7900GTX and 7950 GT should be just fine as well, but it'd be neat to try them out.

@philscomputerlab
I'd like to test.. but unfortunately the only vintage computer I have has an ati radeon 7500 LE...

ddaazzaa wrote:

I've spent a bit of time the past couple of days experimenting with drivers for both ATI and Nvidia on Windows XP Pro SP2. With […]
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I've spent a bit of time the past couple of days experimenting with drivers for both ATI and Nvidia on Windows XP Pro SP2.
With a GeForce 6800GT (AGP) the lighting showed correctly up to driver 175.80 (Beta). The last WHQL driver that works is 175.16.
Nvidia released the 177 drivers after that and the lighting is broken. The 177 release happens to coincide with the release of the 9800GTX.

I tested an 8400GS (G86 model) with the old drivers and couldn't get that to work with correct lighting. The 8xxx series introduced unified shaders so I think this is where the game breaks on a hardware level.
ATI introduced unified shaders in the HD2xxx series so I think that's where the ATI cards stop working properly.

I tested an ATI X600 (PCI-E) with the latest available XP drivers (10.2) and the lighting still works fine. So ATI cards may not have an XP driver that breaks the game.

So I think the following might be true:
*GeForce 8xxx and newer will not work.
*Radeon HD2xxx and newer will not work.
*Cards older than those above will work but have to run on Windows XP and Nvidia cards cannot use drivers 177 and newer.

If anyone has a 7900GTX, X1800, X1900, X1950 can they test to confirm whether the lighting works properly with these cards?
The best way to play this game might be with a 7800GTX/7900GTX or X1900XTX/X1950XTX. Both would get similar frame rates (flagships of the same generation) but the Nvidia solution would have better image quality with softer shadows. Since they are PCI-E cards modern processors could be used.

It would be interesting to know if there is any video card/driver combination that will work on Vista/7. At this stage I'm thinking that XP is probably going to be the only OS able to display the game correctly.

My unified shader hypothesis, was just an idea indeed.. And every manufacturer was free of maintaining the right code even with newer cards... if I hadn't melted down my HD2600 I would try myself

Besides, it wouldn't be bad if you could test that x600 on vista (and even the SM3 nvidia cards). Has this already been done?
And I would try to compare drivers package to find the different dlls, but that damn 177.xx forceware series was a rout. There are 177.39, 177.40, 177.41... so I'd have to compare dates, it seems, to find the one more close to 14 May 2008 (the date of 175.80)

If I get a chance over the weekend I might try and test the X600 with Vista and see what happens.

If the 2 driver packages are compared it might lead to a clue as to what was changed and if there is any chance of someone patching the game to work on modern gpus but that goes way above my knowledge though.

Guys, keep in mind that the X600 is basically the same card as the older 9600. It was just pure rebranding and maybe some clock boost on the top model.

I just tested the X600 on Vista x86 and the lighting actually works but there is a different issue introduced. Depending on the camera angle I was getting flickering on the water. Similar to this youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GalccgnUopk
I first tested it using the default windows WDDM drivers that were automatically installed. They were dated 21/08/2006
I then installed 7.2 and it was still the same. I didn't try any more drivers.
I will probably test the 6800GT tomorrow with Vista and see what happens.

Did some further testing with Vista.
Tested a 6800 (non GT) with the default windows WDDM driver dated 22/08/2006 and lighting was not correct and there was also the flickering on the water so it's the worst result so far. Installed driver 100.65 and it made no difference.
Tested a Ti4400 and let it install the default windows X DDM driver dated 21/06/2006 and everything works perfectly. Nvidia don't support Vista for the 4 series so you can't update the drivers.
Since an X DDM driver means it is using the old 2000/XP driver model this is probably why it works.
So it is actually possible to get this game to display correctly with Vista.

Interesting. I did try the game on 8.1 and it does run but of course without correct lights and shadows.

I've settled on using XP, a GeForce 7 card and an older 70 - 80 series driver.

Can someone try the game using WARP in Windows 8/8.1? Disable your video card in device manager which will enable WARP.

This would be an easy way to point to Nvidia\ATI that it's a Driver/video card issue if the game works properly in WARP. (If it still doesn't work right then it would be a WARP issue of course)

Note that the game will be extremely slow so may need to drop to a lower res.

Going to drill in a couple of minutes so no time to test.

I could give that a try tomorrow.

ddaazzaa wrote:

Tested a Ti4400 and let it install the default windows X DDM driver dated 21/06/2006 and everything works perfectly. Nvidia don't support Vista for the 4 series so you can't update the drivers.
Since an X DDM driver means it is using the old 2000/XP driver model this is probably why it works.
So it is actually possible to get this game to display correctly with Vista.

