Can you game WITHOUT driver updates?

Is your GPU getting long in the tooth? Or maybe your new graphics card crapped out, so you are stuck gaming on your old workhorse. Just how screwed are you if you want to play new games on an old Nvidia or AMD card?

Buy a GPU? LOL, maybe an APU to tide you over.

Purchases made through some store links may provide some compensation to Linus Media Group.

FOLLOW US ELSEWHERE
---------------------------------------------------

MUSIC CREDIT
---------------------------------------------------
Intro: Laszlo - Supernova

Outro: Approaching Nirvana - Sugar High

CHAPTERS
---------------------------------------------------
0:00 Intro
1:02 Ground Rules
1:41 Game Compatibility Results
4:09 DirectX 12
4:57 Direct3D
5:30 What are Feature Levels
7:46 Modded Drivers for AMD
10:06 Get it? SCOPE?
10:16 Limitations of Drivers
11:42 Outro

[LordMaliscence]

Nvidia: *ends driver support for 700 series top-of-the-line card*
Also Nvidia: *rebrands a GT430 and sells it as a GT730 for over $100 in 2022*

[BudgetBuildsOfficial]

Hey it’s me 9:30. Those Drivers completely revolutionised the HD7870 for me again as it’s now gone back off to a family member who’s still using it today 👍

AMD needs to work on their final drivers as no HD Series cards seem to have ever got final drivers. 👍

Very much enjoyed the video.

[kwizzeh]

I've always gave props to the ATI/Radeon community keeping older cards alive with their custom/modified drivers even though I'm firmly on team Green now.

[AeltgenXIV]

“The older we get the less we can play, right?” That hurts Linus so damn true :(

[Dewm_]

I've loved using Vulkan through a translation layer for a long time now, and it's been great. Quite a few games I've noticed have even gained performance,
or have reduced things like frame pacing issues; on top of better alt-tab support. I would love to see a video on this because I feel it should be a more popular practice
not just for using old hardware on newer games, but also the opposite: playing old games on newer hardware.
Not only does this push development for Vulkan, but also helps the push for better support for these sort of APIs which is beneficial to linux adoption.
It's the perfect stepping stone that gives a lot of benefits to all sorts of people, and I'd love to see more on this subject.

[Mixa_Lv]

I probably made a good decision when I traded my previous 2Gb GTX 770 for a 4GB R9 380 back in 2017. It was about as powerful, but I figured that having newer architecture and 4Gb of vram was probably going to be more future-proof. I'm going to investigate these modded drivers now, thanks for that.

[neemabrown]

And of course, on Linux, this problem is largely a non-issue for AMD users, because the open-source driver developers (some of whom work for AMD) maintain support for these older cards long after AMD officially stops.

For Nvidia users it's rather less rosy, especially for more recent GPUs where Nvidia's design and IP choices mean that an open-source driver with reasonable performance cannot be made easily, because it must be entirely reverse-engineered. Particularly problematic is the fact that the GPU defaults to its minimum clock speed on boot, and figuring out how to reclock it has taken a great deal of effort. While the people in charge of many Linux distributions will attempt to provide legacy versions of the binary Nvidia drivers which are compatible with the other software in their repositories, that only works for so long without Nvidia's support, because eventually some new version of the graphics pipeline outside the driver will cause a breaking change (as is already the case for 300-series cards and older). For the moment, people with unsupported GPUs which were released after Nvidia stopped releasing critical data face an unfortunate choice between having a card that performs more or less as advertised and having an up-to-date system.

[jackpenner]

I’m still running an r9 280x to this day, modded drivers are a life saver. Runs all my game perfect.

[kevinstarlike]

I bought that exact model of R9 380X as my first discrete GPU.
Sold it in 2017 to get a GTX 1080 (which I still have today). I like to think that whoever bought my little 380X on ebay saw this video and is happy about the great deal they got and proud of the little red guy

[Zmbaru]

I would love to see a similar look at older CPUs. I have a feeling that a 10 year old CPU will actually still work quite well as long as the motherboard is still reasonably supported

[TheDemocrab]

You guys should do a video on graphics API translators, it's incredibly handy technology. It was mentioned in this video that you can convert newer, unsupported APIs to older ones but it actually goes in reverse too: Some more niche features of old graphics APIs are software emulated on the CPU these days and the oldest ones aren't even supported at all, plus the converters can add in graphical fixes so it's becoming increasingly useful for retro gaming. Hell, if you wanna play Fallout New Vegas, The Sims 2 or GTA IV then DXVK is the easiest way to fix the graphics pipeline and get solid performance without the common bugs.

Same with Win9x, so many old games that won't work natively on modern windows will work fine when you install dgvoodoo2 which converts 3DFX Glide and old DX code into more modern code that modern GPUs can run. I use it to play Sims 1 and Gearhead Garage among other ancient games.

[MrRickTic]

THIS IS THE KIND OF VIDEOS I MISS FROM LTT!!!! Ive been a sub for longer than i care to admit and was a sub of Floatplane till i realized i didn't have disposable income. Love seeing videos like this that really help gamers using older hardware. Ive wanted to help kids get into gaming but couldn't afford to do it. With this knowledge i can get some less fortunate kids gaming for far less if not free. Thank you guys. Great work!

[KageBlink]

To be honest, following your channel since my first builds, you guys managed to keep me well informed and up to date in what to upgrade to. You made a good call in saying I should upgrade my rig early and buy a new graphics card, and then BAM the shortage happened. I bought a modest rx 5600xt, it's not amazing, I don't game at 4k, but it's really good 1440p and 4k videos. But it's also very good at gaming 1080p and even 1440p just fine. Even runs my VR setup much better than my old builds. So again, thank you LTT so much for doing what you do.

[bne]

The new Kernel for AMD apparently has made it nearly impossible to mod old drivers anymore. With the NimeZ, you can even add ReBar (aka Smart Access Memory) to RX 580 8GB cards and older GCN cards like the R9 390, 380X etc. It's a shame AMD is cracking down and making further development of these drivers near impossible for the future.

[Bushidounohana]

Very interested in seeing how Proton-related tech is serving these older cards in Windows. Great work, as always!

[stumblinzz]

The quality of this video has been amazing so far. Smooth, informational, easy to understand, keeping it high level enough, visuals dialed in. Presentation from Linus with things like verbal and visual cues were well timed.

Im saying this mainly because I like some of the other hosts on LTT but if I was going to write home as to why I specifically like Linus, Luke, and Anthony, those are my big asks.

[Razear]

The modding community never ceases to amaze. That's the incredible thing about PC gaming, smart people working together to fix and improve things that benefit the userbase.

[BabsOfEao]

This is the kind of LTT video that I'd like to see more of. It'd be interesting to see how old you can go for every component in your system and still have a competent machine.

[Wlfenstrike]

DXVK has been a godsend for my ancient GT 640 that I use on my office PC. I know that card was meant to run Xbox 360 era games, but just for shits and giggles I still like to tinker with it like I did a decade ago and it still works pretty fine with certain expectations in check.

[WrenIsWitty]

Finally, a major tech YouTube channel using my definition of playable games.