Hello,

I was shopping around for a new GPU to replace my getting-old GTX 260 in my Phenom II X4 -system. I play somewhat graphics-intensive games on my 1080p display so a gpu has to have a bit of "oomph" to it. I don't need to game BF 3 on "ultra" settings - or BF 3 at all, and my budget is around 250 EUR.

Ideally I wanted to go for Radeon 7850. But, I've read on Newegg.com a bunch of people having bad experiences with current Catalyst drivers. That put me off of Radeons somewhat. I get stressed and fed up if I have to battle with my computer and would prefer not to do it. Some amounts of fiddling I can take, though, but not too much.

Also, I still have a bunch of older games that I want to play on Win XP of my dual-boot Vista/XP system. Might even be some DX 8 games there. I'm no expert but I have a feeling new Radeons don't work well with older games. Am I correct? I appreciate the power 7850 has but I'd loath not to be able to play the backlog of oldies I have. My GTX 260 has served me well in this regard so eventually I ended up buying GTX 560 Ti from a guy off the internets for 180 EUR. Not as powerful a card as R7850 but I'm guessing I can be more confident for compatibility in old games?

Sorry late to this I seem to have missed it.

Anyway if your still wondering I'll try to answer the question.

For retro gaming there's a lot to concider:

Generally speaking and in "Theory" if a developer stuck to the Windows SDK when they made the game the game should be able to be played on any Windows OS no matter how many OS's down the road the game is going to be played on.

Now "the truth" is an awful lot of developers ignore the SDK. If the game was developed in the pre-XP era this could be a real problem,. This fact is the sole reason for the SFC system that was first shown in Windows Mil. The most common thing players remember about that OS was that their AOL would not run. That'd because Microsoft had to do something about developers writing their own .dlls- which BTW was strictly against the SDK. You cannot have a stable OS if developers replaced that OS's files- and this was the reason in windows 98 and older you had to do anual reinstalls---you were actually replacing the original .dlls -- and AOL basically threw out all windows networking components and installed their own. This was what was happening in the games industry as well. So a game replaced a .dll and ran and then it broke another game depending on that dll.

When Mil released it used a somewhat modified approach that windows 2000 had. In Windows 2000 it would allow the game/app to install (so setup would not fail) but it noted what dlls were replaced and after install put the originals back in so it wouldn't break other programs. When the user ran the program it would put those pirate dlls in for it alone- and remove them after the program shut down.

In Windows Mil it did basically the same thing but it did not store and switch out the dlls. It simply let the program install- then removed the bad dlls and replaced them with the originals--so suddenly AOL, and the slew of badly dev'd games would not work anymore. This spurred some lawsuits- but in the end MS won of course- and so did the user- who no longer had to wrestle with reinstalling windows regularly or wonder what new thing was stomping on a program that suddenly stopped working.

If your old retro game was one of these games- it's not gonna run on XP, Vista or Win7 because those dlls it's trying to replace are going to be automatically changed back-and it matters not if you have an ATI or Nvidea card.

Comically some devs- like battlefront- go back and put the correct dlls in- charge their customers for their screwup for the patch-and all is well again when their old badly dev'd game now runs. Other times you can do a google search and find which dlls are at fault and manually put one in (usually regarding directX)

And somethings the replaced dlls work for some and not for others depending if they have an ATI or Nvidea. one game in particular is the original MTW. If your on a Nvidea it's not gonna play. You have somewhat of a chance with ATI. That is because Nvidea used a bad hardware trick to garner framesrates startting with their 8800's series- that basically made their GPUs no longer fully compliant with the SDK. So again this happens even in the hardware world.

On the flip  side however Nvidea has an open policy on drivers whereas ATI's is closed. Go on 3d guru and your see hundreds of tweaked Nvidea drivers for various situations-- whereas there's not much that one can do with ATI until they themselves address it. This affects games but it really affects linux as well- if you want to game on it stick with Nvidea.

But if you want hardware that is actually engineered to be SDK compliant ATI is the choice.

A lot of people hold onto Windows XP for compatability but the truth is XP has the SFC system and will not allow games to install rough dlls. anymore than Windows 7 and to boot windows XP doesn't do what Windows 7 does in compatability mode. XP uses what we called shims for that. if the shim is there it'll work. If not no. Windows 7 on the other hand uses the actual OS kernel- you still have the dll issue and the hardware issue but you are getting rthat kernel- that should make it easier on win7 than on XP to retro game.

This is IF your not on 64bit. If you listen to advice about 8 gigs of ram and jumped to 64 bit for it you just opened another can of worms. go back to 32bit and use 4gig and put your money on GPU memory. Overall I'd recommend Nvidea- although i know ATI is better engineered it's closed drivers are a problem.

You have a simuliar problem with sound codex's. In the ever pursuit to be dumbass's be it itunes or whoever these clowns insist on replacing codex's that really have no need to be replaced that can make systems unstable. They want you tied in to their system- and you pay the price. I'm not a fan of prioritory companies and your never see me with an ipod, ipad or i-anything. I remember the headaches I had at work. And I absolutely loved it when AOL customers, or some guy who's game would not run. "well sir, I'd recommend calling the clowns and informing them your onto them and would like to cancel your AOL account. Let me recommend another provider"

Microsoft gets and bad rap and gets blamed for most iof these by the general population. But i spent years dealing with stuff and the truth is it's morons who learned to code but never learned to read SDKs.