Steam games that don't work on my computer

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I was trying to play one of the Resident Evils the other day, and it wouldn't work. I think I eventually got it to work by unplugging the Display Port cable, and just using the HDMI monitor I have connected as a second monitor.

I have this fear that I have been buying Steam games forever, so that "one day" I could try them all... and then "one day" appears, and they don't work.

Well, "one day" is here and many of them don't work. Here's a thread on what is broken.

Dystopia: just a blank black screen (did work via HDMI).
Mortal Kombat Komplete Edition: it will take up a small section of the monitor and then sort of flash still images from what I guess is the demo mode (did work via HDMI).
Mortal Kombat Kombat X: just a blank black screen
Tharsis: bug that stopped play, that I tweeted to the developer about. He fixed the game killing bug on a beta branch. I just want to note it here, though.

Tharsis aside, I seem to have a problem where games won't work with the DisplayPort. I gotta be honest. I don't care about "image quality" any more. What the hell. I just want the games to work. Lemme see if the fancy monitor has an HDMI port. I may be off DisplayPorts until "someone" fixes this.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I did one last search and found a Reddit post talking about nVidia "scaling mode." The post said to just change it to anything. I don't know what scaling mode is, so I just turned it off... and Dystopia worked. I haven't tried the others yet.



A Christmas miracle.

Ok, I looked up "scaling mode."

Image scaling is NVIDIA's upscaling technology that works in any game. The technology is based on a simple upscaling algorithm aided by a sharpening filter. It takes the output image rendered at a lower resolution and upscales it to the native resolution of your monitor.

It works "in any game" it's just that sometimes your games are non-interactive black blobs, you dumbass gamer.

nVidia's market cap is only a trillion dollars, maybe if it gets to a quadrillion they could hire someone to test this garbage.

[AArdvark]

So it's not the games, the hardware advancements are starting to make them not work.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I think that's right.

"Hey we got a feature that breaks games and offers no value."

"Default it to on."

[RealNC]

I did one last search and found a Reddit post talking about nVidia "scaling mode." The post said to just change it to anything. I don't know what scaling mode is, so I just turned it off... and Dystopia worked. I haven't tried the others yet.

This is what you need. The "set it and forget it" option:

scaling.png

If you're interested in what it does: this setting will always drive the display at its native resolution. If a game tries to set another resolution, the graphics card will prevent that and instead convert ("scale") the lower resolution the game wants to the display's resolution. And it will do that without weird stretching (like stretching a 4:3 resolution to widescreen, making everything fat.) And the image quality you get is usually higher than how the display would deal with it, unless you have like a high-end premium display. This also applies to the desktop itself. If you switch the Windows resolution to something lower, if you look at your display's OSD menus where it shows the current resolution it's running at, it will show it's being driven at its native resolution, even though you switched Windows to a lower one.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

If you're interested in what it does: this setting will always drive the display at its native resolution. If a game tries to set another resolution, the graphics card will prevent that and instead convert ("scale") the lower resolution the game wants to the display's resolution. And it will do that without weird stretching (like stretching a 4:3 resolution to widescreen, making everything fat.) And the image quality you get is usually higher than how the display would deal with it, unless you have like a high-end premium display. This also applies to the desktop itself. If you switch the Windows resolution to something lower, if you look at your display's OSD menus where it shows the current resolution it's running at, it will show it's being driven at its native resolution, even though you switched Windows to a lower one.

Thank you for this. Every time you post my life gets better. I appreciate you, and my main computer is now set this way.