Can you game WITHOUT driver updates?

[@kwizzeh]

I've always gave props to the ATI/Radeon community keeping older cards alive with their custom/modified drivers even though I'm firmly on team Green now.

[@sphygo]

I’m moving to green on my next card. I’ve had an rx 480 for about 6 years now and although it still works and temps are weirdly low even under full load, I’ve had problems with the driver software many times over 2 different windows installs and tons of updates, weird fan speed issues, and crashing in games that are running fine at 60+ fps. Maybe I’m unlucky, maybe I have a bad card. Either way, I’m trying out the other side soon.

[@Azzysdesignworks]

I was the same, until ATI for no reason ended support of older DX11 cards in Windows 10. We ended up having to replace several workstation cards which did fine for what they did up until the drivers locked them out of anything but basic Windows drivers, which limited screen resolution.

[@TdrSld]

@@sphygo I have a sapphire Nitro + rx480 and up an till both OEM's kill crossfire/SLI I was running 2 of them in my rig in crossfire.They ran great for me and in crossfire landed just a hair above a 1070 for cheaper (I got both cards on sale at different times haha). I was looking to pick up a 6900xt when they dropped but we all know how that turned out. :( Lets hope the next gen at the end of this year will be able to meet demand!!

[@DailyCorvid]

It's a shame that there are teams. I have both companies stuff, and critically assess the products as if I had made them myself. So brands don't matter and there are only two teams for me. We have to just be objective or we will overpay and accept flaws we needn't accept. Us, and them. We are gamers, they are not. We don't use the colours of the companies we are gonna criticise or how can we be objective? That is upon them painting colours on their goods. Criticising what they paint those colours upon is for us rather than saying "only green stuff is good"!

[@marsovac]

I am using Nimez drivers to gain the legacy support for SAM/Rebar on R3600+RX Vega 64 on B450, which is a completely unsupported configuration out of the box. A hassle to configure, BIOS (Above 4G decoding ON, ReBar ON, Legacy CSM OFF) + driver console window fiddling to enable legacy ReBar/Sam, but it works great in Forza H 5, giving me a bump from 1080 with a mixture of High/Ultra to 1440p with the same settings, maintaining >60 fps. Won't be as good in most other games, but anyhow great stuff from the community, and props to AMD for being open with drivers. At least somebody will maintain older GPU if AMD does not have the resources or will to do it. Ending official support is not such a big deal if there is somebody that will maintain it unofficially.

[@LordMaliscence]

Nvidia: *ends driver support for 700 series top-of-the-line card* Also Nvidia: *rebrands a GT430 and sells it as a GT730 for over $100 in 2022*

[@markthestark1]

And its already outdated after few months people cant even play some esports titles

[@LordMaliscence]

because we all know GT430 is a more capable gaming card than the 780Ti

[@CarterPersall]

Me: *Laughs in 750 ti which still has support*

[@DailyCorvid]

They should be forced legally to release their drivers to the open source community once support ends. Even though it would be a great move for them I doubt they have sufficient available marketing talent to capitalise on this. So they need to be pushed!

[@LordMaliscence]

@@DailyCorvid Lapsu$ would like to have a word with you

[@Dewm_]

I've loved using Vulkan through a translation layer for a long time now, and it's been great. Quite a few games I've noticed have even gained performance, or have reduced things like frame pacing issues; on top of better alt-tab support. I would love to see a video on this because I feel it should be a more popular practice not just for using old hardware on newer games, but also the opposite: playing old games on newer hardware. Not only does this push development for Vulkan, but also helps the push for better support for these sort of APIs which is beneficial to linux adoption. It's the perfect stepping stone that gives a lot of benefits to all sorts of people, and I'd love to see more on this subject.

[@luminatrixfanfiction]

Steam Proton is a game changer for sure. Almost every game I've played has higher fps when playing on Linux rather than Windows thanks to pre-rendering.

[@Kamel419]

Seconded... I really wish this video wouldn't have been so DirectX heavy. I don't think they really represented the whole Vulkan/OpenGL side of the equation. If I were uninformed and saw this video, I might incorrectly think that DirectX was the only valid API for 3d game development.

[@iris4547]

@@Kamel419 "i wish this video wasnt so 99% heavy, we should really force the 1% down viewers throats". you fanboys are pathetic.

[@RobinCernyMitSuffix]

@@iris4547 not really, OpenGL and Vulkan doesn't have such a feature creep then DirectX, and this video was about using old GPUs to run modern-ish titles. Some of them even have support for Vulkan or OpenGL. So in turn, some games may run better with those APIs. And also: Vulkan is way better performance vise than DirectX, if implemented correctly, as it gives the Developers way more options. And you can see that on titles like DOOM, Half-Life: Alyx and other AAA titles. If done correctly it runs just as good or better then directX, with the added benefit of being actually crossplattform compatible (Vulkan runs on Android, Mac, Linux, Windows and I think even on consoles). So for Game devs who also want to release their game for a different plattform, it makes even more sense.

[@sinni800]

I definitely agree here. It's a mad scientist experiment to look at the myriad of ways to run games, especially older ones. Direct3D? OpenGL? Glide through a glide wrapper? Direct3D to Opengl wrapper from wine? One of these direct3d TO "newer" direct3d wrappers? Wine ON WINDOWS through the Subsystem for Linux which does support GPU processing now? There are so many friggin possibilities and I'd love for someone to take a few games, explore all these possibilities for each of them and check how each of them runs. Also so many older games run really good on wine on Linux.

[@AeltgenXIV]

“The older we get the less we can play, right?” That hurts Linus so damn true :(

[@melomelo420]

become streamer then

[@AeltgenXIV]

@@melomelo420 not possible for me, raising 5 kids no time :(

[@melomelo420]

@@AeltgenXIV ah yea i forgot about that some poeple are married

[@eonnephilim852]

@@AeltgenXIV Well, in any case, everyone here including me hopes that you get more satisfaction out of raising 5 sentient living things well, than compared to playing video games all day. hope your kids grow up in a happy environment to be good people and that you extract as much joy out of it as possible brother

[@AeltgenXIV]

@@eonnephilim852 they play games for me :)

[@kevinstarlike]

I bought that exact model of R9 380X as my first discrete GPU. Sold it in 2017 to get a GTX 1080 (which I still have today). I like to think that whoever bought my little 380X on ebay saw this video and is happy about the great deal they got and proud of the little red guy

[@DailyCorvid]

See at first I was looking at the RTX3060ti, but after a while decided that a 1080ti was better. For me was the best card of the last 3 generations of both companies. I had a 1060 which I recently upgraded to a 5 series Radeon because it's marginally quicker than the 1080ti though has 8GB of VRAM and can chug along at 2Ghz easy. What did I have for like 6 years prior to that?? Yep, old reliable! The R380X! It served me so well, I put her out to pasture in my dads old Mac which he edits home video on now he's a grandad. But the 1080 and 1080ti will probably remain relevent for at least another 3-4 years, that one nailed every element of what makes a really great GPU.

[@sirfairplay9153]

Nah, it will be in a waste dump somewhere

[@garuda]

Are you thinking about upgrading when prices drop to msrp?

[@pierdaponte]

Pretty much my exact situation. I had the Sapphire Nitro R9 380X and sold it to upgrade to a MSI GTX 1070 Ti Titanium Edition. Still using that card today and holding out for a miracle on GPU prices returning to normal. Either that or a console. Rather pay a grand for a console than a card at this point tbh.

[@kevinstarlike]

@@garuda probably not right now I don't play any games for which I would need more horsepower and if I did upgrade (I would be going for a 3070 or higher) I would also have to get a 144hz 4K monitor, because it would be pretty wastefull to use such a strong card at 1440p imo

[@BudgetBuildsOfficial]

Hey it’s me 9:30. Those Drivers completely revolutionised the HD7870 for me again as it’s now gone back off to a family member who’s still using it today 👍 AMD needs to work on their final drivers as no HD Series cards seem to have ever got final drivers. 👍 Very much enjoyed the video.

[@Rocketboy92]

I was like "did he say budget builds?" 😁

[@BudgetBuildsOfficial]

@@Rocketboy92 had to do a double take on it myself

[@NexusXP]

Got the notification from the discord server.

[@lucaswyrm7323]

Never thought LTT would tell your name LOL

[@disaster_runner5030]

Do we expect a new wave of LTT fans joining budget builds now?

[@Mixa_Lv]

I probably made a good decision when I traded my previous 2Gb GTX 770 for a 4GB R9 380 back in 2017. It was about as powerful, but I figured that having newer architecture and 4Gb of vram was probably going to be more future-proof. I'm going to investigate these modded drivers now, thanks for that.

