keeping steam from installing legacy physx driver on older game?

zalazin

[H]ard|Gawd
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I just bought Overlord ffor the PC . I bought it through amazon I did not relize it was going to be from steam , I added and activated game. What I don't want is for the Nvidia legacy or what ever geforce Physx drivers to install. I have an actual Ageia PPU installed and the Nvidia drivers woul totally screwup the Physx card drivers I have installed. The game was originally released in 2007 yes I know its an old game. The game does not need the legacy drivers if an Ageia card is present. How do I stop this from happening?
 
When installing nvidia drivers select the custom option and then deselect nvidia physx drivers from installing.

I had a ppu also, to be honest though if you have a semi decent video card then it will perform better than the aegia ppu, though if I remember it depends on if the nvidia physx drivers support said game.

But if you dont want the nvidia physx drivers then do the custom install and also you can uninstall them and only them via the installed programs menu in windows control panel.
 
What I meant is when steam installs a game it automatically installs physx drivers that is what I don't want
 
my mistake it is overlord 2 that supports ppu, Got it and ppu physx does work.
 
Can't you just uninstall it from programs and features after the game installs and then put back the version you need?
 
Oh No not that easy. new Nvidia drivers erase support for Ageia PPU. You have too do all this...
 
I thought that newer GeForce cards were superior to Ageia cards at PhysX now, anyway? Most people started just using their old graphics cards for PhysX a long time ago. Or am I wrong? Surely NVidia wouldn't have disabled support if they were still worth using.
 
Sure they would. Nvidia didn't want competition so they bought out Ageia then used Physx as a marketing gimmick. As far as Geforce being superior. BS. on games that support the PPU. I find the Ageia PPU superior and smoother. If Geforce is more powerful why can't t they run the PPU levels of Cellfactor? A dedicated device is superior to an added function in a video card.
 
Sure they would. Nvidia didn't want competition so they bought out Ageia then used Physx as a marketing gimmick. As far as Geforce being superior. BS. on games that support the PPU. I find the Ageia PPU superior and smoother. If Geforce is more powerful why can't t they run the PPU levels of Cellfactor? A dedicated device is superior to an added function in a video card.

I do see your point, but bear in mind that we're talking about at least an 8-year old product here. Some newer Intel IGPs are superior to old GeForce cards now. If Ageia were still around making these cards, you would be correct about the dedicated device being superior... but I find it hard to believe that an 8-year old piece of hardware is that much better just because it's dedicated. Is an 8-year old GeForce card better than Intel HD Graphics on Skylake? Not really.

My answer for that question is that Cellfactor was probably designed around the Ageia unit. I have an old Linux game, SimCity 3000, that won't run on anything but Red Hat 6 without patching, and that version of Red Hat only works with ancient Pentium II era graphics cards. You can't even run it in a VM, I've tried. That doesn't make those graphics cards superior, but those particular pieces of software will perform better with those old graphics cards that have drivers available than they will with any newer ones that are forced to fall back to a VGA compatibility mode.

So while I would concede that the Ageia unit might be superior for playing Cellfactor, that doesn't mean it's a superior piece of hardware in absolute terms. I mean, it might be, but it seems unlikely after this much time has passed. It's probably better than some older or lower-end GeForce cards, but I doubt it's better than what modern cards can do.

The game you're talking about was released in 2007... so of course it's smoother with the hardware it was designed to run on. It was likely taking advantage of that specific architecture as there was no other product on the market at the time that could do the same thing, and less smooth on newer hardware because the newer hardware is having to use a fallback mode.
 
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I concede your point on newer games, But I wonder what might have been. After all Nvidia lacked respect for their own customers by disabling both PPU and Geforce phsyx for use with AMD cards. Mostly now Physx is just a few particle effects etc in games, I don't see any real immersive physx. Before you say I am an AMD fanboy my System is A A10-7870K with a Geforce GTX660TI and Ageia PCi physx card. Thanks for you opinion and input .....
 
Oh No not that easy. new Nvidia drivers erase support for Ageia PPU. You have too do all this...


Soooo... the first part where you have the needed files copied to a different location. If you just keep those files for later use, it should take only a couple minutes max to restore Ageia support.

And if you wanted to automate the process, it would only take a very simple batch file to do so.

From the "you have to do all this", I was kinda expecting some registry editing, etc., but the steps needed are very simple and quick.
 
But don't driver installs make changes to the registry? In that case recopy just the files would not work. Currently what I do is image my C drive to a second SSD using Macrium reflect thus I can restore if newer drivers screw up the Ageia ones. I might just do an experiment to see if just copying the folders back would work.
 
But don't driver installs make changes to the registry? In that case recopy just the files would not work. Currently what I do is image my C drive to a second SSD using Macrium reflect thus I can restore if newer drivers screw up the Ageia ones. I might just do an experiment to see if just copying the folders back would work.

For the PhysX stuff it should just work.
 
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