Rant on Video drivers
Long-standing graphics driver bugs, and the fixing (and occasional breaking) of the fix
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Stardock Forums
Stardock Forums
nVidia makes nice graphics cards. Having said that, their drivers and developer communication need work.
For instance, back 3 years ago, when the Geforce 3 came out, there was some sort of graphics draw distance problem, where occasionally things would be drawn as if they were in front of something, when they were in fact behind them. In particular, light sources would often go through walls. Developers in those days worked around that bug, so that their games looked right. So far, so good, right?
Fast forward to now. nVidia fixed that drawing bug probably 1 or 2 years ago. The developers of games that are 3 years old are generally not interested in working on their old games, so they remain broken. That results in games like ORB requiring older drivers in order to see the "pinging asteroids" (green expanding circles on top of asteroids, used to mark waypoints in the tutorial) using a Geforce 3.
Newer games, of course, are coded to use that particular feature according to the fixed graphics driver, and when run with older drivers that let you play ORB with all the graphics, you risk missing some of the new games features due to using an older partially broken driver.
I realize the fix is "buy a new video card", but it looks like it can't be an nVidia card, because of the previously broken (and somewhat silently fixed) API.
Maybe the real answer is not to fix long-standing video bugs without making sure every single new developer will hear about the previous problem, and code some version specific fixes into the nVidia driver, so people can play older games without totally screwing up newer ones. Every time I hear "install newest drivers", I cringe, knowing that doing so will break the graphics on my older games.
Rant ends
For instance, back 3 years ago, when the Geforce 3 came out, there was some sort of graphics draw distance problem, where occasionally things would be drawn as if they were in front of something, when they were in fact behind them. In particular, light sources would often go through walls. Developers in those days worked around that bug, so that their games looked right. So far, so good, right?
Fast forward to now. nVidia fixed that drawing bug probably 1 or 2 years ago. The developers of games that are 3 years old are generally not interested in working on their old games, so they remain broken. That results in games like ORB requiring older drivers in order to see the "pinging asteroids" (green expanding circles on top of asteroids, used to mark waypoints in the tutorial) using a Geforce 3.
Newer games, of course, are coded to use that particular feature according to the fixed graphics driver, and when run with older drivers that let you play ORB with all the graphics, you risk missing some of the new games features due to using an older partially broken driver.
I realize the fix is "buy a new video card", but it looks like it can't be an nVidia card, because of the previously broken (and somewhat silently fixed) API.
Maybe the real answer is not to fix long-standing video bugs without making sure every single new developer will hear about the previous problem, and code some version specific fixes into the nVidia driver, so people can play older games without totally screwing up newer ones. Every time I hear "install newest drivers", I cringe, knowing that doing so will break the graphics on my older games.
Rant ends