- You never forget your first GPU,
all the good memories you had and the bad.
But all good things must come to an end.
I don't wanna 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 weird aunt still used Facebook.
And to find out how screwed I would be
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We began our investigation by plopping these five GPUs
onto our Ryzen 5800 X 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 Doom Eternal 5,
all of the titles that 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 ever thing age like fine milk?
Out of the 25 games we tested,
it only managed five of them.
All of which were ever amongst the oldest in our suite
or more basic free to play and E-Sports 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,
it's paid for specs indicate that it should have
about the same horse power 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 gaze
to something a little newer?
Like our new cable ties at lttstore.com.
So many pretty colors. Right.
And the R9380X.
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 three ADX
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 a 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 card having two GPUs
on the same PCB.
But the bigger reason is feature support.
The 380 X 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 borrowing 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 Direct3D.
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 Direct3D, which is why our DirectX 12380X
handled newer DirectX 12 games so well.
At least to the best of its geriatric abilities,
but Linus, you might say, 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 Direct3D.
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 newer hardware
in order to be effectively utilized or even to run it all.
And this is where our soup gets a little murky.
Direct3D 11, which was released with Windows 7
as part of DirectX 11 covers feature levels nine one
to 12 one.
Direct3D 12 came with Windows 10 as part of DirectX 12
and spans feature 11 zero to 12 two 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 zero feature level
of Direct3D.
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.
While 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 card
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 and 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 380 X
play Halo Infinite, a title that the card
should theoretically support if DirectX compliant charts
are anything to go by, but play it like this.
(gunshots blasting)
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 gonna use to fix this issue
are referred to as Nimez Drivers or Amernime,
Nimez Drivers or Amernime 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 modern drivers,
we should even expect big improvements and performance
for applications that use both open CL and open GL.
For our part though,
we didn't find much difference in performance
in the games we tested,
but fellow YouTuber Budget Builds Official 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 they're
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 in impressive, do have their limits.
They're not gonna 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 prices 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.
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Check out our video, where we use hacked in video drivers
to turn a mining GPU into one that could game.
Look at us go, saving the world,
keeping one GPU outta a land field at a time.
Good job, Anthony.