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

Re:nVidia not to blame

[cliffski]

I'm a game dev who uses a very out of date API for my games (DirectX 7). I do 2D turn based games, so there is zero incentive for me to use a newer API, which would mean rewriting engine code.
The problem is not so much that newer cards screw up rendering of old games (although this *can* happen), but that no card driver seems to stick 100% to the directx standard. DirectX is HEAVEN for game devs, because in theory it means we can write to a single standard for the windows platform, and have our games work on any card.
The problem is, there are so many minor quirks, differences and tweaks in the way each card implements the same directx calls, that in practice you will *always* encounter people who have rendering issues just on their PC. I wish ATI, intel (worst offenders) and nVdia would take more time to ensure that their cards actually come closer to the supplied reference rasterizer in terms of results. The entire point of directx is to allow devs to be free of individual card woes. shoddy drivers can undo all of that work.

Re:Pure gaming bliss.

[rhyder128k]

I think that a new generation of emulators is probably a better idea for older games. I wonder what it would take to software emulate a 3dfx voodoo 1 card? Any such attempt could offload some of the work onto the real GPU, of course.