nVidia (Game Related)

nVidia has dumped support for older games...

Their new drivers are 'breaking' games that at one time worked on their video cards (such as the 8 series [and lower]). Players have had to 'roll-back' their drivers to play their favorite games, some of which are only 1 to 2 years old. The games work with the older drivers, which means it's a driver (software) issue and not a hardware issue.

This wouldn't be much of a problem except that older drivers may be less secure and newer games require newer drivers. This means that players have to install old drivers to play old games, then new drivers to play new games, then re-install the old drivers to play their old games. (A very foolish thing, considering that nVidia could support both the new games and old games with one set of drivers!)

If this keeps up I could see nVidia losing a lot of market share. There are a lot of great games that have been made and have cult-like fallowings. Neverwinter Nights (the first one), Vampire Bloodlines, and Silent Storm to name a few. Just cause a game is 'old' doesn't mean no one wants to play it. Just cause there aren't copies on the shelves or being sold doesn't mean no one is enjoying them (or trying to enjoy them).

Every video card I've ever purchased to date has been an nVidia video card. Now I'm feeling let down by nVidia and will have to seek other video card venders unless nVidia wakes up and realizes how many people they're pissing off.

Until next time...

Sources:
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=2222f2057d4257600d2f5559b7e367d2&t=98609
http://www.strategycore.co.uk/forums/Silent-Storm-Sentinals-Issue-t6619.html
http://games.slashdot.org/games/07/09/16/1940215.shtml
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?act=ST&f=33&t=77021
http://www.ironworksforum.com/ubb/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=7;t=003894