News Nvidia officially drops 32-bit OS support

So long as the download links are maintained for a few more years it's about time - and I say that as someone maintaining my old Core 2 Quad rig with 32bit Windows XP/Vista for games that only have a 16bit executable (and therefore are out on 64bit Windows).

 

I have a Win XP VM for those 16-bit executables (looking at you, CivWin).

 

And nothing of value was lost.

Since the old drivers will still work for old games the only impact will be for future games not backwards compatible with the last 32bit drivers, but since game technology doesn't move forward all that often even that is a few years off.

 

They should be. But if you're worried, just download it now and stuff it in a cloud or something

I played Diablo mostly on Windows XP (occasionally I'd have to close and re-open the game if it picked the acid trip colour palette). Late on, someone made a registry patch that makes it (and a bunch of other 256colour games as well, I think) reliably pick the correct colour palette too (and which is much more important on Vista and up since it picks the full acid trip one a lot more often).

 

No need, having spent some time in recent weeks on my old rig with a GTX 750 it's clear that NVidia stopped developing XP/Vista drivers of any flavour in 2016 (and the same rig has 64bit Win7 which isn't affected). Does lead to some longer term questions though and I'd always intended on having a single PC to cover everything, off topic for this story so will be heading for a separate forum topic