[@aspookabie]

Yes

[@TheRatManBob]

Depending on what games and programs you use on your pc Linux is also a good option. Even on cards that still get official updates Mesa's Linux AMDGPU driver tends to be less buggy than the Windows drivers. Plus you can use gamescope to use FSR on any game.

[@SchwachsinnProduzent]

You could also experiment with Linux, since it has AMD drivers within the kernel and also uses the translation to Vulkan. On older hardware the support in Linux is often better than in Windows.

[@he.lena21]

My R9 290 still a beast, I can run Forza Horizon 5 on the high settings in 1080p in a pretty decent frame rate, and also battlefield V in 1080p on medium. I play Overwatch everyday, I can run on ultra at 60fps, but I prefer to play on low at 200fps.

[@AntKnown]

I have a sapphire r9 380 4gb and currently using the modded driver Linus featured in this video it works perfectly except I can't boot up apex cause easy anti cheat is flagging the driver files for some reason. I heard there's a patch for it but I just haven't looked it up for I'm such a lazy fuck.

[@1jackpenner]

I’m still running an r9 280x to this day, modded drivers are a life saver. Runs all my game perfect.

[@cameronallan9930]

guess I'll wait another 2 years for a 3060

[@NeoxTheBig]

same

[@99-white-balloons]

Hd 7770, starting to run unstable:(

[@brian9801]

When you say perfect, do you mean 20 FPS.... LMFAO

[@1jackpenner]

@@brian9801 it’s faster than a 1050ti, so 900p medium is normally 50+

[@Z1mbaru]

I would love to see a similar look at older CPUs. I have a feeling that a 10 year old CPU will actually still work quite well as long as the motherboard is still reasonably supported

[@Paxton171]

They use the i7-3770k in a lot of their old or repurpose style builds video. Unless I was playing a CPU intensive game (Total War or a Paradox Game). I didn't have that many problems.

[@spicywolf6718]

I have a heavily overclocked Core 2 Extreme QX9770, ASUS P5E64 WS Evolution, 4x2GB Corsair Dominator GT @1600C7 and with a modern GPU it's pretty surprising what it can run. It pulled me through Code Vein, Scarlet Nexus, Ark, Wolfenstein II, Halo MCE etc before I moved to my place holder 5800X.

[@ZestyLemonSauce]

if you have an 8 thread cpu like the older i7s they work reasonably well. 4 threads dont cut it with some modern titles that are optimised for 8 thread cpus (probably because of consoles being 8 thread).

[@shudahknive]

I am still using my 2600k paired w/ my 1050 ti and although I don't play that many of the titles they tested, my setup works on the ff decently: GTA V, Destiny 2, Lost Ark (of course lol). As for the others games I play using this setup, there's nothing that demanding: Genshin Impact, Vermintide 2 (I get headaches though), Path of Exile, FF14, Anno 1800, Days Gone, MHW, Warframe, Rust, WWZ Aftermath, Dirt 4, etc.

[@milosstojanovic4623]

10 year old CPUs will not 'work well' AT ALL. Only decent in like 5 year old titles or older. Those CPUs do not have instructions required to run titles from 2021 and also probably from 2020. Will get just bottleneck with any newer card and games that need more than 4 cores.

[@neemabrown6922]

And of course, on Linux, this problem is largely a non-issue for AMD users, because the open-source driver developers (some of whom work for AMD) maintain support for these older cards long after AMD officially stops. For Nvidia users it's rather less rosy, especially for more recent GPUs where Nvidia's design and IP choices mean that an open-source driver with reasonable performance cannot be made easily, because it must be entirely reverse-engineered. Particularly problematic is the fact that the GPU defaults to its minimum clock speed on boot, and figuring out how to reclock it has taken a great deal of effort. While the people in charge of many Linux distributions will attempt to provide legacy versions of the binary Nvidia drivers which are compatible with the other software in their repositories, that only works for so long without Nvidia's support, because eventually some new version of the graphics pipeline outside the driver will cause a breaking change (as is already the case for 300-series cards and older). For the moment, people with unsupported GPUs which were released after Nvidia stopped releasing critical data face an unfortunate choice between having a card that performs more or less as advertised and having an up-to-date system.

[@lokithecat7225]

I'm running my Gtx Titan (2013) on current Games, like Elden Ring, with no issues. You can usually find a Fix that bypasses the games Forced Dx 12 within a week of release. I usually play it, while having my other Monitor playing KZbin Videos, or Streaming Movies.

[@timschulz9563]

To quote the other Linus: "Nvidia, f*** you!"

[@airy_co]

Interesting, that explains why there are no mayor issues running linux with recent gpu nvidia cards, using proprietary drivers of course

[@meinnase]

How about you watch the whole video before commenting? lmao

[@ChristopherCobra]

This may seem like a silly question, but how many of the games they tested run in Linux in general? I am just curious. Oh - I mean natively.

[@TheDemocrab]

You guys should do a video on graphics API translators, it's incredibly handy technology. It was mentioned in this video that you can convert newer, unsupported APIs to older ones but it actually goes in reverse too: Some more niche features of old graphics APIs are software emulated on the CPU these days and the oldest ones aren't even supported at all, plus the converters can add in graphical fixes so it's becoming increasingly useful for retro gaming. Hell, if you wanna play Fallout New Vegas, The Sims 2 or GTA IV then DXVK is the easiest way to fix the graphics pipeline and get solid performance without the common bugs. Same with Win9x, so many old games that won't work natively on modern windows will work fine when you install dgvoodoo2 which converts 3DFX Glide and old DX code into more modern code that modern GPUs can run. I use it to play Sims 1 and Gearhead Garage among other ancient games.

[@kelownatechkid]

They should do a video about this!

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Sometimes old games run better with wine under Linux than they do on modern windows.

[@curvingfyre6810]

tell me more about this new vegas bugfix...

[@MrRickTic]

THIS IS THE KIND OF VIDEOS I MISS FROM LTT!!!! Ive been a sub for longer than i care to admit and was a sub of Floatplane till i realized i didn't have disposable income. Love seeing videos like this that really help gamers using older hardware. Ive wanted to help kids get into gaming but couldn't afford to do it. With this knowledge i can get some less fortunate kids gaming for far less if not free. Thank you guys. Great work!

[@Razear]

The modding community never ceases to amaze. That's the incredible thing about PC gaming, smart people working together to fix and improve things that benefit the userbase.

[@AdrianVM19]

And a bunch of dumb people like me just making use of all the cool stuff made by smart people lol

[@hansg6015]

@@AdrianVM19 if you use it then you are not dumb

[@KageBlink]

To be honest, following your channel since my first builds, you guys managed to keep me well informed and up to date in what to upgrade to. You made a good call in saying I should upgrade my rig early and buy a new graphics card, and then BAM the shortage happened. I bought a modest rx 5600xt, it's not amazing, I don't game at 4k, but it's really good 1440p and 4k videos. But it's also very good at gaming 1080p and even 1440p just fine. Even runs my VR setup much better than my old builds. So again, thank you LTT so much for doing what you do.

[@qazzie5336]

About a month before the shortage hit Linus and Luke recommended Pascal cards on the WAN Show due to how well they've held up and their availability in the used market as a result of the old mining craze and that's what got me to feel informed enough to pull the trigger and buy one literally days before the shortage hit.

[@b0ne91]

The new Kernel for AMD apparently has made it nearly impossible to mod old drivers anymore. With the NimeZ, you can even add ReBar (aka Smart Access Memory) to RX 580 8GB cards and older GCN cards like the R9 390, 380X etc. It's a shame AMD is cracking down and making further development of these drivers near impossible for the future.

[@cromefire_]

You should still be able to reverse engineering the Linux drivers though, although that might only help so much for DirectX compatibility, as Linux of course uses Vulkan or OpenGL

[@fastgecko5799]

@@chicken29843 They lose out on new GPU sales if old GPUs are still functional.

[@drsupergood8978]

@@chicken29843 Security. Users installing third party infected drivers under fake impossible promises of performance would be a major vector for malware infecting less tech savvy users. Such drivers could even steal real improvements made by people just to appear performant on the surface to avoid suspicion if tested but buried inside is sleeping malware. As such any source for drivers should be official and signed as such. Nothing stops such official sources being open source with sensible user contributions of course.

[@nicholasvinen]

@@drsupergood8978 so what you're saying is that by discontinuing support for usable hardware, they're forcing users to lower their security? That sounds kind of bad.

