Forcing old hardware to run newer games

[Techno]

I was sort of bored last night so I fiddled around with an old Geforce4 MX 420 card for about 3 hours and after some overclocking and driver tweaking I finally got Portal to run on the card at 10 FPS which was actually a real surprise to me. I was able to emulate pixel shader 1.1 which is the requirement to run Portal. I turned the resolution down to 640x480 and all graphical settings on low quality.



Geforce4 MX 420 64MB 335mhz/430mhz (factory clock's 250mhz/166mhz)

The game is completely unplayable at just 10 fps but it was a fun experiment. Just to note. Before I did the tweaking and overclocking the game wouldn't even launch. It would say "Your video card must have pixel shader 1.1 or higher in order to play." or something along those lines. There were a few instances I got the game to launch early on but it managed to chug at 0-1 fps at the menu screen, lol.

Here is a screenshot from www.canirunit.com for Portal.

[jlreich]

Very fun experiment.

How did you emulate the shader model?