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Is nVidia Support for Older 3D Games Fading?
BrendaEM writes "A thread on Through the Looking Glass depicts the plight of fans of the original Thief Series and System Shock 2, who are asking nVidia fix rendering issues these 3D 16-bit games on their newer video cards and drivers. In the case of the original Thief series, in which the games build tension by their use of light and shadow, the rendering has been badly degraded from that which was originally intended. In another Slashdot article, the author asked the question whether or not video games were art. If one of the greatest video games of all time, with a growing wealth of hundreds of fan produced missions, as well as an entire full-sized expansion, does not play well because legacy support diminishes, then what will happen to lesser 3D video games?"
You haven't lived until you've tried getting Final Fantasy VII for PC running on a modern machine.
are tending to break more than play these days. I remember a few weeks ago I tried to load up Mechwarrior 4 under winXP only to find that the program would minimize to the task tray at the beginning and never maximize afterwards. Sure this had nothing to do with the 3D drivers, most likely a video codec or something, but regardless... old games are getting harder and harder to play on current systems that shouldn't have a problem with backwards compatibility.
With such a wealth of poorly phrased material in the article blurb, I think I'd have to look past simple over-use of punctuation and right on to the following senseless sentence:
who are asking nVidia fix rendering issues these 3D 16-bit games on their newer video cards and drivers.
...only because it is going to have an open source driver.
Technically by the way, the specs would allow a open source Windows driver to be written aswell instead of the one supplied by ati for windows, right?
Nvidia is not really good with their drivers lately quality-wise and of course they don't even set their eyesight on things like working well with a tickless kernel. The damn thing generates a tick at the refresh rate of my monitor, a problem I cannot fix because the code is closed. Otherwise my system would be around 3-4 ticks per second when idle, so it is an ugly thing.
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I'm quite sure that game programmers are using every undocumented feature and bug they can find to achieve better performance and to allow creating better games, and so they inheritely are fragile. I assume also that situation is getting better as API's are getting better and performance of hardware has increased giving programmers more freedom to produce good code vs fast code.
We at Slashdot complain about cruft!
I also like to be able to play my old games in modern machines, but alas, that is not always possible. Keep a few old machines handy, in case you need to play your old DOS favorites, or your Win9x ones.
My only hope is that at some time, a combination of modern HW+Virtualization done right allow me to play my old favourites in modern HW, retiring in the process my compatibility fleet of computers.
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Those older video cards that have open specs will find themselves virtualized or emulated. Of course, there may be a 5-10 year or longer gap before an emulated video card can perform as well as the original. But in 2015, playing games from 2000 should be no problem, provided at least some vintage video cards are open-spec.
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Starting around Detonator version 60.xx, the PC version of Soul Reaver would no longer run on Windows XP. Reverting to the earlier Detonator versions fixed the problem. I assumed at the time that NVidia had tweaked it to improve performance in the rice-gamer benchmarks at the expense of real-world compatibility.
The initial release of NVidia drivers for Vista made the game run correctly. My assumption then was that Microsoft had tightened the restrictions on compatibility with the new driver model. I haven't tried it since then to see if that's still the case.
In any case, it's pretty annoying. I have a copy of System Shock 2 I've been meaning to play for some time, and there are lots of other good old games out there. I would switch to ATI, but their drivers are abysmal in my experience.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
The problem with thief/sshock2 is that the 8800 series cards do not seem to do any dithering which leads to those ugly colors when using a 16bpp mode. The interesting thing however is that the cards claim they support dithering in D3D (D3DPRASTERCAPS_DITHER caps bit is set, which means "Device can dither to improve color resolution.") but they still just do not do it.
Makes me wonder if it is just something that's not implemented yet on the drivers or is it a hardware limitation. Either way the driver should not say it supports dithering if it doesn't.
Someone who knows about graphics, please explain: What can be wrong in a driver that affects only old games? A bug in rendering a certain version of directx? Wouldn't that break all of the games of that era (or the ones that use the same api) instead of a few ones?
...3D 16-bit...
In what way 16-bit, and why should this matter?
Even the original System Shock used a 32-bit protected-mode extender. I'd have thought that almost all DirectX/OpenGL games would be Win32 applications.
There's also a copyright issue involved; even the developer will cease publishing and supporting the game over time, and it's likely that it will stop being compatible with modern hardware and software due to underlying changes in APIs and such.
