you never forget your first GPU the good memories you had and the bad
but all good things must come to an end I don't want to play with you anymore
or must they can an old GPU still game last summer we looked at the
eight-year-old 780 Ti shortly after NVIDIA announced that they would drop
driver support for it and found that it was still a pretty capable card and it's
far from the only GPU on the market that might have the grunt to play games but
is no longer receiving active support and with most modern games now targeting
the latest generation of consoles we set out to find out just how screwed over
you are if the last time you got a driver update people other than your
rear dance still used Facebook and to find out how screwed I would be if I
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at the link below we began our investigation by plopping these five
gpus onto our ryzen 5800x test bench and
picking 25 AAA titles from the last few
years and boy did this ever get interesting fast now some ground rules
when we call a title playable in this video we mean that it runs at 1080p on
the minimum settings available in game without any hacky tweaks with a stable
average frame rate of greater than 30 FPS yellow means that we were able to
launch the game but it walked more than ran and red means that it wouldn't
launch or it would crash okay we'll start by revisiting the 780 Ti that now
has both of its feet firmly in the driver support grave out of the 25 games
we tested it was able to play 16 of them without issue and except for do maternal
in dirt 5 all of the titles it couldn't run are from 2021 or later so even
though you aren't getting game-ready driver releases you're actually still in
a pretty good spot as long as you're not dying to play new hits like Halo
infinite Elden ring or God of War but what if we go older the GTX 480 came out
three years earlier in 2010 and it received its last driver in 2018 to
provide optimal gaming experience for Far Cry 5 and wow did this everything
age like fine milk out of the 25 games we tested it only managed five of them
all of which were either amongst the oldest in our suite or more basic
free-to-play and Esports titles now I
confess we included this one mostly out of morbid curiosity but next up is the
beastly power guzzling Radeon HD 6990
despite being released 11 years ago its paper specs indicate that it should have
about the same horsepower as a 1050 TI unfortunately
it's just as bad as Team Green worse actually since it can't really run
shadow of the Tomb Raider and draws almost 400 watts
just like life the older we get the less we can play right how about we turn our
games to something a little newer like our new cable ties at lttstore.com so
many pretty colors right and the R9 380x
a couple of months before NVIDIA pulled support for the 780 Ti AMD did the same
for its substantially newer 200 300 and
fury series gpus and this caused quite a
stir given that the 380x in particular was released just in late 2015. though
In fairness I can kind of see why AMD didn't want to support it since not a
lot of people bought it it was priced as an upper mid-range card and honestly for
the performance didn't make a ton of sense the mid-2010s were pretty rough
for poor old AMD but look at this
except for just three games this thing rides baby this card is only slightly
more performant than a 1050 TI just like
the HD 6990 so why has the game
compatibility done a 180 they're both from AMD well two main reasons one is
that the 6990 is a whack-ass card having
two gpus on the same PCB but the bigger
reason is feature support the 380x isn't
getting new drivers sure but it does support DirectX 12 which is a
requirement for many newer games or at least it kind of does thing is we
often talk about DirectX as if it's a single monolithic thing but really it's
more of a collection of apis that Microsoft developed way back in 1995 to
help with multimedia development especially game programming it includes
tools for developing for sound 2D applications text rendering maybe you've
heard of X input for controllers they're all part of DirectX and what's great
about these industry standard tools is that barring any unforeseen bugs a
compliant piece of Hardware running a compliant driver should be able to run a
compliant piece of software or game without special tweaks within this Suite
of apis then is direct 3D now obviously
a game that has great 3D Graphics but no
sound and no controller support wouldn't be a very good game so you can't say
that one API is more important than the rest but typically Microsoft does align
the naming of each version of DirectX with the accompanying version of direct
3D which is why our DirectX 12 380x
handled newer DirectX 12 games so well
at least to the best of its geriatric abilities but Linus you might
it says right here that the GTX 480 also
supports DirectX 12. why can't it play
all of my DirectX 12 games
here's the thing software development never really stops
and many of the apis within DirectX 12
have received significant updates since they launched and that includes direct