[@resolvext]

@DrSuperGood The fact that modded drivers like NimeZ is not same as what you think. It has original WHQL signature that remains in these drivers, using private Certificate (Yep, NOT ORIGINAL CERTIFICATE FROM AMD, because it's impossible to get) to emulate these WHQL, so as long original amd driver files remain untouched, that WHQL is pretty safe. This is why some people still worry about Security Concern, and its driver is not same like XtremeG that has badly modified drivers, I know because I've compared both of them.

[@WrenIsWitty]

Finally, a major tech KZbin channel using my definition of playable games.

[@Chancer_Mage]

Yasssssssssssss

[@PurpleSvj]

sometimes 30fps can be painful in competitive but its livable

[@DragonBane299]

my playable is 1024x768 at 30 frames (yes I have low standards)

[@8-bitcentral31]

YES I said the same thing when it appeared! I run BeamNG at low/lowest setting 1080p at 30/40fps and its fine.

[@alienalloy604]

i personally like playing on as high setting as possible and dont mind lowering resolution. It just looks better to have high details and low res than having high res and low details.

[@Bushidounohana]

Very interested in seeing how Proton-related tech is serving these older cards in Windows. Great work, as always!

[@daedalusspacegames]

I'm going to be that guy and point out that *technically* DXVK and VKD3D (the non-proton branch, at least) were developed originally for vanilla Wine, separate from and prior to the Proton project by Valve. That said, I would also be interested to see a video on these technologies running in Windows, and perhaps in Linux through too?

[@Bushidounohana]

@@daedalusspacegames hahaha-no worries on being “that guy,” I am never beyond reproach! I appreciate precision in language and also appreciate being gently redirected in such a fashion as you have. I have spent years working with Wine in OS X and MacOS (via Wineskin Winery) and should have known better, thank you for the correction!

[@eideticex]

That's the beauty of keeping things open source. A process like migration platforms becomes infinitely more doable and in a lot of cases just a matter of time until you or someone finds the motivation to do so.

[@klaxoncow]

@@daedalusspacegames Yeah, but, in fairness, we should also acknowledge just how much hard bloody work Valve have put into these things through the Proton project (and that they upstreamed that work back to the original projects to benefit everyone). So, yeah, they didn't originate these things - but they've really helped to push things forward at a rate of knots that only a super-rich company can, and happily gave it all back to the community again, without demanding any price for that.

[@Autotrope]

I would assume the bulk of DXVK and VKD3D work is done by Valve these days. It's a very rapid rate of development and Valve has a whole ecosystem riding on it.

[@BabsOfEao]

This is the kind of LTT video that I'd like to see more of. It'd be interesting to see how old you can go for every component in your system and still have a competent machine.

[@Z1mbaru]

Agreed. They could make a competition out of the idea, giving each team a budget and a time limit to produce the pc from scrapyard parts. Like some kind of scrapyard war. I don't know what you would call something like that though.

[@EbbyMyther]

Until end of last year I ran a maschine that was made of components 9years and older (I bought it 9 years ago as a fully build machine at around 100€ without a GPU..., self-installed a NVidia 770 later on) worked rather well for me though I don't play many of these big titles. Still working the 770 GPU daily while upgrading Mainboard and CPU by now. Depending on your useage you can go pretty old for most components I would say. My old setup is now being used as an office PC that only needs to be able to work with Office and to be able to maybe watch a few tutorials.

[@ssenyosdaviee1873]

Enuff of intel $1000000000000 upgrade

[@NotTheHeroStudios]

It's my specialty. For people. From 2020-now I build a handful of "ebay" computers for people around $400-500. But a lot of it was from old cards I had laying around I wanted to clean out. So I sold them for next do nothing. Anywhere from gtx660 to 700 series. The best one I did was a battle field 4 build (make it purely for that) using 8 year old i7 I picked up old stock for like $90 (unfortunately they have gone up) It's actually really fun tbh.

[@Thatdavemarsh]

I am rocking a Q6600 with a 550ti. W10, Runs Minecraft with shaders, at 20-25 FPS, 45-60 without 1080p. Not triple A games, but is my home PC.

[@Bassquake76]

Hardware like this should be allowed to become open source by law if companies no longer support it.

[@dileep7943]

Yep, also non AAA titles that uses less intensive 3D effects would still work with older GPUs.

[@OlympiaMarketing]

Exactly

[@joe7272]

And large organizations (like government and hospitals) should be forced to donate it to charities, instead of burning literally hundreds of millions of dollars of usable equipment, even if 5-10 years old.

[@1pcfred]

You should keep your grubby little fingers out of other people's business.

[@joe7272]

@@1pcfred then companies turning earth's natural resources for profit should keep their hands off natural resources

[@stumblinzz]

The quality of this video has been amazing so far. Smooth, informational, easy to understand, keeping it high level enough, visuals dialed in. Presentation from Linus with things like verbal and visual cues were well timed. Im saying this mainly because I like some of the other hosts on LTT but if I was going to write home as to why I specifically like Linus, Luke, and Anthony, those are my big asks.

[@ky-jen]

It would be interesting to see if you can get more games to run on Linux with the open source drivers.

[@magfal]

I have more hope for this when it comes to AMD GPUs.

[@rogervanbommel1086]

Yes, because Linux can run directX 11 games with directX 10 due to translation

[@Zaphod_]

Maybe, although performance would then take another hit because of the DirectX-Vulkan translation layer (if the game doesn't run natively)

[@cnr_0778]

@@rogervanbommel1086 I think you mean "Yes, because Linux can run directX 11 games with Vulkan due to translation" right?

[@ky-jen]

All good points and exactly why I am curious. Thanks for the great comments. (So far)

[@pedrovieira8602]

Very interesting. As a console gamer I never knew that "end of support" actually meant the new games didn't work. I always assumed that if a video card was direct x # compatible it would run every game under that number up the the graphics power of the card.

[@Catalysten]

@@raresmacovei8382 Doesn't the video show that Directx # doesn't necessarily imply it has the functionality to run all games under that #?

[@iris4547]

did you watch the video? it actually showed that end of driver support is just end of driver support, it still runs games up to its directx feature level, outside of any other bugs or issues.

[@lightly-red-huedmaleindivi6266]

@@raresmacovei8382 That's not correct Many modern games for DirectX 12 run in Linux using Proton even if the card itself is DirectX 11 Additionally, even if the cards don't support DirectX some of them DO support Vulkan so they can sneak in more games

[@TheDemocrab]

Most of the time it is actually down to feature support and driver-side bug fixes. Most games can drop some features if the GPU can't use them, or it just silently errors out and doesn't render that specific bit. (which might be hard to even notice) That's why you'll see say, an early DX11 card not working fully with later DX11 titles: The game or driver has a bug which has been fixed in later driver versions to what you have. Easy way to fix it is to use the modded drivers when your GPU loses official support. My Fury Nano got a 10fps increase in FH5 over the last official ones *and* FSR works fully :D

[@pedrovieira8602]

@@iris4547 I did watch the video. What I'm commenting is basically that I didn't know any of that, I just assumed when you got a card you could play it untill it wasn't powerful enough, I wasn't aware of all those API intricacies. Now I know. Because of the vid.

[@W0lfenstrike]

DXVK has been a godsend for my ancient GT 640 that I use on my office PC. I know that card was meant to run Xbox 360 era games, but just for shits and giggles I still like to tinker with it like I did a decade ago and it still works pretty fine with certain expectations in check.

[@caramelldansen2204]

Still love my R9 390. Thanks AMD for keeping her alive. (Full disclosure: before Adrenaline, mine crashed under load at random for ~2 years. Fixed now, though.)

[@fromhell1]

i was using a powercolor pcs+ r9 290 for 11 months and the chip suddenly gave up, i sold the broken card for 20 dollars. in that 11 months i live the one of the best gaming experiences of my life.

[@Vermilicious]

I actually have a 380X, which I got as a replacement for a faulty card years ago. It's a very capable one, I have to say. I didn't know about custom drivers, but that's interesting for sure.

[@TH3C001]

Damn, it’s crazy how fast these bots work, I just saw your comment stolen by one of those “TaP mY pRoFiLe To HaVe SeX wItH mE” channels lol. I thought Linus took care of them, lol?

[@proCaylak]

@@TH3C001 they still have to do the cleaning periodically. I believe they did mention the limits of that in the relevant video.

[@TH3C001]

@@proCaylak Yeah, it's time for a second dose lol.

[@Neoxon619]

It still feels weird that the 780 TI was that long ago. Damn, I feel old.

[@Neoxon619]

@Deadpoppin I’m 26

[@sql64]

@Deadpoppin no you are just very young

[@felixf4378]

@@Neoxon619 The 380X makes me feel even older. I can't believe it's a 7 year old card. I still remember how excited I was to work at McDonald's because I would soon be able to buy a 380X (coming from a HD7770).

