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?"

Comments

My next card will be Ati...

[A beautiful mind]

...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.

Re:My next card will be Ati...

[Randle_Revar]

They already released two large documents, and it would seem pretty silly to release that much and then not follow up on the rest of the promise. I mean, if you aren't going to keep your promise, why not go all the way and and not keep any of it?

Re:Old games in general

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, expecting backward compatability from nVidia, or ATI is asking a bit much these days. Hardward vendors, AND software vendors are looking to future performance and one-upmanship for the competitor. It's the same thing with processor performance thats going on between Intel and AMD.

As someone who is a fan of Theif series, hearing about this dismays me quite a bit. I have several games that are 5-6~ years old, like Theif, that I wouldn't mind loading just to have available to play. I would expect graphics performance to increase over the years. NOT degrade.

nVidia not to blame

[zokier]

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.

Virtualization to the rescue

[davidwr]

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.

Re:16-bit ?

[NSParadox]

16-bit as in 16-bit integer color per pixel, as opposed to 32-bit floating point color per pixel that all video cards have supported since the notorious NVIDIA GeForce FX/ATI Radeon 9700 series. This has nothing to do with 16-bit memory utilization/integer size vs. 32-bit.

Not merely a driver issue

[cpt kangarooski]

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.

Authenticode price is prohibitive for hobbyists

[tepples]

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? Unless the driver is one of those specific kinds of drivers that can run entirely in user space, you can't use drivers you compiled yourself because they are not digitally signed. Workarounds are to 1. press F8 every time you start Windows Vista or 2. pay $499 per year for a VeriSign code signing certificate and sign your code.

The damn thing generates a tick at the refresh rate of my monitor Perhaps this has something to do with the ability to block on the start of vertical blanking, which is crucial for smooth animation in PC games.

Re:Pure gaming bliss.

[gravos]

Exactly. One of the biggest reasons to be a PC gamer is because you can still run most of yesterday's games today, unlike on consoles.

If nVidia is taking that ability away, then PCs start to look a whole lot more like consoles...

Re:Old games in general

[Splab]

Find the exe file, right click, properties, pick the compatibility pane, check the run this program in compatibility mode for and pick a suitable version of windows. Also you might want to disable advanced services and visual themes.

Hope it works.