Crazy that Crysis is almost 20 years old but still looks very nice even for todays standards.

Love your videos and humor! Still have my Vista disk lol

Like! 7:00 the visual improvements in DX10 are minimal compared to DX9 but the frame rate is 2.5x lower than in DX9. Clearly DX9 is the way to go.

I really enjoy your videos, but this one was a bit better than what you usually make, NICE !!! 👍 (that nostalgia is also kicking in, ..... may be time to un-dust my good'ol q9550 and gtx 460) 😅

this is a great video, really :) a lot of the games for most people with DX9 and DX10 render paths will not notice much difference. the options (and the game must be developed for it) are typically in particles and lighting effects. DX10 in theory should have a better "Fire" effect in far cry 2 and perform better when rendering spreading fire and lots of smoke particles. DX9 doesn't handle dense particle effects very well (see CSGO smoke...). for the FEAR sudden drop in GPU utilization, the JupiterEX engine has a bug related to an outdated DirectInput library file. you can probably find an updated one and put it into the directory to replace the game's original image to make the fix. JupiterEX (and the Jupiter engine in general) is known to have this sort of issue and similar fix for another game might help too. Gotham City Impostors had a similar crippling issue until patched. GDDR4 was so rare to find in a video card and never was around long enough to really be as widespread as the cheaper GDDR3 or the more performant and power efficient (and later on much faster) GDDR5. an interesting DX10 comparison might be comparing GDDR3 vs GDDR4 on the 2600 XT if you can find that for cheap since it was available with both memory technologies.

I remember the early direct x10 period and the strange performance issues it would bring up. I always thought DX10 games looked very muddy or something as well! preferred the bright dx9 look. Another fun video btw keep up the good work!

Keep it up 🔥🔥🔥

Great job. Windows Vista was Microsoft's testing ground. Some games worked best with a clean system, others with service pack 2, and others were developed for service pack 1. This system was the work of a mad scientist/programmer.

14:51 Yeah, STALKER is in my top 5 games of all time. I liked FEAR as well, although 2 was even better. 3 was terrible though... different developer. Monolith also made Condemned: Criminal Origins which is also great. 15:19 Haha, when you mentioned Starforce it only reinforced my suspicions. Another great video, thanks!

I gotta say a Vista rig never occured to me before, I have bad memories of trying to play games on vista with my crappy Celeron laptop. Then again I do remember running it on my desktop and it being quite adaquate at some stage. I've got a GTX 260 in my XP rig, if I manage tro find more RAM and maybe a Phenom x6 I'll think about installing Vista 64 on it.

I was a teenager when DX10 OS and hardware came out and that period was terrible. Like you noticed: performance side was awful even on good or high end hardware but honestly games gameplay were even worst. I can make exceptions for few title but most of them were console porting with terrible controls and dumb gameplay.

12:30 Wait...How does Most Wanted looks so colorful?! Is it because of the ATI graphics card? 🤔Usually the PC version looks kinda faded and has a ugly yellow filter.

Not being able to control the fan speed on ATI > X700 is usually due to flashed a different BIOS from another model of the same chip. I did this many times, but saved the original BIOS and returned to it. Find the right one on the Techpowerup GPU BIOS database. This was the case even on newer cards that I flashed, like RX Vega, RX 550, RX 570, RX 580 and RX 6600. Back in the day, I had an HD3850 where I created the same problem. On the second issue: FPS dropping and not recovering, I suspect that the GPU reached a higher temperature and could not spin the fans faster (problem above ^), then entered a lower power state as a means of protection. Locking the fanspeed at 25% would have this effect after using the card with an uncapped FPS.

I need to build me one. I got a P35 Platinum, an intel E8500 and a few ATi cards of the time.

Also the bug in fear 1 is the direct input fps bug.

Optical drives not working... yeah, what's the deal with that? I never had any issues with them pre-Windows XP and then all of a sudden I was buying one every few months. None of mine lasted more than a year and I bought them all new. Several were high end. I have well over a dozen broken optical drives, all of which were lightly used. The only internal ones that do anything at all are the BD-ROM drives but they won't read Blu-ray, only CD and DVD. Curiously, my external USB ones work fine. I do wonder if it was due to Starforce DRM, because I always had a Starforce protected game (LOMAC) installed during those years. Abandoning optical media was one of the best moments for me. That said, inserting my first CD into my 56X drive back in the Windows 95 days was something special. It was Apache for DOS.