[@EN8Kirito]

Still love the design of the card.

[@MrAxnavara]

Meanwhile am of old pc builders early 2k of single core athlons but my modern pc started off with an R9 290X and that card lasted me till June 2020 7 years of honestly solid 1080p 1440p performance in mostly medium to high and even maxed settings in most AAA

[@TidusfromZanarkand]

Oh man, I still remember the first GPU I bought myself for the PC my parents bought me after I finished Highschool. It was a Palit GTX570 something platinum, and it was SO GOOD!! I could crank up WoW graphics and draw distance, I could install texture mods on Oblivion, I was the lad with the super computer out of my friends circle XD Good times man, good times . .

[@maighstir3003]

Mine was a Voodoo 3 3500. Had 16MB of VRAM, and a TV tuner. Unreal Tournament looked awesome.

[@blech71]

I had a few 970’s laying around and man those things are still great for 1920x1080 resolutions. I used to run some polls in guild and asked those that had subpar systems that could benefit from a card like that. After a raid weekly I would offer a card to help someone. The biggest happy face we got was when I gave a first gen Titan card away. That thing was a beast back then and still does rather well for WOW…. Granted I had to kick down a PSU to help the system but yeah the guy was in tears he was so appreciative. Old gear laying around can be a huge help to others.

[@hi_its_jerry]

you're a hero

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Not all heroes wear capes. Some wear armor

[@cosminmilitaru9920]

Thank you for being an awesome human.

[@bulutcagdas1071]

Never forgot my Geforce 2, the first time ever seeing 3D accelerated graphics as a kid, it just blew my mind.

[@ginjopowder]

Riva tnt blew my mind

[@iris4547]

@@ginjopowder that takes me back. tnt2 was my first actual graphics card.

[@uss_04]

Had one of those too. Rip

[@rukia4473]

Please read my name!

[@jat5am]

geforce 4 and max payne or jedi academy.

[@fightRflight]

I love that they included the 480, when I'm still playing on a 470 I've actually had better experiences than you'd expect. I can run most indie games, and anything that will run on dx11. I repasted the GPU, and that got me a 15-25% increase in any game. It doesn't handle my 1440p monitor in any game but Fortine, where thier performance rendering mode is really amazing. I can run at low details, high mesh quality, 120fps locked at 1440p.

[@fightRflight]

@@tehrealgsus I haven't even bothered with oc on mine. I'm hoping to get a 3070 when prices come down, I've got a Ryzen 5 5600x overclocked, with 32 gigs of ram Overall though, I'm really impressed with how well the card handles modern games.

[@twinversbr]

My sons 570 is the same way. The 4gb of VRAM is the biggest hindrance to it currently, but 1080 medium and 1440 low on pretty much anything

[@erichb4530]

Wow, now glad my last card purchase was an AMD. I think I remember using a custom driver MANY years ago, it's awesome the community is still doing this!

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Ahh, the gold old Omega drivers.

[@UnhingedSystems]

I'm always a little nostalgically sad when I look at my 9800GTX SLI pair and 790i ultra chipset motherboard and realize that they were the best when I bought them, but they don't even support basic modern games anymore. The 570GTX upgrade did me good for a long time, and my 980Ti still plays nice with most games but is starting to show its age on new 2021 and 2022 titles. Respect to the industry for the constant progress and increased performance.

[@bricaaron3978]

Hi! Can you tell me what resolution you output, and what are the most taxing games (not just poorly coded/optimized, but actually demanding) that you have played with the 980 Ti? Do you target a VSync-locked 60 fps or do you tolerate lower framerates? Thanks in advance!

[@UnhingedSystems]

@@bricaaron3978 Great question! I played all the way up to AAA titles like The Witcher 3 on my 980Ti at 1080p. I used v-sync but it definitely dipped below 60fps at times.

[@bricaaron3978]

@@UnhingedSystems Wow.... It sounds like you are behind on AAA games just like I am. I have my 2014 4770K build, and am planning on building a new system at the beginning of 2023, when hopefully the new NVIDIA cards are decently priced. I haven't played any AAA games later than 2016 (DOOM 2016), and even though I'm not excited about gameplay or terrible business practices, I am excited about seeing how much graphical realism has improved. (I have deliberately not looked at screenshots or videos of games for that reason, lol.)

[@tornike6776]

guys can i find driver for gt 730 from amernime or nimez? i tried but idk cant get it.. plz someone more experienced help me

[@bricaaron3978]

@@tornike6776 I have almost all NVIDIA drivers going back to 2008 and earlier. I can send a driver if you know of a good way to do so.

[@anarcy7777u]

I'm honestly just glad you guys gave Budget Builds a shoutout. Guy makes awesome content

[@fab1604]

Super interesting video, started as "haha old GPUs with new games" and we've got a quick lesson on DirectX, drivers and other cool stuff. Gotta love LTT

[@illyay1337]

My GTX 480 was still strong. Had to use that for a while after my 970 died and there was no way to get a new GPU with the shortages. Played Halo MCC pretty well!

[@alexlandherr]

I’m still using my first GPU; a GTX 1050 4GB card inside my Dell Inspiron 15 Gaming 7577. Works like a charm for accelerated video playback and reasonably heavy gaming at 1080p.

[@HawKDesignss]

I remember years ago before I got my 480 8gb, which has also been years now, I had a sapphire hd 7970 that I had flashed a 7990 bios to and it performed fairly well and in some games almost as good as the 480 while running slightly cooler. IIRC I've seen where some have even flashed an even higher tier bios on them now with even more performance. Still to this day the most reliable card I've owned considering I never ran into any crashes and the longevity.

[@TheAdatto]

I had 2 480's in sli and i think 95oC is the lowest temp i've ever seen on those

[@youtubeshadowbannedme]

@@TheAdatto i think he is referring to RX 480 while you're referring to GTX 480

[@b0ne91]

I doubt that. The 7990 is a dual GPU card. You're probably thinking 7970 to R9 280X, which uses the same GPU and config, mostly the same PCBs too. Whereas that card has roughly GTX 960 performance, short of the GTX 970, the RX 480 is closer to a GTX 1060 6GB, outperforming the RTX 970 and R9 280X by a good 15-20%.

[@Archman155]

I had a 7950, great card till the fans broke and the thermal paste was ancient, sold it along I think but it was great

[@MrBillgonzo]

I just plugged in a GTX 460 and was able to get Resident Evil 2 remake running at 720p medium. I was super surprised

[@SUNGOLDSV]

With FSR, you can upscale to 1080p too without losing performance, I hope you have fun.

[@felixf4378]

Most of these gpu are still very capable, it's just that the manufacturer doesn't put that much effort into the drivers.

[@shane-porter]

00:23. 👍

[@stitchfinger7678]

And fans won't rush to homebrew drivers for non-flagship cards. Shame the hardware has to go to waste usually.

[@circlehousePRO]

Remember that paper u wrote in third grade? I'm gonna need you to spend about 6 hours rereading and rewriting it so that it stands up to where you're at now, you'll get no money for either, actually I'll need to do it during work hours as well so it actively costs you money to do

[@Spoofaged]

They want your new money since they already have your old money. Stop support, get mo moneys selling new cards.. kinda like cell phones..

[@pcguy619]

It's not effort. It's the fact that as hardware gets older, more and more exceptions are required for each GPU to keep working. At some point, the exceptions become too many and add way too much complexity to the drivers for newer cards. This causes instability, slowness, and lots of other issues on said newer cards, so the older GPU is axed from support. Anyone who's done software development in a well-defined software development life cycle can relate.

[@UserNameAnonymous]

There'll always be a special place in my heart for my gtx 680. First graphics card I ever bought. Gave it to a friend and he used it up until January 2022. I miss it.

[@Farzlepot]

Cheers, now I feel old as hell

[@xpmon]

Definitely would like a follow up for dxvk on Windows and maybe even how these same games run on Linux through proton

[@colmustard5683]

Doom Eternal, Monster Hunter Rise, Warframe, DBZ Kakarot, Elite Dangerous and Aliens FIreteam Elite (these are the only games I currently play) run amazing. i5-7500 3.4GHz (4), 16GB Corsair Veng XMP 2.0 DDR4 2400 (will check later), ASUS STRIX 1060 6GB, ASRock H270 Pro. First Vulkan shader compile can take a bit but subsequent updates to the shader are usually much faster. Final Fantasy online worked fine too but, don't play anymore.

[@xpmon]

@@colmustard5683 while that is great, I meant the older GPUs mentioned in the video, while the 1060 is not new it is not old either

[@honkhonkler7732]

My first GPU was an HD7950. She's flashed and still used in my old Mac pro tower to this day.