Part of the solution to this from a legal angle (in the US at least) would be: to mandate registration for all works for which a US copyright is sought; to mandate the deposit of a full, unprotected/unencrypted copy of the software and source, plus additional comments and information, so as to enable a programmer of ordinary skill (cf. PHOSITA in the patent field) to understand and make use of it freely; and to have a very short maximum copyright term -- perhaps five years -- in recognition of the especially short commercial lifetime of software.
As much as it would be great for the original parties -- the creators of the game, the OS, the hardware, etc. -- to provide long-term support, ultimately, it's safer to not put all of our eggs in that basket. Instead we should make sure that the resources are available so that even if they're not interested, but some third party is, that the software can be kept running in one way or another.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
AMD/ATI released the hardware specs, that's what my next card will be.
If SS2 can be run under Wine then screw Microsoft too.
Glass
At least not in the way you seem to think.
ATI hasn't announced anything new. They've simply brought attention to the fact that they will support open source efforts, as they always have.
As always, there will be 3d drivers for paleolithic versions of their cards, and 2d for everything else. If you actually want to use up to date cards, you'll have to use the closed drivers.
So you might as well just buy Nvidia cards, since their closed drivers work.
I thought one of the things Windows had going for it was backward compatibility. I guess not. I love the old Mechwarrior games, and older flight simulators too. Trying to get any of these working on Vista with Nvidia is almost like trying to get them to work on Wine. Practically impossible. The PC, in this case has a 2.75 ghz A64, 2 gigs of ram, and a 6800 Ultra. Time to try VMWare.
Also, Falcon 4: Alllied Force on Vista with Nvidia is pretty broken too and it's only two years old. Although it is on an older engine. I can't get 32-bit color to work without artifacts, the IQ is pretty blurry, and performance is awful.
I set up two desktop PCs in my work area, a relatively modern one, and an old Win98 box. While I did so to help with my troubleshooting (I'm a PC tech), I found that it's pretty convenient to have the old box to play the older games in my software library.
How the hell can we play that, nowadays?
Well, yes. Direct3D is a pretty messy spec; the game asks for the capability bits, and gets I think over 100 bits back with information like "supports fog" etc... they kind of crufted up over time. If the app tries to use a capability the card doesn't have, it crashes. In contrast, with OpenGL, the app can set "prefer accuracy", "neutral", or "prefer speed", and CAN query for various capabilities, but if it uses a missing capability, it's either silenty dropped ("prefer speed") or emulated in software (prefer quality).. with neutral, any slow ops are dropped, and stuff that's quick to emulate is emulated (anything better than about a Rage128 just won't have to emulate much if anything, barring DirectX 9.0-equivalent features added in OpenGL 2.0). Pretty much since DirectX 3 (when Direct3D was put in) some people urged game programmers to write for OpenGL, and suggested gamers insist on this as well. Pretty much by using Direct3D so persistently, they've gotten what they deserve 8-).
This will sound silly, but I wonder if someone could port wine to Windows? It sounds ridiculous on the surface, but wine includes a full Direct3D implementation (up through 9.0c I believe..), and, more relevantly, all older Direct3D versions. It utilizes opengl, so it may well get those unhappy apps running fine.
In the case of these games, NVidia's driver is probably not doing the right things with regards to some older DirectX edges. At some point the API's
have to be dropped- problem is they're still advertising something that the game wants if it's there and the implementation in the current drivers
is busted for that something. Not knowing all of what those games use out of DirectX, I couldn't say- a little further up towards the top of the
conversation, someone mentioned dithering being broken; that shouldn't keep a game from running (just make it render like crap under some specific
conditions), but in the end, it could indicate the likelihood of something else not being done right in the driver.
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I have a quite low-end machine (AMD 3200+, nVidia 7600GS), and I often play games of yesteryear. Not long ago, I was looking to play one of my old flight sims. First effort was "European Air War". It wouldn't run because my graphics drivers no longer support 8-bit colour. After much searching, there was an unofficial 16-bit texture pack which did make flying possible, but it's far from problem-free.
Oh well, I'll have a bit of arcade tomfoolery with "Crimson Skies". Nope. My drivers no longer support textures that are not a power of 2. Bah.
I'm no zealot, but I do believe that this would be less likely to happen with open source drivers.
I remember I using 3Dfx wrapper software to play old games since no one uses 3Dfx cards anymore these days. We need something like this for older NVIDIA cards. Actually do they exist that I don't know about?
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I use the latest version of the Catalyst drivers. Day Of Defeat and all other HL1 mods were unplayable in OpenGL, and barely tolerable in Direct3D. I proceeded to switch to the Omega alternative, and all is well now.
