Driver for Geforce FX 5950 for Windows 7 32 bit

[Xaero_toast]

Does anyone know where to find a windows 7 driver for a geforce FX 5950? It seems nVidia dropped official support for the FX series of cards before Windows 7. I can get a Vista driver to install, but the performance is abysmal.

I have in the past gotten cards to run on drivers after support had been dropped with a simple edit to the inf file, but comparing a current, and a last supported inf file, it seems the structure of the inf file has changed slightly.


Suggestions to replace the card will not be helpful. This is an old pc, and the entire project is only (marginally) worthwhile if it can be made to work with the parts on hand.

 

[Armenius]

The Vista driver might work on W7. The last version of the driver to support the FX series on Vista is 96.85, available in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors.

 

[GotNoRice]

The Vista driver might work on W7.

I can get a Vista driver to install, but the performance is abysmal.

I've used the Vista drivers in Windows 7 in the past with success but it mostly involved using FX5200 series cards and the only purpose they served was to be able to enable Aero on the desktop.

You said performance was abysmal, but are you sure that is the drivers and not the card itself?

The card is a DirectX9 card, but keep in mind that DirectX9 itself lasted a long time and was fairly fragmented.

The Geforce FX series only barely supported DirectX 9. It was widely known that if you had an FX card, and the game you were running had a way to force DirectX 8.1 instead of 9, you could get an incredible performance boost.

It only supported Shader Model 2.0A. The final iteration of DirectX9 used Shader Model 3.0. I have a Radeon X800XT-PE setup in a classic rig I have setup. It only supports Shader Model 2.0B. It's amazing how limiting that is. Even in games that claim to support DirectX9, many only work with Shader Model 3.0 cards now. This even includes games like World of Warcraft, which were actually playable using those old cards until the cut-off.

So I'm just wondering, what exactly are your expectations for this card? What games are you trying to run where you say the performance is abysmal. Well it should be abysmal for the most part, with a card that old, unless you're running a game that is 10+ years old.

 

[Xaero_toast]

You said performance was abysmal, but are you sure that is the drivers and not the card itself?

Everything performed well on XP. 7 has been a recent thing.

By "abysmal", I mean benching Quake III at 20 fps, 1280x1024 32 bit color. Under XP, it was well over 100 (150-ish FPS). Dropping color depth, and resolution to 640x480 got it up to around 45 or 50 FPS. Still way less than the card is capable.

 

[Stoly]

Everything performed well on XP. 7 has been a recent thing.

By "abysmal", I mean benching Quake III at 20 fps, 1280x1024 32 bit color. Under XP, it was well over 100 (150-ish FPS). Dropping color depth, and resolution to 640x480 got it up to around 45 or 50 FPS. Still way less than the card is capable.

I'd try other games. IIRC Quake 3 had performance issues with windows 7, I think running xp compatibility helped.

I no longer have my FX5900 but I did try it on windows 7 x64 and performance was on par with XP.

 

[Brackle]

Hmmm isnt that a DX9 video card? (might be DX8 cant remember)

I think Vista/7 need a card that supports DX10?

Of course I am probably wrong.

 

[Stoly]

Technically its DX9, but it only supports SM2.0