[@SasquatchComposites]

I started with an HD7870. That was just a year ago. It played Halo MCC beautifully until I could get something newer at a not-horrible price for Infinite.

[@RetroDestroyer]

My firs tgpu was the Intel HD 2000! :D The difference is still I still used Intel HD 2000 until 4 months ago

[@ffwast]

Flashed with what? I might have to dig mine out of the bin...

[@DailyCorvid]

@@ffwast Showed it a picture of Britney Spears in the early ninties, probably what I would choose if somebody were to flash me.

[@wimpieeeeee]

@ffwast Probably with a HD7970 BIOS. I did the same with my 2 HD6950's, which became 2 HD6970's and surpassed the HD6990 in performance. Was a great deal back then for 250 euros per card. Great thing about them is that they also had a BIOS switch, so you could just flip the switch if the flash went wrong and just switch between a 6950 and 6970 BIOS

[@tomi832]

Yes! Thank you! I have an R9 390, and I was really disappointed last year when AMD abandoned my card, which is still really capable in basically every game (at least for FHD). Because of that I've began looking into other new highly-priced cards...but now that I know that I can still use my R9 390 for a year or two, I don't need to spend that! Thank you!

[@MHWGamer]

FH5 only worked with the latest final driver but other games were faulty, so I downgraded again after playing it. The beast can still play Ms flightsimulator which I didn't expect at all (6600k quadcore for that game lol). My first gpu and one of the best choices I've ever made (not like choosing the 6600k and not the 6700k which was a bad choice). Also Doom Eternal on literally highest settings in 1080p!! used 7,6gb out of 8gb Vram haha the alternative 970 cries with its 3.5gb

[@HoloScope]

sell it to me pls

[@mercuriete]

I think your card is still supported on linux side. Vulkan support on linux means DXVK (all steamdeck supported games). The only thing you need to check is how to enable amdgpu on old amd cards (southern islands and sea island)

[@geodescent]

I have an R9 380; do you randomly get black screen followed by a reboot with no bsod or event viewer logs?

[@AlexanderVFX]

@@geodescent sounds like cpu failure to me if the frequency increases over time and then fails to boot it was the problem - I have had a gpu failure once quite some time ago and the symptoms were visual artifacts and a bunch of lines on the screen - as other comment said could be power supply, I believe you can test by putting your GPU under heavy load. If it black screens under heavy load consistently psu is the likely problem

[@Cairo_666]

The start of this video was so good lmao "I dont wanna play with you anymore" and *no working hardware was harmed so good lol

[@israelperez4862]

Loved this video, maybe you should take a look at running these games on Linux, via Steam Proton, since it translates DX12 functions into Vulkan functions, there might be a better Vulkan support for that hardware

[@TheExileFox]

they have. Try watching their "Linux challenge" series that was released not too long ago.

[@Sitwayen]

@@TheExileFox Not the same at all, we are talking about specific hardware here not the one used in the challenge.

[@GabrielSouza-of7kt]

Yeh, would be awesome to see if AMD Drivers for this cards is Open Source and still maintained by community, if this is the case, they could have better drivers than Windows

[@LinxOnlineGames]

Testing the older AMD GPUs with the Linux Mesa drivers would be interesting.

[@taragwendolyn]

I'm using an RX580 in an eGPU on Arch, using the Linux Mesa drivers (amdgpu module). Gaming is fine. Even limited to just 4 PCIe lanes because Thunderbolt 3, some games work better under Linux than they did when I still had a desktop PC running Windows with full access to the 16 PCIe lanes. (admittedly I went from a Sandy Bridge i5 w/ 16GB RAM to a mobile Kaby Lake R i5 w/ 32GB of RAM in that change, but that shouldn't be enough of a boost to overcome the change in PCIe lanes). It's able to handle everything I've thrown at it with relative ease - very playable, and able to run some of the games they tested at ultra on my 2560x1080 panel. It's a little more modern than most of what they tested, but it's still 5 years old. Plural of anecdote isn't data, but my experience has been pretty good. Haven't looked back on my switch away from Windows in years, and proton has just made gaming that much better.

[@jasuko]

@RogerWilco99 Mesa still has such software rasterizer: LLVMpipe. I use it all the time, since my GPU does not support the newer OpenGL versions that some modern software requires.

[@1pcfred]

Sounds like an exercise in self abuse to me. AMD bloze.

[@phenomanII]

Honestly, GCN cards and the FineWine stuff AMD was doing back then was pretty impressive. (The 380X being an HD7970 less so.) Despite the beating they took in launch reviews, most of their cards have leap-frogged their competitors. Shame that they didn't put more effort into the last official drivers released for those cards, but I guess RDNA needed it more and you have to remember how small AMD actually is while competing with both Intel and nVidia. For all the trashtalk about AMD drivers back in those days, I actually had zero issues on either the HD7870 or the HD7950. Couldn't say the same about the GTX560 I had before that - had to run nVidia Inspector to make it run at its full 850 MHz, just because something in the driver was screwed up and it kept trying to run games at 405 MHz. (temps and power were fine)

[@TheExileFox]

i had the HD7770 reference card which was pretty crap at cooling. But it didn't have any issues apart from one instance with Fallout4 in the Far Harbor DLC and that's only when you go into a virtual space full of blue cubes. That damn quest always seems to crash at some point regardless of what hardware I use.

[@yuryzhuravlev2312]

You should try Linux, OpenSource AMD drivers are very impressive there.

[@rukia4473]

Please read my name:D

[@rukia4473]

Please read my name

[@TheHavocInferno]

the 280X was a 7970 refresh, the 380X was an actual new GPU ;)

[@fahey6797]

I've been gaming since the late 80's, and still like to revisit some of the old games from time to time. I have several mid-towers I keep for this purpose with these OS's: DOS, Win ME, Win XP, Win 7. Since I've been building my own systems for decades, you tend to collect a lot of old parts. Sure, there is GOG that allows you to "run" old games on a modern machine, but do they truly operate correctly? No. Try playing Wing Commander without and then with a joystick. If you don't have an old machine, you can't play with a joystick, how it was designed to be played. In master of Orion 2 for instance, the game is playable, but the soundtrack is jumpy. To listen to a smooth soundtrack, you need a machine running Win ME or Win 98.

[@0Synergy]

What shocked me personally was Linux is often able to run older games BETTER than windows. It is absolutely astonishing to me that M$ who are known to be really good with backwards compatibility failed so hard with windows retro gaming yet Linux with WINE runs them flawlessly.

[@michaelironsights8347]

Did you try virtual box to run old Windows versions on modern hardware?

[@fahey6797]

@@michaelironsights8347 Yes, but it does not support joystick usage. Besides that, the type port that joysticks plug into are no longer present on modern day MOBO''s. I think too that Win XP may be the last OP that has joystick support natively built within.

[@ignorance72]

@@fahey6797 You can get gameport-USB adapters that work with modern PCs. And Windows 11 still has joystick support.

[@fahey6797]

@@ignorance72 I'll give it a try. Thanks for the tip.

[@HarryvandeSunweb]

I've been playing elden ring on my old r9 380, laughing my ass off at current gen gpu prices. I never thought I would be using this card for 6-7+ years.

[@polskri1747]

@@EllaKarhu Possibly those people don't even know how to tweak game settings, they just directly play without changing anything in case higher settings is off limits to the graphic card.

[@richardcarritt5126]

@@EllaKarhu - It's Gameplay that matters not the GFX.

[@ArbiterYT]

@@polskri1747 The game is actually just poorly made, like many modern games. A friend has a 6900 XT, and I have an RX 470, which is a nearly 6 year old card. The bad thing is, while my friend gets much better average frame rates than I do, he still gets the same stutters regularly. I thought I just got stutters and FPS drops because my CPU maxes out playing the game, but seeing it happen to him as well, and none of his performance stats hit a limit, shows just how poorly the game is made. This isn't exclusive to Elden Ring, there are many games that are similar in terms of performance issues, and it's been getting worse overall with time, not better.

[@JB52520]

I and countless others can't get a new graphics card that isn't crippled, worn out, unsupported, or sold by a scalper. Why does our suffering make you laugh?

[@HarryvandeSunweb]

@@JB52520 Let me tell you a little secret. kzbin.info/www/bejne/nnzUh6mOicahsKs One of LTT's most useful videos.