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You might want to pull out your spectacles. If you actually read what you responded to, I did note that the OS ATI drivers for paleolithic cards were fine.
64-bit MS OSes, Vista and XP, don't allow for unsigned kernel drivers. The 32-bit ones still do, including Vista. Also I believe the graphics drivers are all user mode in Vista. Every time I install the nVidia beta drivers, it snivels about them not being signed, but allows it to proceed (I am running 64-bit).
Note that even ATI's closed source drivers don't support that. Neither do Intel's.
Historically ATI has always shared specs. I wasn't aware that they hadn't for those GPU's, but this still isn't news, it's just a return to business as usual.
Given that ATI's drivers suck ass on both windows and linux, I suspect the problem isn't solely with the drivers.
With the hardware in these videocards advancing - the drivers will little, by little stop supporting games from the Win95/98 era.
I am a Thief fan, a BIG one. I own all series and downloaded each and every fan mission. I have tried to make my own but have since stopped. It was at first because my Pentium Pro, 96mb RAM and 8mb Video card could not support Thief 2's DromEd program very well and it required a Pentium 2 CPU. But I later upgraded to an Athlon 2500XP and 128mb Video card and Windows XP. I had trouble installing these games from the getgo, especially my favorite, Thief 1 & Thief Gold. Because of that I had to hunt down old and cheap computer parts.
I haven't been in touch with the fan scene but I doubt you can get Thief 2 to play on Vista and even on Xp with the latest drivers if you have a high end videocard that has been out for over a year now.
The architecture in the hardware has changed to where new drivers no longer support older architecture GPUs. If you want to experience these games then you have to hunt down Pentium 2/3 hardware plus 16mb Voodoo3 or 32mb TNT2 cards and hard to find Win98 drivers for motherboard drivers, etc to get these games to work ok.
I have built one but using my current PC and school, I am still unable to continue working on my fan mission, but I plan to someday. The Thief Fan Mission scene will never die out as long as there still fans out there dedicated to keep the series alive and well by making more adventurous and innovative level designs. Calendra's Cistern is one of my favorites as well as Thief2x.
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You can't necessarily lay all the blame on the hardware vendor, either. A lot of game programmers (especially back then) were used to programming on the edge. They shoved the software out the door if it worked for them, whether or not they dotted all their i's and crossed all their t's--games aren't written to some idealized standard, but with whatever hardware and drivers are available at the time (and often with avoidable bugs anyway). Drivers ended up riddled with compatibility hacks to workaround this or that game's bugs. As time goes by, nobody bothers maintaining those hacks, crufty workaround code gets removed in favor of cleaner code paths, and older games break.
Which is why it's all the more important that drivers don't cater to broken software. But alas, if it's a big game (like, say, BioShock), you have to cater or lose out to the other guy.
I mean, I could tell you to use OpenGL -- everything you said about DirectX is true of OpenGL/SDL -- but I don't know if it would be any better with this particular problem.
But 2D turn-based games? Are you really doing so much animation that you need to accelerate it at all?
(Oh, and regardless, it's poor encapsulation if you're tied to one graphics API anyway. Most visible example, probably: Unreal (specifically Unreal Tournament 2003/04), which runs on DirectX, OpenGL, and various consoles, with the same engine. I know UT04 can change resolution without restarting the program, along with most settings, so it's even possible that it can change APIs in the middle of a firefight.)
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... access the source code to force companies to release code of old games into public domain. Since gamers have legal rights to be able to play the games they legally purchased and be able to fix them when they stop working. Freespace 2 SCP would not have been possible without the source, and emulation takes a long time and is imperfect. It would be better if people could expand, update and maintain the actual source.
For the first time after several years of closed source only drivers, ATI has released at least some hardware documentation. That makes their promise of eventually releasing full documentation halfway credible.
Of course, they still can reconsider before the full documentation is out. But at the moment, they have somewhat more credibility with the Open Source community than NVidia.
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I haven't read any posts but I figure the same thing will happen for those "video" games that start not working right as what happens with art. Older working cards will cost a lot more money as support "dies" in the newer ones. Just as art, nothing makes something more valuable then when something(one) dies :)
I can run a OS 8.6 game using classic support on OS X 10.4.10 Tiger running on Quad G5. I didn't have to ask anyones support to run the game flawlessly since game is coded using OpenGL technology.
I bet the games mentioned are direct3d games yes?
Who promised complete backwards compatibility while developing DirectX technology? MS or Nvidia?