Hello, I'm MrGuaren, ESL, and as a hobby I spent over 10 years of my life developing indie games and engines for very old gaming consoles of the 90s, be it in C or even Assembly in multiple instruction sets. The primary goal has always been to push for demoscene-tier VFX using very little resources. Because that's what I got the most practice and grew up with, I have a hard time picking up the "higher levels" (let alone modern coding practices) as if I was a young boomer.
I have some questions (at the end of this message, everything else is preamble and context). My PC's specs:
Motherboard: ASUS A55BM-K, FM2+ CPU Socket
RAM: G-Skill 2x8GB DDR3 @1833Mhz
CPU (APU kind): A8-6600K (Quad-Core) @4.2GHz
iGPU (from APU): Radeon HD 8570D
dGPU: Aisurix RX 580 8GB 2048sp (With OC at 1340MHz and VRAM at 2000MHz; manufactured for PCI 3.0, but I think this board is 2.0)
The APU's been released in 2013, the dedicated graphics have been released between 2017-2018, nearly all software up to 2022-2023 works well, at 1360x768 screen resolution, except for Palia (which to the best of my knowledge runs pretty bad even in faster PCs).
I'm going for the compatibility, not really having above 60 FPS (or even 30); no AMD PSP, contains CSM module, with everything configurable and everything necessary in order to even run DOS games with CGA graphics from 1982 or 1984 IIRC (integrated) with apparent VESA 3.0 support (which, if I'm not mistaken is retrocompatible with 2.0 (and, in turn, retrocompatible with 1.X?)), and I can run GTA V, The Sims saga or Valheim and Days Gone (2022) with max settings through the Aisurix with no hassle, unless I increase the PhysX in games such as Alice Madness Returns (graphics card doesn't feature PhysX, and emulation through CPU is simply too much load).
Obviously there's no Sound Blaster card, but there's HD Audio (apparently half-retrocompatible with AC97?), so I can supplement with SBEMU (tested yesterday) and Scitech Display Doctor due to lack of video drivers for Windows 9X (I got vague memories of giving this a try and seeing it work properly, hopefully had been done through this machine but can't be sure).
Windows 1.0 up to Windows 10 tested and work with no major hassle (though I had to decrease EMS mem to get Windows 3.X to boot correctly); it's not a "castrated" system, maybe one of the only/latest that is capable of running 40 years worth of software... so I guess getting rid of this rough gem is going to be difficult. The only thing that hurts is the lack of AVX-512 support (Sky: Children of the Light just doesn't work).
My questions are:
- Is this system/cpu capable of running or using the dedicated graphics to its entirety with relative "ease" (depending on the code's optimization)? How can I know that, is it with some benchmark such as Furmark or so? I'd like to know because, again, compatibility.
- I'm not the most knowledgable on the newest HW or their prices; do I have better options for running roughly 40 years of software? or, while I know none of these are collector's items (thank goodness), should I buy replacements (hopefully of the same models) before its too late?
- Because of this high compatiblity, are there really any "design holes" I should take care of, besides not having a BASIC ROM?
Some day, once I get enough free time, I'd like to program or arrange some stuff for the heck of it... down from the lowest to the highest level. You know, finish exploring this system to its fullest potential before letting it go.