[@WickedGamerCollector]

I have a pile of old GPU's .. i love them 😅

[@SG-lu4uj]

Damn Im the first like on a verified acount comment xd

[@beursekstudios8150]

Bro do u have any stronger than nvidia geforce 9500 gt? If have pls send me one,linus will pay u

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

I use my old 8800 GT as coaster. It died years ago and got revived twice in the oven, but at some point it just wouldn't run anymore. The 7300 GT with 60% overclock and the R7 250X with 1337 MHz are still fine tho.

[@rickarnoud5770]

@@HappyBeezerStudios lol dude i did the same thing with my 8800gtx after it started showing artifacts mine does still work!

[@RedRoses71]

Bro you're literally sitting on like 20k worth of gpus

[@BarDocK_LSSJ]

DXVK is really helpful on games that are cpu/single thread bound like GTA 4 where personally I have seen double the performance.

[@saricubra2867]

Even freaking Dolphin, Citra and RPCS3 console emulators have better optimization than GTA 4 port lmao, the latter is worse than the original Crysis from 2007 (runs in one thread).

[@W0lfenstrike]

I finished the first Crysis using DXVK and while it's not a magic solution to get better framerates and sometimes it stutters like crazy when compiling new shaders, at least it lifts the CPU load somewhat and makes it more GPU bound, making it WAY more playable and actually enjoyable on a modern system.

[@saricubra2867]

@@W0lfenstrike Crysis 1 shows more the single thread stagnation after 14 years more than anything really, after Sandy Bridge and Haswell, we had mediocrity.

[@saricubra2867]

@@superkoopatrooper4879 Crysis remastered has twice the framerate vs the original. Digital Foundry showed a better CPU optimization. Crysis is from 2007, the bad optimization can be understandable, Core 2 Duo basically didn't exist lol.

[@yancgc5098]

@@superkoopatrooper4879 Technically Crysis 1 used 2 threads, it just loaded one of the threads more than the other.

[@markjones2349]

Looking back at every graphics card I've owned I would say that nothing was ever as smooth as my Voodoo3 back in the day. Not sure if it was just the Glide enabled titles or what but the experience was just like butter back then.

[@mini-_]

GPU when Linus drops it: _I sleep_ GPU when Linus drop it _and_ says 'I don't want to play with you anymore': _panic_

[@defiantgg9201]

dead meme

[@mini-_]

@@defiantgg9201 oh ok

[@alessio4761]

Hopefully FSR 2.0 will give older GPUs more life again

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Assuming the game supports it. What I'm waiting for is a generic dynamic sampling solution that can not only upscale a lower res image but also downscale a higher res one, like dynamic SSAA/DSR/Downsampling.

[@sidthesloth5213]

In todays market. As long as it runs, its never too old. People will still find a way to game on a 3DFX Voodoo card.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

I've seen people run Doom 3 on a Voodoo 2, so nothing is impossible.

[@TheTonie4]

So nice to see the R9 380x get some recognition honestly. I had the R9 290 and it ran like a hot beast for all the time I had it. Only stopped using it because it really struggles at 1440p and (what actually forced me to upgrade) it killed its own fan after going through so many heating up and down cycles. Broke my heart when that fan broke off in my hand. Though it now has a second life in a secondary machine with some slim noctua fans strapped to it and soldered directly to the connector (not directly directly, just directly though a splitter). Works just like it did when it was new

[@lillee4207]

My 380 was great, loved it. Now I have an rx580

[@BadMax02_VR]

The modded driver thing i didnt even know existed in such a scale, i might be able to use my old hd 7770 after all for my guest pc or maybe as some server haha

[@ash36230]

The issue I ran into with my HD6950 was when I started hitting games that required instruction sets it didn't have in 2017, not necessarily because of bad performance.

[@ginjopowder]

Which games? I have hd6970

[@shankurmomz]

as a former owner of a 6950, you can flash the 6970 bios onto the card to squeeze out extra power. it was stable for me. its the same PCB just slightly higher binned. They disabled some shaders on the 6950 bios that are enabled when you flash to 6970.

[@Kasapin5033]

@@shankurmomz Not all 6950s are capable for running the 6970 bios. That was possible on some of the early runs, but later on they locked them down on a hardware level. Source, I had 3 HD 6950s that I tried to flash with their respective 6970 bioses and no dice.

[@MarshallRawR]

DXVK on Windows with GTA IV is amazing. It just allows for higher and smoother framerate overall.

[@noway9880]

Damn. The production budget for these videos must be astronomical now. I went like four years without watching Linus' videos..there's even backround music for ambiance now. Glad to see he's doing well.

[@CanIHasThisName]

Ha. Doing well is an understatement, he literally built an Xbox controller out of solid gold a few months ago.

[@DoubleMonoLR]

There are about 50 employees involved, there's clearly plenty of money coming in.

[@alextokash1005]

I still have my R9 380X and using it right now as I type this missive. I got it on sale refurbished for $130 back in 2016 and it still plays all the games I like to play at 1080p just fine. I can't help but think how much money this card has saved me over the last 6 years. And now with the news of modded drivers possibly increasing performance some, well sounds like I may be keeping it a few more years.

[@lucacavedale676]

just to add some info : would have been nice running AMD directly on linux, with the Mesa support, open driver and especially community does wonders, sure don't know they could beat these modded driver on windows, but you know it's easy to just try linux and see those games! :)

[@Sitwayen]

Even the nvidia, since Linux doesn't directly use directx it would be interesting to see the results with proton.

[@lucacavedale676]

@@Sitwayen worth a try? definitely, not sure though, you can basically use nvidia, even the older card just with proprietary stuff, that of course are gone alongside the windows counterpart, but better if i'm wrong :)

[@Sitwayen]

@@lucacavedale676 I did not think cards not being supported meant not being able to find drivers at all for them, I thought we could just grab the last official release, but reading the comments, I think my assumptions were wrong.

[@relsre]

​@@Sitwayen You're right that you _might not_ be able to just download the last official release and just run it, to use old NVIDIA cards on Linux -- to be more specific, it depends on whether the Linux distro you use (i.e. Ubuntu, Pop!_OS, Fedora, Arch Linux, etc.) has a way for the drivers to work with the respective distro's kernel. Most of the larger/popular distros include a program/framework called *DKMS (Dynamic Kernel Module Support)*, you can run it every time your Linux distro kernel updates, to rebuild the _module_ that allows your driver to communicate with the kernel, which keeps your driver (and in turn, your card!) working on your system. Some distros might offer 'legacy' packages (mostly unofficial) that automate this process, and basically make it identical to how you would install drivers for supported/newer NVIDIA cards. Case in point: I use a GTX 780 (non-Ti) with Arch Linux (a distro that offers _strictly_ up-to-date versions of the Linux kernel and programs), and it works -- _BUT_ I can't use the *nvidia* package from the official Arch repository -- if I try and install that package, the driver within will detect that I'm using an unsupported card, and refuse to boot into a graphical session. Instead, I had to download the *nvidia-470xx-dkms* package (470.xx being the latest driver version available for Kepler series cards), which was an unofficial offering from a community-run repository, basically a script that automated the DKMS rebuild process and assigned the rebuilt driver files to the appropriate locations. Rinse and repeat to get the 470.xx version of the 32-bit driver and some other programs that directly interact with the NVIDIA hardware (e.g. NVIDIA settings GUI, OpenGL, OpenCL). Sorry for the long comment, hope this helps clarify the situation regarding using unsupported NVIDIA cards on Linux!

[@Sitwayen]

@@relsre Thank you for the detailed explanation. So there is a way to get good drivers and test with proton then.

[@moshmosh26]

That toy story reference was great! 0:10

[@yourfriendmouse9967]

Oh thx I just noticed

[@300mags2]

0:08

[@DanielsGameVault]

I have the R390 and I have a love-hate relationship with it: I feel like it sucks for just about anything that involves rendering (LOTS of issues with compatibility and crashes and junk), but at the same time it was capable of running just about every game I threw at it....

[@TechnoBacon]

These are my favorite kinda LTT videos. They're not as funny or wild but they're super duper informative!!

[@Satansclawps3]

WHY ARE YOU GAY?

[@BNBPhotofr]

The reason I always go team Red for my GPU's, aside that they work better with Linux, is that their drivers are open source, thanks to which you have other people developing alternative drivers.

[@ChrisD__]

*Cries in Blender user on Linux*

[@flyingtentacle7631]

yea good luck with your gpu working better in linux with the 5 games you can play. Just finished linus's series on gaming in linux. Looks rough.

[@mrcrackerist]

@@flyingtentacle7631 Says someone that don't know what they are talking about.

