5700 XT Video Cards Compatibility with Old Games

Boris_yo

Limp Gawd
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Hi,

Those who hav RX 5700 XT video cards, do you think they are compatible with old games?
I am talking about games that were release in a range of years 2000 - 2015.

If AMD works on latest drivers for DirectX 11 and 12 then what about Direct 7, 8, 9, 10
that old games work with? Will I have issues?

Thanks.
 
There's no reason why 5700 XT wouldn't be compatible with those APIs and past games, as much as any modern GPU, in any case.

I play a number of older games e.g. Unreal Tournament, Skyrim, HL2, past GTAs etc. on my VII (and 1080, 2080 before that) just fine, for example.
 
I get all my games from GOG, and read the forums a lot.

There is one consistent pattern of GPU failure, and that is Intel IGPs.

Even though they are now powerful enough to run old games. Those games were never intended to run with Intel IGPs and for whatever reason many trouble doing so.

I don't see any consistent issues with AMD/NVidia GPUs. Both seem much better at supporting older games.
 
Hi,

Those who hav RX 5700 XT video cards, do you think they are compatible with old games?
I am talking about games that were release in a range of years 2000 - 2015.

If AMD works on latest drivers for DirectX 11 and 12 then what about Direct 7, 8, 9, 10
that old games work with? Will I have issues?

Thanks.

I'm gonna have to go back and check some of my old pc games now - just an excuse to see older titles with 1000 fps maxed out!
 
Unfortunately, AMD cards have had problems with older games since around the HD 2000 series. Many old games from the mid to late 90s and early 2000s used what's called "immediate mode rendering" where the rendering engine proceduraly builds the frame to be rendered by blasting drawing commands to the GPU. Nothing is retained between frames, each frame is drawn from scratch and blown away for the next, which is extremely inefficient. Later "retained mode rendering" uses object lists to represent the scene to be rendered in the frame and only changes what is needed between frames being rendered, which is much more efficient since much of the data remains the same and doesn't have to be written from scratch.

Games back in the day used immediate mode rendering for a variety of reasons, most important being memory usage. Retained mode rendering can use a lot more memory, something of which video cards of the day didn't have ample supply of.

The Half-Life engine is a good example of this, it has very poor performance on Intel and AMD video cards spanning from around the HD 2000 series to today. I've tested at least one of every generation of AMD GPU (up to my latest RX 570) in a few immediate mode games like Half-Life and the result is always the same. AMD doesn't consider it a priority to optimize their modern GPUs to run ancient rendering modes properly. Intel is in the same boat, their IGPs aren't great to begin with, but they have an even worse time in immediate mode renderers.

On the other hand, every Nvidia card I've tested runs old games fine for whatever reason. My GTX 1070 TI has no issues in any of the old games I play.
 
Unfortunately, AMD cards have had problems with older games since around the HD 2000 series. Many old games from the mid to late 90s and early 2000s used what's called "immediate mode rendering" where the rendering engine proceduraly builds the frame to be rendered by blasting drawing commands to the GPU. Nothing is retained between frames, each frame is drawn from scratch and blown away for the next, which is extremely inefficient. Later "retained mode rendering" uses object lists to represent the scene to be rendered in the frame and only changes what is needed between frames being rendered, which is much more efficient since much of the data remains the same and doesn't have to be written from scratch.

Games back in the day used immediate mode rendering for a variety of reasons, most important being memory usage. Retained mode rendering can use a lot more memory, something of which video cards of the day didn't have ample supply of.

The Half-Life engine is a good example of this, it has very poor performance on Intel and AMD video cards spanning from around the HD 2000 series to today. I've tested at least one of every generation of AMD GPU (up to my latest RX 570) in a few immediate mode games like Half-Life and the result is always the same. AMD doesn't consider it a priority to optimize their modern GPUs to run ancient rendering modes properly. Intel is in the same boat, their IGPs aren't great to begin with, but they have an even worse time in immediate mode renderers.

On the other hand, every Nvidia card I've tested runs old games fine for whatever reason. My GTX 1070 TI has no issues in any of the old games I play.

Interesting, I didn't know about "immediate mode rendering".

Compatibility with old games (moreso the OpenGL ones) is actually the reason I strayed away from AMD/ATI on my main desktop originally (I think it was the HD38xx gen).

I can understand that they don't see supporting old games as a priority with how far ahead nvidia is right now, but they lost a customer that they're unlikely to get back anytime soon (I know I'm not the only one but I imagine there's not that many of us). There's always going to be some old titles I love going back to and I hate having to fiddle around the internet for hours to get them to work semi-decently at best (plus it's not just performance but also glitches/crashes at times). In theory the raw power of recent cards should be sufficient to make up for it but in practice I have found that to be false far too many times - especially if you're shooting for a 120+ stable framerate on a modern display.
 
