 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 if I didn't tell you about our sponsor, GlassWire. Are you having poor quality video meetings? Use GlassWire and instantly see what apps are wasting your bandwidth during your meeting and block them. You get 25% off today using code Linus 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 Doom Eternal and DiRT 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 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 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 699. 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 gaze 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 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 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 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 12 380X 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 new hardware in order to be effectively utilized or even to run at all. 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 9.1 to 12.1. Direct3D 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 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 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 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 380X, 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. I can't, 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 Nimesh drivers or Avernami, Amernami, Amernim, Amernim, Amernim, Nimesh drivers or Amernim 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 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 reg 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 Vulkan, 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 followup about that. It should also be noted that these drivers, while 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 and solid compatibility between your wallet and our sponsor. 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Try FreshBooks free for 30 days, no credit card required, by going to freshbooks.com slash 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 gain. Look at us go, saving the world, keeping one GPU out of a landfill at a time. Good job, Anthony.