THE BUBBLES! I noticed that 32bit Vista acts very differently than 64bit Vista, I had a lot of problems with 32bit version, bu 64bit runs totaly fine and stable on my C2Q setup. I for example had problems with DX10 games in 32bit Vista, while in 64bit, everything works fine. I think for the best compatibility (some games can't be even installed on 64bit OS) it's the best put Win 7 32bit there on C2D era computer or have XP installed on second HDD fore games which didn't work well even in Win 7. BTW, look at how Crysis looked like in 2007 and it was possible to play it on Pentium 4 with some 256MB GPU like 7600GT. Today games want 8 or even more GB VRAM and 6+ core CPUs, you need GPU for 1000 eur, your computer eats like 700W and games don't look THAT better than 2007 Crysis, I am really sad because of that, everything went wrong after like 2015, optimalisation pretty much doesn't exist now. I never actually played Crysis in DX10, I have to fix it. But I remember another problem and it was the case even later with DX11 - in DX10, mouse felt more delayed than in DX9 with the same FPS, I am noticing this for a long time, modern games have terrible input lag even when you have 60 FPS, I need like 120 FPS in modern games to get rid of that input lag feeling. How is it possible that old games didn't have such crazy input lag even in low FPS? I remember one of the first DX11 games (Stalker COP) and it was unplayable for me in DX11 because of input lag, I think DX12 made it slightly better, but still not good as in old DX9 games, I would say Vulcan games feel better. 12:08 - You are playing on ATI card, what do you expect? Those GPUs literally didn't work at all with some versions of drivers, but I am not saying nvidia was better back in the day. 😀 I built my first good computer in 2008, it was C2D E8200 + 9800GTX and it was totaly superior with XP and later with Win 7, I had no problems, everything worked perfectly.

Q6600 + HD3870 same combo i used for years later upgrade to HD4850. Battlefield bad company 2 was game of choice on that machine. But Borderlands 1, Bioshock 1, COD4, Dead Space , Mass Effect, Oblivion all played very well. But no Vista oh no, stayed far far away from Vista

Huh i remember reading it supported direct x 10 fine, if not 10.1, maybe that was some custom made patch too get 10,1 & 10 in windows xp. I know Vista does DX11 at the most so something like a HD 5770 could be put into this system just fine.

Good pick of subject ! I also want to build a worst-of-all-time pc based on windows vista. I had a socket 775 motherboard with a pentium d, the windows vista and the notorious radeon hd2900 series. But unfortunately all the hd2900pro I received were dead on arrival :(

It wasn't until the HD48XX that I returned to the Radeon. HD38XX wasn't even designed to be a halo product. it was a cut down version of the HD2900, Hence it's the RV670. It's an R600 with a simpler memory bus.

Am I able to install a working web browser on vista? All I have on a fresh install is IE but it does not work

Try a nvidia GPU, i remember having vista in my 939 X2 with 7800 GTX playing WoW...good days!!

DX10 promised better performance compared to DX9 the same way DX12 promises better performance than DX11 :))

Very nice build, but yes…it’s not powerful enough for DX10 SM 4.0 gaming. I was planning to build i7 870 , 4 gig and GTX 285 for Vista. This was available just before 7 lunched. But a lot of my retro pc pal’s said that it also could not be powerful enough

So much better than the Vista setup I've got...though the Radeon 9550 I now have did end up being targeted as an entry level Vista GPU (the drivers show it as the X1050). And I expect the WEI score to be higher with it than even an FX 5600XT or FX 5700LE.

What needs to be understood is that in 2007 20 FPS was still considered playable

How does Crysis run on that??

But what if you add the GPU in a case? Won't that make the system quieter? Mayhaps you could then run the GPU at 100% and not wake up the dead from their sleep. Lemme know, thanks.

ati/amd drivers are known to be buggy all thw damn time no matter what era gpu it is

I skipped Vista, running XP X64 until Windows 7 released. I did try it out but the gaming performance in demanding games was much worse. This was early in its release though.

1:25 are u a..... ghost???

Why Q6600 when you could have gotten a 6 or 7 series chipset, a 2nd or 3rd gen core i5, a gtx 960 or ati equivalent, 8 or 16gb ddr3 1600, and still be fully supported by XP and (ew) Vista?

Yep, you had too high expectations. Back in 2007, nobody played games in 1600×1200. Most people still used 1024×768, a few went up to 1028×1024. Hardware and displays were not capable enough for 1600×1200 and FullHD.

Sorry but how in da heck is a 15% performance gain from cpu overclocking small? I'm a bit confused there. 😄 If there is a 15% gain from a basic OC then surely your card has more gpu performace left in the tank untapped due to cpu clockspeed bottleneck. There is a reasone why the wolfdales were favorites still for gaming during this period. Because of it 3ghz+ clockspeed and potential for 4ghz overclocking and two cause games at this period still can't fully utlize quad core processors. Besides, 25% oc on a Q6600? Those are rookie numbers geek. Get yourself a big ass air cooler slap it in there and go for at least 3.5. You got a decent board for overclocking. This era you are getting back into, these were the glory days of overclocking. It would be a crime not to dedicate a section for overclocking in your nostalgia vids.