So why not trying proper XP drivers in vista, I mean

These may also be worth a look

@ddaazzaa @DosFreak
Could this SC:CT flashlight fix possibly change something? I mean, either in Vista (both vendors) or broken XP

Forcing the 81.98 XP drivers on Vista worked perfectly. The game displayed correctly.
The 97.46 Vista drivers had the exact same issues as the other Vista drivers.
I quickly tested 3d Analyze but it didn't seem to change anything.

I think it's safe to say that for this game to display correctly it requires XP drivers regardless of OS. So in theory it's possible to have the game running correctly on higher end Geforce 7 series cards and Vista but would anyone really want to? Forcing drivers to install on an OS they are not designed for probably isn't ideal.

As Phil said I think the ideal way to run this game is with a high end GeForce 7 series card and XP

Wow, nice results!

I didn't know you could force XP drivers. It's another option for people out there trying to get this game going. I'm working on another little project and once that's done I'd like to do a few let's play Pandora Tomorrow videos 😀

ddaazzaa wrote:

I think it's safe to say that for this game to display correctly it requires XP drivers regardless of OS. So in theory it's possible to have the game running correctly on higher end Geforce 7 series cards and Vista but would anyone really want to? Forcing drivers to install on an OS they are not designed for probably isn't ideal.

It's not ideal, but WDM drivers are designed to be forward-compatible.
Though graphics drivers are usually special.. So it seems that only selected would work. (besides they should work even on 7... but not 8)

DosFreak wrote:

Can someone try the game using WARP in Windows 8/8.1? Disable your video card in device manager which will enable WARP. […]
Show full quote

Can someone try the game using WARP in Windows 8/8.1? Disable your video card in device manager which will enable WARP.

This would be an easy way to point to Nvidia\ATI that it's a Driver/video card issue if the game works properly in WARP. (If it still doesn't work right then it would be a WARP issue of course)

Note that the game will be extremely slow so may need to drop to a lower res.

Going to drill in a couple of minutes so no time to test.

I kinda forgot about this until a few minutes ago. Gave it a quick try and what do you know... It actually works! The results are on a more positive note, a lot of the light sources seem to be working properly, although there is the water flickering that someone noted earlier. It still is buggy and not totally correct, mind you!
Unfortunately, I can't crank the details higher than Medium (High doesn't show up in the menu) and I can't force any resolution, it seems to be running on my native resolution, no matter what I do (which means it is dog slow).

Also gave it a try on my Pentium 4 system with my 6800 "GT", looking mighty fine at 1280x1024 and High Details, although it is not the smooth 60FPS experience I'm looking for. This is under Windows XP SP3 and 77.77 drivers.

F2bnp wrote:

Also gave it a try on my Pentium 4 system with my 6800 "GT", looking mighty fine at 1280x1024 and High Details, although it is not the smooth 60FPS experience I'm looking for. This is under Windows XP SP3 and 77.77 drivers.

I found that a 6600GT wasn't faster than a 5950 Ultra. A 7 series card however is able to run the game at a constant 60 fps most of the time. I had good results with a 7800 GTX and there are even faster cards available like the 7800 GTX 512 or the 7900 GTX.

Part of me wishes I had never sold my 7800 GTX... What the hell was I thinking? 😵

They should still be quite easy to obtain.

So.. I checked these drivers, in the order:

• Forceware 175.80 leaked: 14/05/2008
• Forceware 175.19 WHQL: ...16/05/2008
• Forceware 177.39 physx: ...16/06/2008
• Forceware 177.40 beta: ......17/06/2008
• Forceware 177.41 WHQL: ...18/06/2008

It seems that 175.19 are actually newer than 175.80.
Then, for simplicity's sake I would avoid to download international drivers (so installer size is halved)
And I can't understand why.. but Guru3D drivers appear as if they were supporting different products... files are really different..
So I'd recommend comparing nvidia website drivers with nvidia website drivers and guru3d with guru3d..

If just the Wayback Machine did work today... nevermind. I hope something will come out eventually.
Remember that you can also open installers with 7-zip and use windows "expand" tool to retrieve dll and sys

EDIT: wtf. There's even 177.26, 177.35... and an entire compilation of drivers with 25 releases just between 175.80 and 177.26!
With instructions on .inf modding (thanks to nvidia unified drivers architecture, desktop/mobile/quadro drivers should be interchangeable)

Just tried the game on my rebuilt WinXP machine using an X1900XT and the 10.2 drivers , the lighting seems to display correctly

the frame rate isn't the highest but it is running in 1600X1200 , so that doesn't help it. Also i had EAX HD enabled while using an SBLive card (at least for now, I will get get an X-fi or Audigy2 at some point) so that might also be eating into CPU resources. I would assume these are the best ATI cards one can use with the game, and probably some of the best overall (apart from maybe an X1900XTX and 7950GX2)

Cool, thanks for sharing!

The 7800GTX does quite well at 1600 x 1200. Played a bit last night.