@ionusX:

I would try resetting cmos and then try updating the motherboard bios. Its possible that the newer gpu is not being recognized. And you could try disabling any type of secure boot options in bios which can can issues with gpus.

Note* just seen your other thread that your still using a OCZ 650w ZS, I think its time to retire that power supply, its possible its not supplying clean power to the system anymore, the GTX 1060 and RX 6650xt are probably more sensitive too it than that old 6950. You can drive to a Bestbuy and grab a new Corsair 650/750w or any Microcenter having more options of good psus.

I've just recently just replaced my old 2tb Firecuda HDD( it had 8gb of SSD buffer for most commonly used data) with a 4tb 2.5" Samsung SSD for $170. I have a total of 11tb of SSD storage now. But I really only used that 2tb HDD for storage and older titles, that Hybrid drive was pretty quick though.

There were 5gb/s SSD's show cased all the way back in May of 2019. The controllers used at that time were limited to 5GB/s. Back in the summer of 2019 You could grab a ASUS Hyper M.2 expansion card( and raid them if you actually needed the speed. But really the argument with 5.5gb/s vs 5 gb/s as a talking point was "short sighted". Because Even before the PS5 officially released there were SSD's available that were "faster". But the kicker is that the PS5 m.2 was disabled for nearly a year after its launch.

You had a lot of games in the 90's into the early 2000's that had FMV cut scenes some had choices during them then you had games that nothing but FMV.

Games that come to mind is Silent Steel, Toonstruck, Star Trek Starfleet Academy, Tex Murphy games, Command & Conquer, Star wars Jedi Knight Dark Forces 2

Silent Steel for me was really cool, because you were put into the shoes of a modern sub captain trying to prevent a conflict while figuring out who sabotaging the mission while being hunted by enemy sub.

Actually no Western Digital SN 850's(over 7gb/s read) were available to pre-order on the 8th of October in 2020 it took Sony until September of 2021 to update the PS5 to actually allow users to use the M.2 slot.... On top of the fact that 5gb/s m.2 SSD's were available back in 2019. It was Sony who fumbled not SSD manufactures....

the Cell did help by augmenting the RSX but the quality of doing so was totally on the developers able to work with it. Custom tech can be hit or miss with actually being beneficial or a hindrance. Adding unwanted complexity and can affect future compatibility with newer consoles.

The 360 was more advanced than the PS3 and was easier to work with too. Developers&Sony had to figure out a way to use the Cell processor's SPE cores to augment the "RSX",because the PS3 gpu alone would have been thrashed by the 360 with every turn. Sony originally designed the PS3 just with the Cell to do cpu & gpu tasks but quickly found out it was lacking. So Sony turned to Nvidia for a trimmed down G70 core aka Geforce 7800.

The Xbox 360 typically did better than PS3 in multiplat titles. The PS3 had an extra complexity in the coding for the Cell processor, having to juggle cpu work and gpu work along all the SPE cores in the Cell since it only had a single "normal" cpu core, while the 360 had a triple core cpu able to handle upto 6 threads. Also PS3 had to fight its two separate 256mb memory buffers one for system and other for vram. While the 360 had unified 512mb memory pool which allowed more flexible allocation. Then onto the main GPU of the PS3, it was a cut down Geforce 7800 gpu with fixed pixel/vertex shader processor count. While the xbox 360 had an unified shader architecture that allowed developers to use any combination of the shader processors to achieve the performance needed for what they wanted to focus on vs limited fixed amount of pixel/vertex shader processors.

While 1st party or dedicated/experienced developers were able to squeeze all they could out of the PS3 it was a nightware for everyone else which lead to worse looking and or under performing multiplatform games.

Did you do a fresh install of windows?

Also you can force perfer max performance with game profiles in the nvidia control panel

Actually it was AMD who was creating custom graphical API that catered to their products first.... It was called Mantle, the only way Nvidia would be able to use it was by disclosing their gpu information... which they were not going to do. Mantle was slick but shady move for AMD because it shifted optimizations and hardware coding to the developer shifting the blame and not having worry about spending resources patching drivers for each new title that needed tweaked. Because at that time frame AMD Direct x11 optimizations were all over the place and performance always lagged behind Nvidia.

If your referring to Nvidia software API. AMD uses their software API the same way.... look at TressFX, which performed poorly on Nvidia gpus.

The thing is that those proprietary features or "gimmicks" as some would call them, push innovation into future standards. You may complain about Nvidia over saturating games with tessellation killing AMD performance, but it forced AMD to design gpus to handle high levels of tessellation, which are now common place. Or look at Physx, putting gpu real time physics in the fore front, which lead to more open sourced physics engines that could use any gpu, which forced Nvidia to forgo that proprietary feature.

I think to problem is AMD touting it being "opensource", but when the other guy known for its "gimmickery". Is promoting more openness for dev's is not a great look.

Also I would like to suggest that more recent 8gb vram limitation increase in games has one common thread.... these newer AMD sponsorship titles.....(STAR WARS Jedi: Survivor,Resident Evil 4, THE LAST OF US etc) Is AMD purposely influencing developers to inflate vram requirements to make their gpu's look better? AMD holding back RT effects in sponsored games to cater toward their shortcomings? AMD Goaded Nvidia over vram ahead of RTX 4070 launching ..... All these things seem a bit fishy in being hypocritical in supporting "open source" yet cutting/limiting features.