3D these updates are called feature levels and they're a good thing they
provide new tools and new functions for developers to use and Gamers to enjoy
but while the newer feature levels are inclusive of the older levels meaning
that your new GPU can almost certainly run your older games
sometimes a new feature level will contain forward-looking functionality
that requires new Hardware in order to be effectively utilized or even to run
at all this is where our soup gets a little murky direct 3D 11 which was
released with Windows 7 as part of DirectX 11 covers feature levels 9 1 to
12 1. direct 3D 12 came with Windows 10
as part of DirectX 12 and spans feature levels 11 0 to 12 2 and Beyond so you
see that how there's a little bit of overlap there that means that while the
480 is technically a DirectX 12 GPU it
only supports the most basic 11-0 feature level of direct 3D that means
anything that's been added in the four feature levels that have come since are
unsupported and making matters more complicated this card is so old it
doesn't actually have full support for the highest feature level of DirectX 11
either so in a nutshell that DirectX number
really doesn't tell you the whole story it's actually a GPU's compliance with
more modern feature levels that will make it compatible with newer games and
you can see this in our results for the GTX Titan black Wild games did run
better its compatibility was actually identical to the 780 Ti because it's
running the same physical Hardware architecture and the same drivers so any
game that requires a feature that your car doesn't support pretty much puts you
up poo creek without a paddle sort of if you're not happy with the drivers that
AMD has left you with for example you might say well why don't we just make
our own and that's exactly what the gaming community did these are pretty
cool but before we dive in they are not official drivers and we can't guarantee
that you won't encounter major issues nor can we personally certify that these
drivers are completely safe to download and install but from our point of view
it's your Hardware you can do what you want just like we do what we want an
emulate games the 100 legal way get
subscribed so you don't miss that video now AMD has gotten a pretty bad rap in
the past for releasing poorly optimized drivers especially for their older cards
for example the final drivers for the 380x play Halo infinite a title that the
card should theoretically support if DirectX compliant charts or anything to
go by but play it like this
yeah this history of bad drivers spurred on development by the community to
create drivers that better serve the hardware and respect the customers who
bought these cards and the ones we're going to use to fix this issue are
referred to as nimes drivers or ever
enemy amerenemy amereneme and my name
ambernim nimes drivers or amronim Zone
drivers and they work great look at that
we can play Halo infinite now in fact we
can play all of the games that were giving us issues on the 380x and
according to users of these modded drivers we should even expect big
improvements in performance for applications that use both opencl and
opengl for our part though we didn't find much difference in performance in
the games we tested but fellow YouTuber budget builds officials showed that the
10 year old AMD HD 7870 which is
actually based on a very similar architecture to this card can run games
like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Halo infinite rather well which is very cool
another great thing about these drivers is that the really easy to install no
red edits or editing INF files required and they don't seem to break any
anti-cheat software there are also other workarounds for DirectX 12 support using
dxvk or d3dvk you can use a compatibility layer to translate DirectX
12 API calls to Vulcan which this card
supports and is pretty much how proton works on Linux though in this case you'd
actually be doing it on Windows we decided against testing this since the
scope of this video had already crept pretty high but let us know if you've
had success or if you'd like to see a follow-up about that it should also be
noted that these drivers while impressive do have their limits they're
not going to turn your Hardware into a magic card that gets double the FPS and
all of a sudden supports DirectX Ray tracing or anything and we weren't able
to find any equivalent for NVIDIA users at least for now but for team red users
they have the potential to improve performance stability and especially
compatibility which is great so if you
need something to tide you over until price is settle you can rest assured
that until DirectX 12 ultimate features become standard you can expect pretty
solid compatibility for a couple of more years even with an older card and solid
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freshbooks.com Linus and get back more time to build a business you love check
out our video where we used hacked NVIDIA drivers to turn a mining GPU into
one that could game look at us go saving the world keeping one GPU out of a
landfill at a time good job Anthony