[@BNBPhotofr]

@@flyingtentacle7631 While Linus had some very valid points in his video series it doesn't reflect everything about Linux gaming. Is it perfect ? No. There are some very gaming focused Linux distributions such as Garuda Linux, which I am personally rocking for the past two months after switching over from Linux Mint. I am using Linux as my daily driver since 2011 and despite having my fair share of frustrations I would never look back. I have a quiet extensive game library and to be honest the only GPU I had issues with was my GTX 680 and my GTX 770. Both of them NVIDIA cards. Also, all of the above is my personal opinion. :)

[@ChrisD__]

@@flyingtentacle7631 It's not that bad once you know what you're doing. My Windows installs break more than my Linux ones. I don't know what game support looks like now that Steam Deck is out, but it's looking pretty damn good.

[@dirgofserb]

Would love to see information about custom drivers, that sounds really interesting.

[@GabrielSouza-of7kt]

2 things would be awesome to see: How this AMD cards are being maintain on Linux Kernel, if they are at all, if the community continues to maintain in Mesa and DXVK/VKD3D would be awesome to see as well. The AMD Drivers on linux is open source, I don't know if anyone maintain, but would be awesome to see a video about it.

[@lionkor98]

Got an AMD Radeon HD 7870, which is from what, 2013? It has full DXVK (Vulkan) support on Linux, adn runs modern games quite well

[@HoldandModify]

This is a great “read between the lines” video for those of us out there fed up or too broke to grab newer cards for “basic gaming.” Thanks LTT!!!

[@hayleyxyz]

It would be good to do a video on how old drivers vs latest drivers perform on a card like a 980 to see what improvements older card owners may be able to get if nvidia didn't drop support.

[@jat5am]

980 owner. it runs everything just fine. I guess, not worse than 1060. older nvidia cards also supported bios mods, so I've modded mine and increased max power draw, made voltages/clocks higher. finished rdr2 on release with no problems on pretty high settings (30-45fps).

[@metalvideos1961]

i run a 970. i really should have gone with that 980 or 980TI back in those days. but didnt want to spend 500 euros on a GPU. which in hindsight i should have done. o well its cheap now. so if i want to get one i get one second hand.

[@hayleyxyz]

@@jat5am Mm I run a 980 too. The bios mod sounds good - my current performance is currently fine but can try that at some point to squeeze a bit more life out of it 😁

[@jat5am]

@@metalvideos1961 actually, I had 960 4GB, but managed to sell it for about 100$ year ago and buy 980 with no extra cash. I wish I was smarter to buy something better like 1070 at least, because with the current prices it's not that easy. @Hayley all in all you can get pretty much the same boosts with afterburner, but bios mods allows you to use its max capabilities without any additional software. You can get about +300mhz core which is great, because 980 defaults are about 1100 (≈25%). With greater cooling some get 1500, but it demands an unreasonable voltage curve.

[@metalvideos1961]

@@jat5am yeah 960 was not the best choice. but hey you live and you learn. in my country people still sell a second hand 980TI between 225 till 325 euros. i am like no way i am going to pay that much for 6 a 7 year old card. 150Tops. they really are overselling it over here.

[@RoximRox]

I'd love a more in depth video showing how to do both the final drivers and the vulkan compatibility layer.

[@alexfrideres1198]

My first gpu was an Nvidia 8500 gt, with a whopping 512mb of DDR2 memory, and an impressive 16 Cuda cores, and graphics performance completely crushed by the Xbox 360

[@louistournas120]

My first GPU was an S3 Virge DX 2 MB PCI card.

[@bricaaron3978]

My brother built a PC in 2008 and put in an 8500 GT. Even though he wasn't really a gamer, he should have spent a bit more money for a lot more performance. But at any rate, he sent it to me in order to diagnose a problem, and I installed the Crysis Demo and played it without any problems at all. It saddens me how much misinformation there is about Crysis. Any reasonable gaming PC could run it when it released.

[@Icureditwithmybrain]

My GPUs in order 8600 GT 9800 GT GTX 285 GTX 680 GTX 1070 GTX 1080 Ti RTX 3070 AMD 7900 XTX (because nvidia overpriced their GPUs)

[@idontneedthis66]

Love the DXVK translation library. I recently used it on The Witcher 1 (yep, still play that game occasionally 15 years later) to get a rather substantial FPS improvement over the native DX9 in Windows 10. Not surprising, as Vulkan is far more efficient than DX9 was, but still impressive. Highly recommend at least giving it a try on older games if you have FPS issues, especially ones that are still relatively low even on modern hardware due to being single-thread bound.

[@drsupergood8978]

Vulkan is only more efficient than D3D9 when the API is being used directly or from another more modern API. If a translation layer is being used it not only has the inefficiency of the D3D9 API but also the overhead of the translation layer. Any performance gain from such translation layer is likely due to Nvidia and AMD no longer optimising their drivers for D3D9 and heavily optimising for Vulkan. As such it is not Vulkan making the game run more efficiently, but rather the game is not being slowed down artificially due to inefficient D3D9 driver support.

[@leucome]

​@@drsupergood8978 As far as I know some of these bottleneck that slow down old game are indeed built in limitation of the DX9 API. No mater how they improve the driver if the DX9 API is wasting CPU time the driver can not fix it. DX9 was already an API meant to translate simple 3D instruction to low level hardware one anyway. So replacing it with something else don't introduce that much of a performance loss. You need to take into consideration that 3D API before Dx12 and Vulkan were also translation layer meant to make 3D programing easier. They take simple D3D and OpenGL instruction and turn them into their complex low level equivalent. So it is not that different than a translation layer.

[@drsupergood8978]

​@@leucome Yes however translating directly from D3D9 API calls to low level form used by the GPU should be more efficient than translating D3D9 API calls into Vulkan API calls into low level form used by the GPU. An additional translation should never make things faster, especially given that this translation is not optimised away like it could be if the substitution was done at application link time. The only time this would not be the case is if the Vulkan API calls into low level form used by the GPU is more optimised than the D3D9 API calls to low level form used by the GPU. Given that D3D9 is largely end of life I suspect this is what is happening. Nvidia, Intel and AMD no longer care about D3D9 performance on their newer GPUs so the drivers are not optimised to run these APIs efficiently, probably aiming for compatibility and relying on better hardware for some level of performance. However they do care a lot about Vulkan and D3D12 performance so those back ends are heavily optimised. Such translation layer is then taking advantage of optimisations in other parts of the driver to improve performance. This is assuming the translation layer is not imperfect and is gaining performance by skipping slow parts of the D3D9 API. This might explain why the driver creators do not adopt this translation approach natively and save themselves significant effort going forward. In this case it is not really a translation layer from D3D9 and more a stripped down, more performant version of D3D9 that is implemented using Vulkan or D3D12.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

It also doesn't help that the D3D9 implementation in Windows 10 is rather badly done with performance worse than under D3D11 or D3D12 or running D3D9 under Windows XP. So translating it into Vulkan should go around that bad implementation.

[@b0ne91]

One way you can get past feature level support is by running a Vulkan translation layer. Using DXVK or VKD3D. At least for single player games this works on Windows. This way, you can run Elden Ring on a GTX 680 on Windows 7. Does it run well? Not really - but on a 780 Ti, that's a whole different story.

[@blogeek7039]

Ahh, relying on the community to circumvent Nvidia's shenanigans...

[@r3n846]

I'm pretty sure Fermi doesn't support Vulkan, or if it does, the Vulkan implementation is too old for VKD3D.

[@b0ne91]

@@r3n846 You're right, Fermi (neither 1 nor 2) doesn't support Vulkan. It was a typo, I meant to say 680 (i.e. Kepler 1).

[@theultimo]

@@raresmacovei8382 sadly you have to play offline, but Kepler and maxwell 1.0 do have a dirty hack around the FL in Elden Ring. the game itself is FL 11_0 but the code to start requires 12_0. there is a bypass to feed it the wrong info and relay to the real dx12 driver

[@JanusDarke]

The way AMD & Nvidia ended GCN/Kepler support was a bit reversed. AMD released a driver then said "no more for you" while Nvidia said "once we hit this driver version support ends". The way Nvidia handled it is much more consumer friendly, which is kinda what AMD are supposed to be...

[@yancgc5098]

Yeah people shit on Nvidia for their Kepler driver support when they ended it gradually, while AMD ended early GCN GPUs driver support pretty suddenly.

[@shizzywizzy6169]

Yeah AMD really screwed over their GCN consumer base, especially those if the Fury series of cards. The Fury's had lackluster drivers all through their lifecycle and got screwed over by AMD removing support entirely way to early. Very beefy cards hardware wise but what a let down...

