).

You guys remember FFXI? there was like a 180 page thread for it.
I think they actually managed to make drivers that made people able to play it "semi" okay. People couldnt understand why a old game like FFXI would running worse on their newer 480 cards, than their old old nvidia cards before ran just fine.

lots of those incidence like that took place, due to fermi changeing things up alot with newer architecture. Which is why im surprised people are saying to go nvidia for old games, I would say go AMD for that.

 

[Obsoleet]

Back in the day for older games, I would've said NV, hands down.

Today, times have changed yo. Fermi broke a lot of what made NV so good in my opinion. I'm not even that impressed with their driver support for newer games anymore..

You want AMD if you want to be covered for new AND old games.

 

[Magic Carpet]

Obsoleet & Arkadrel & BFG10K & Will Robinson & the rest.

That's kind of response I was looking for. Thank you. I knew there was a twist. Glad I didn't pick up a 560TI on sale yesterday ;-p

Due to TDP reasons I am ready to wait for the upcoming Radeon 7000 series as realistically I want to get a sub 120W card. Can't deal with active cooling anymore :biggrin:

 

[PingSpike]

If you asked me 5 years ago I would have said nvidia hands down. Both still have a ton of problems, but I'd say ATI is better now.

If you're looking for a double card solution to the problem, the x1x00 series and the xX00 series from ATI seems to have similar compatibility to the 9000 series card before them. And most importantly, they have PCI-E parts so you can actually install them in a modern motherboard. After that they broke a lot more things in my experience.

Again, none of them are perfect though. New driver updates break things in old games and since they're old they never get fixed. And it depends on what your desired applications are I suppose.

 

[Magic Carpet]

I have no desired... it's hard to circle some. I'd be occasionally playing games like Planescape Torment, Baldur's Gate all the way to KOTOR, No One Lives Forever and Far Cry 1/2. FPS and RPG mostly I reckon.

I have acquired a huge collection of games I never really had the time to play. This box I want to handle everything post DOS/Win9x basically.

And ideally some of the newer FPS/RPG games too. I just sold my HD 4650 card maybe I should have kept it instead. The upcoming 7000 series might have some issues with my games, hmm. The idea of having a 3rd computer is killing me and swapping cards around is rather annoying.

Thanks for your thoughts and advice ;-p

 

[PingSpike]

I have no desired... it's hard to circle some. I'd be occasionally playing games like Planescape Torment, Baldur's Gate all the way to KOTOR, No One Lives Forever and Far Cry 1/2. FPS and RPG mostly I reckon.

I have acquired a huge collection of games I never really had the time to play. This box I want to handle everything post DOS/Win9x basically.

And ideally some of the newer FPS/RPG games too. I just sold my HD 4650 card maybe I should have kept it instead. The upcoming 7000 series might have some issues with my games, hmm. The idea of having a 3rd computer is killing me and swapping cards around is rather annoying.

Thanks for your thoughts and advice ;-p

The best solution I came up with is to buy a motherboard with dual PCI-E slots and install the best "classic" card you can find in the secondary one. Then dual boot with an older OS. You disable the old card in device manager in your new one, and disable (or don't install drivers for) the new card in the older OS device manager. Then you can either use different monitor inputs or a monitor switch between the two and you have very little hassle.

I don't really understand why everyone says to install windows 9x though. I can't remember ever being unable to get a game to run on windows 2000 that was designed for 9x...and windows 9x was fucking horrible! I'd just as soon not play those games ever again rather than deal with a 9x install.

 

[sandorski]

The best solution I came up with is to buy a motherboard with dual PCI-E slots and install the best "classic" card you can find in the secondary one. Then dual boot with an older OS. You disable the old card in device manager in your new one, and disable (or don't install drivers for) the new card in the older OS device manager. Then you can either use different monitor inputs or a monitor switch between the two and you have very little hassle.

I don't really understand why everyone says to install windows 9x though. I can't remember ever being unable to get a game to run on windows 2000 that was designed for 9x...and windows 9x was fucking horrible! I'd just as soon not play those games ever again rather than deal with a 9x install.

Win 98SE was a good OS. I hardly had issues with it. Trying to run it with current Hardware is going to be quite the challenge though, simply because no one makes Win98 Drivers anymore and Win98 was finicky with RAM amounts.

 

[taltamir]

Battlefield 1942 era. Whose got the best drivers to handle old games without ridiculous amount of glitches?

Thanks.

neither. Get one of each and pray a lot. (a lot of games will not work on either)
Also look for game specific community made fixes.

Although if i had to choose... nvidia.

 

[Anarchist420]

I haven't tried AMD so I'll admit that nvidia may not be better overall since they suck too. Both pander to noobs too much (I heard that the reason nvidia removed force trilinear mipmapping from the drivers was because it conflicted with AF; instead they could've kept it and put a warning saying that it conflicted with AF).

I've never understood why they don't offer the option to force whatever back buffer formats are available in hardware. They could put options like that under a tab saying they're unsupported.

However, I don't think nvidia is going to clean up their drivers. I really wish intel had launched larrabee.

 

[Magic Carpet]

That G71 would have been perfect for older games, hadn't it decided not to boot one day. Notice how a more modern and arguably faster GTS 450, loses in this test. On a much slower processor, let alone.

 

[taltamir]

However, I don't think nvidia is going to clean up their drivers. I really wish intel had launched larrabee.

How would that help? Intel has horrible video drivers.

 

[Anarchist420]

That G71 would have been perfect for older games, hadn't it decided not to boot one day. Notice how a more modern and arguably faster GTS 450, loses in this test. On a much slower processor, let alone.

Actually not really because it didn't support Wbuffering.