I wonder if 5700 XT is able to run Diablo 1, Diablo 2, Command & Conquer, Red Alert, Icewind Dale, Baldur's Gate, Fallout 1, Fallout 2, Fallout Tactics, Railoroad Tycoon 2, Tropico and such kind of games.
 
Hi,

Those who hav RX 5700 XT video cards, do you think they are compatible with old games?
I am talking about games that were release in a range of years 2000 - 2015.

If AMD works on latest drivers for DirectX 11 and 12 then what about Direct 7, 8, 9, 10
that old games work with? Will I have issues?

Thanks.
Well, I tried NFS SE last week and it works like a charm on my GTX1070Ti. Granted it runs on Dosbox, but still.

I'll be downloading the NFS series I found on an abandonware site. Its got up to Hot Pursuit 2.

https://www.myabandonware.com/

if anyone is interested.
 
I wonder if 5700 XT is able to run Diablo 1, Diablo 2, Command & Conquer, Red Alert, Icewind Dale, Baldur's Gate, Fallout 1, Fallout 2, Fallout Tactics, Railoroad Tycoon 2, Tropico and such kind of games.

I would be very surprised if it could not.
 
I'd be more worried about Windows causing problems with old games than the GPU.
 
Well, I tried NFS SE last week and it works like a charm on my GTX1070Ti. Granted it runs on Dosbox, but still.

I'll be downloading the NFS series I found on an abandonware site. Its got up to Hot Pursuit 2.

<redacted>

if anyone is interested.
I'd remove that link if I were you.

Otherwise the original DOS version of NFS didn't have a hardware rendering mode. The Windows version runs on DirectX 2 and will definitely not run on any modern video card, as every version of DirectX prior to 7 are incompatible with today's hardware and operating systems. DOSBox renders the point moot either way since it is wrapping the game in emulation, not running it natively in hardware.
 
I'd remove that link if I were you.

Otherwise the original DOS version of NFS didn't have a hardware rendering mode. The Windows version runs on DirectX 2 and will definitely not run on any modern video card, as every version of DirectX prior to 7 are incompatible with today's hardware and operating systems. DOSBox renders the point moot either way since it is wrapping the game in emulation, not running it natively in hardware.


Wrong example, the point is that I've played dozens of vintage DX/OGL games from the late 90s and have little trouble making them work. Bigest issue was 16 bit installers but nowadays its easy to find 64bit compatible installers.
 
I wonder if 5700 XT is able to run Diablo 1, Diablo 2, Command & Conquer, Red Alert, Icewind Dale, Baldur's Gate, Fallout 1, Fallout 2, Fallout Tactics, Railoroad Tycoon 2, Tropico and such kind of games.

Old isometric games have a really bad time on modern hardware. I spent hours trying to get various isometric Command and Conquer games working on Windows 7 64 bit and wasn't able to. I gave up and just built up an old Pentium 4 rig to play those games.
 
I wonder if 5700 XT is able to run Diablo 1, Diablo 2, Command & Conquer, Red Alert, Icewind Dale, Baldur's Gate, Fallout 1, Fallout 2, Fallout Tactics, Railoroad Tycoon 2, Tropico and such kind of games.


Last time I played those games I had a 7870(yeap ages ago but gcn architecture) and had no real issue running them, I don't remember them needing direct 3d but worst case I recommend grabbing a glide wrapper for the really old ones since directed 3d was inferior anyways and glide had better support.

I know that fallout from gog still runs on modern hardware because around once a year I do some playthrough.
 
I wonder if 5700 XT is able to run Diablo 1, Diablo 2, Command & Conquer, Red Alert, Icewind Dale, Baldur's Gate, Fallout 1, Fallout 2, Fallout Tactics, Railoroad Tycoon 2, Tropico and such kind of games.

Most of the games you've mentioned are 2D-only titles leveraging DirectDraw. Any compatibility issues you ran into would probably apply to Windows 10 generally and not to the 5700(XT) specifically. Check compatibility databases if you run into problems, but the Radeon isn't likely to be a bad choice for those.
 
Problematic games are more often older 3D games using Dx9 or older, or old version of OpenGL. Fallout 3, and Neverwinter Nights are a couple that I have seen problems with.
 
Problematic games are more often older 3D games using Dx9 or older, or old version of OpenGL. Fallout 3, and Neverwinter Nights are a couple that I have seen problems with.
Windows 10 shipped with several issues involving DirectX 9 and 10, but they have been mostly fixed as far as I know. If I were to guess I think Microsoft was planning to completely deprecate every version prior to 11 until people got very loud about their old games being broken. There are other issues inherent with newer hardware, such as not being compliant with older API versions or even lacking features that those versions depended on. I don't think there is any hardware out there today that supports pixel shader versions prior to 3_0 natively, which can cause rendering issues particularly in DirectX 8.
 
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