[@dustinm2717]

Its honestly similar to iPhone and Android, people dunk on apple for planned obsolescence and praise Android as the more friendly option, but in all honesty in spite of that reputation apple actually supports their phones for far longer than most android manufacturers do (even if apple does lots of crappy things, many Android phones only get 1-2 years of security updates and no Android version updates at all, from a quick google the iphone 6s from 2015 apparently got iOS 15)

[@EvilTurkeySlices]

@@dustinm2717 yes it did, I’m writing this on one.

[@KEEYBLADE]

I was actually using a R9 380X until 2 months ago. Like it says in this video, i never had any real problems with the games I played ( was able to play mostly on 1080p Mid - High Settings). But then I finally upgraded to RTX 3060.

[@V8Power5300]

The 290/290x/390/390x are also great budget GPU's. Especially the 290x. Yes, they run hot and draw a lot of power but are otherwise pretty cool cards

[@vB34styy]

Had a 290x since 2014 no problems so far, fingers crossed, change the thermal paste recently and running a lot cooler

[@eoinkenny3188]

@@vB34styy Same, was expecting to be running it for about 5 years. 2 years beyond that and I'm surprised that it can still chug along in fairly high 1080p settings still. Just hoping for it to outlast the current GPU apocalypse before it'll be put out to pasture.

[@HedgehogY2K]

I used to play Crossout, a DX11 game back in 2019 on my 2100m, which has a feature level of 10.1. A DX11 game running on Direct3D 10.1 in a DX11 runtime.

[@MR_FIAT]

i got it to run on a 9400GT so yea it will run on potato machines.

[@Lucromis]

The gtx 480 was a beast and still one of my favourite cards I’ve owned.

[@sburton015]

My older gaming PC that I built a few years ago with cheap used parts actually still seems to be a capable PC. It has an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 cpu from early 2008, 4 gb ddr2 ram from 2008, and a GTX 570 graphics card, slightly newer, from late 2010. For me, it will run any 3D games from 2015 or earlier. Also I have Windows 11 on that PC.

[@lysanne201]

My GPU already felt outdated when I bought it because I was planning on getting the 3080. But you can imagine how that ended up going.

[@Draglox]

What GPU

[@lysanne201]

@@Draglox I got a 1650, so it's still able to run most of my games pretty well, still crave a beter one though since I mostly play sea of thieves and I'd like a more stable fps with higher graphic quality.

[@Paltse]

Well, I'd imagine it went as well as my 1908 born gdad's plan back in the 90's to start eating flowers starting from the roots upwards. Never saw him since.

[@lysanne201]

@@superkoopatrooper4879 F I used to have a laptop before I build my PC, never even had a dedicated GPU before, just an 1,9ghz i3. Mostly just stuck to consoles for gaming and bought an Xbox one s to play sea of thieves while I was saving up.

[@amdsemporn6018]

I bought an R9 290X in 2013 when it was released and still running it. It still has decent performance and is a good choice if you need something to limb around or you are tight on budget. The only thing: I’m still mad at AMD for cutting the driver this "soon", installed the modded driver three months ago.

[@DeepSpaceNetwork]

Had that card up until last year. Work horse

[@TheShadowsoftheDead]

Just upgraded last year but can confirm this card did most of what I wanted it to do.

[@tassoss13]

I would love to see how these cards performed in Linux with proton

[@jajssblue]

Please do that DirectX to Vulcan video! Love these technical looks at hardware and drivers.

[@hyperpug2898]

It's a shame that Linux wasn't included. I feel like many games could work just by translating DX12 to Vulkan via Proton. No additional effort required. Out of the box drivers

[@TejWC]

Not only that, but Linux has the "radeon" driver that goes back to the Radeon 7000 (non-hd)! Granted, you can't use DXVK or Proton on it, but 20+ year old hardware still works!

[@Average_Mortal]

The first GPU I ever had was the "Integrated Intel HD Graphics" in my first laptop... Could run World of Warcraft and that's all I asked of it. xD Currently on a GTX 970 and it's still holding up decently well.

[@TheAdatto]

I wish i was that easily satisfied.

[@Average_Mortal]

@@TheAdatto Me too, then they wouldn't of had to make 3 shitty films... 🤣

[@Hazmatguy117]

Still rockin my 970 as well. It handles Minecraft and Skyrim just fine lol!

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

The 970 aged way better than people thought at the time. All that talk about the 3.5 GB memory hackjob seemed to turn out fine.

[@Average_Mortal]

@@HappyBeezerStudios Indeed! I think it's still a pretty decent card - slightly less powerful than a GTX 1060, just not as efficient. I heard about the whole "3.5GB VRAM" situation. Did they ever fix it? and did it only effect Nvidia Variants, or all of them? (MSI, EGVA, etc...)(I have an MSI Variant).

[@Germaco]

My first GPU was a 480. I remember my ears bleeding and my computer burning

[@Firzj]

sitting at 1050ti for like 5 years, still satisfied with all the recent games (not for streaming though)

[@derwissenskiosk8041]

That card was the go to options for a cheap gaming PC under 150€/$...

[@thegenerallorsstarfleet]

You explain these things with so much credibility, thanks Linus 🕹️

[@neolordie]

and his writers, he read a teleprompter

[@stevevolk2585]

I still remember getting my 3d FX Voodoo2 back in the day

[@lorduggae]

the Voodoo 2 was the first gpu I ever bought.

[@angryace4017]

I had 2 480 GTX in SLI back in 2010 when I built my new rig. They may not play games very well anymore, but they do make an excellent space heater. During the winter, I break the old rig out and loop heaven benchmark to supplement the central air to keep my gaming room nice and toasty 😆

[@Greenman5582]

My GTX670 was honestly doing some incredible things until yesterday when the fan became so slow it could barely start up. I’ve ordered an RTX2060 but I don’t know if it’ll last nine years with the way they build GPUs nowadays.

[@Joze1090]

How much did a 2060 run ya?

[@doplere6364]

One of my computers (It's in the backyard shed) runs an i5 3470 and a Gainward GTX670.. Now and then I play CSGO on it when I'm taking a break from doing the lawn .. It's all dusty and looks like a wreck but still manages over 120fps in HD on that game LOL

[@prydzen]

Mod a noctua onto it.

[@spicywolf6718]

Both my GeForce 9000 series cards both work and I still play Battlefield Bad Company 2, Battlefield 3, Stalker SOC/CS/COP on them to this day. There's so much community content & mod potential that keep the old Stalker games interesting & playable.

[@frillneckedlizard8529]

10:10, since you asked, I have an r9 380x, and have been running linux + steam play as my main system for a few years now, and it works pretty well. Have yet to run into a game I really wanted to play but couldn't (didn't even know they dropped closed source driver support, just running the standard open source mesa ones). Either way, really fun seeing linus mention, what is basically my exact setup (though, I am running it on linux).

[@MelissaTimea99]

My gtx960 still works great. I really want a new GPU but I have other priorities at the moment and this card is getting me through.

[@WeissM89]

0:00 Actually, I have no idea what happened to my previous (and first) graphics card. It was a Sapphire... R9 370? 3:05 something like that. I gave my old PC to my sister when I built my current one. Months later, I bought her game and but it didn't run. Turns out the GPU is not inside the PC. (I suspect the guy who installed her a new SSD, Windows 10, antivirus, all that stuff, stole it, but I have no evidence). What's bottle-necking my PC is my CPU. It will be the first thing I replace (maybe the motherboard too) as soon as I have the money.

[@jesuslover4436]

Why doesn’t this video have a thumbnail?

[@dstinnettmusic]

This entire video could be titled under “Stallman was right” If the code was open source, GPUs would never be out of date, just not capable of running the software you want to run

[@HecmarJayam]

Even with all the risks involved, this is indeed correct.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

But doesn't "incapable of running the software you want to run" pretty much imply out of date? I mean, I'm writing this on a machine with a GTX 660 Ti, which would be considered obsolete by driver support, but anything that really requires newer drivers would either run poorly or require never features anyway.

[@ShallowRavers2]

I was planning to extend my gpu lifespan by adding a second gtx 680 for SLI only to find that almost no games supported it anymore :( that was the real allure of SLI for me, buying one card on release, and adding a second used card later for ≈2x performance at a fraction of the cost.. got into it too late it seemed..

[@ryant2568]

Yep, I ended up selling one of my 970s because it was just sitting in the PC chewing up power.

[@ryant2568]

@@chicken29843 The biggest problem SLI had was that it was entirely dependent on the developer's implementation so some games would scale fantastically while others would barely scale at all.

[@Pax.YouTube]

"Games from at least few years" _shows GTA V in the list_ When the game is older than most of these GPUs.

[@MrSharkYT]

I can't count how many times I've repeated the bad memories clip, that's a solid hit