News Intel's Alder Lake CPUs May Not Work With Older Games

[d0x360]

If the denuvo games contact a server it might be possible to sort it out server-side.

It wouldn't be that easy. Denuvo essentially encrypts the game's executable and or files the executable relies on to function. That's why you a performance penalty or why re8 village had massive frame rate drops during certain animation's.

The real question is... How the heck did Intel get this close to launch before finding this out OR why they would have sat on the info when they know damn well that basically every big game made over the last few years has Denuvo and it's usually not removed even after it's been cracked.

This is going to seriously hurt the launch of alder lake... There is just no way that every game is going to be fixed. Not for a CPU that essentially would have essentially 0% market share even after selling every unit available for the first few months if not longer.

Good luck winning back gamers from AMD with a CPU they can't use unless they get a crack for literally every game they own.

 

[casa_is_cool]

Alder Lake sounds a lot like snake oil

Honestly, if the chips require this much developer optimization, this could be a disaster and potentially a pain in the butt for anyone who purchases one of these.

Passing CPU optimization costs on to software companies is also a HUGE miscalculation in 2021. We are in the midst of a developer shortage across all industries meaning costs are higher than they have ever been. What company releasing a new game is going to additionally prioritize Alder Lake optimization at launch? Very few. It's too expensive and not a priority

 

[SirStephenH]

When will devs finally figure out that heavy-handed DRM promotes piracy?

 

[cctchristensen]

Ooof, so that's a skip. Maybe next generation if they've fixed older games, but that's a big no from me boss.

This is a good time to say: those that have been buying your games on GoG do not have to worry about this due to their DRM-free policy.

To be fair, the article has the wrong perspective: it should say, "Denuvo doesn't support newer Intel CPUs." Their problem, not Intel's.

 

[Soaptrail]

To be fair, the article has the wrong perspective: it should say, "Denuvo doesn't support newer Intel CPUs." Their problem, not Intel's.

It becomes an Intel problem if they get enough bad press and sales are suppressed.

 

[Phaaze88]

When will devs finally figure out that heavy-handed DRM promotes piracy?

It's not the devs' fault. They've no choice but to take orders from the top.
Blame those guys since they're the ones trying to protect their assets.

 

[wifiburger]

I don't get it. What exactly is breaking DRM on those old games with AlderLake ?

 

[TerryLaze]

the more this person posts, the more he sounds like an intel PR rep

What am I saying that all the AMD fanboys haven't been crying about the last days?!
Everybody (AMD fanboys) is 100% sure that MS is somehow delaying the cache fix, and v-cache will be even more complicated in case that MS isn't delaying it by purpose but it actually takes them that long.
So which of these two things are you against?!

 

[TerryLaze]

I don't get it. What exactly is breaking DRM on those old games with AlderLake ?

Either Denuvo has a list of supported CPUs (unlikely) or it has an understanding of what a CPU has to look like and gets confused by a CPU having something that it shouldn't have like the smaller cores, it could see that as an attempt to mess with the CPU.

Due to the nature of modern DRM algorithms, it might use CPU detection, and should be aware of the upcoming hybrid platforms.

 

[spongiemaster]

When will devs finally figure out that heavy-handed DRM promotes piracy?

Never, because it doesn't in numbers that hurt them. DRM prevents casually copying which is far more common than the number of people in the woke crowd sticking it to the man by pirating the game.

 

[TerryLaze]

Is there away to reprogram the hardware to recognize different CPUs?

As I said earlier in the thread you can turn off the smaller cores from bios, this should turn the CPU into a normal CPU that denuvo should accept, but it will only be sure after release when people test it.

 

[spongiemaster]

Alder Lake sounds a lot like snake oil

Honestly, if the chips require this much developer optimization, this could be a disaster and potentially a pain in the butt for anyone who purchases one of these.

Passing CPU optimization costs on to software companies is also a HUGE miscalculation in 2021. We are in the midst of a developer shortage across all industries meaning costs are higher than they have ever been. What company releasing a new game is going to additionally prioritize Alder Lake optimization at launch? Very few. It's too expensive and not a priority

Hardware companies don't care. Apple is in the process of dumping x86 and moving to ARM "in the midst of a developer shortage." People have bitched for years that Intel has been sleeping at the wheel and not innovating at all. Now Intel is developing new things again, and surprise, surprise. All people can do is bitch that new stuff isn't 100% compatible with everything that exists in the x86 world. If you want real progress and innovation, you're almost always going to break some backwards compatibility.

 

[usla]

You are paying for extra cores that will handle windows 11 bloatware and spyware not to mention you have no control over backdoor

 

[Ogotai]

What am I saying that all the AMD fanboys haven't been crying about the last days?!
Everybody (AMD fanboys) is 100% sure that MS is somehow delaying the cache fix, and v-cache will be even more complicated in case that MS isn't delaying it by purpose but it actually takes them that long.
So which of these two things are you against?!

your funny, with all due respect, you accuse people of being an amd fanboy, when you prove in almost every post you make, how much of an intel fan boy you are, hypocrite much ? my comment on the posts you make, and how you sound like an into PR rep is valid, as thats what it seems you are based on your posts.

its also quite interesting how you focused on MY post, but yet some one else quoted your SAME post, asking how much you get paid, ( at least it looks like they were referring to that) but not a mention of that.

its also quite possible that v-cache may also work in the same way as WAY back when with the K6-3 cpus, when the board had cache built in on the board, as L3 ( i think it was) and you went from a K6-2 to a K6-3, the on board became an L4 cache, and the system just treated it as such. i dont recall any issues then. but now, might be a little different considering its on die and not on board.

 

[TerryLaze]

your funny, with all due respect, you accuse people of being an amd fanboy, when you prove in almost every post you make, how much of an intel fan boy you are, hypocrite much ? my comment on the posts you make, and how you sound like an into PR rep is valid, as thats what it seems you are based on your posts.

Yes, everybody that doesn't share your opinion is sell-off to the government or intel or whomever, it can't possibly be that someone just has a different opinion then yours.

its also quite interesting how you focused on MY post, but yet some one else quoted your SAME post, asking how much you get paid, ( at least it looks like they were referring to that) but not a mention of that.

How is that interesting?! Do you think I'm in kahoots with him?

but now, might be a little different considering its on die and not on board.

Oh wait you said it's different just like I said that it's different, now you have to be the sell off.
See how silly this is?

 

[salgado18]

Hardware companies don't care. Apple is in the process of dumping x86 and moving to ARM "in the midst of a developer shortage." People have bitched for years that Intel has been sleeping at the wheel and not innovating at all. Now Intel is developing new things again, and surprise, surprise. All people can do is bitch that new stuff isn't 100% compatible with everything that exists in the x86 world. If you want real progress and innovation, you're almost always going to break some backwards compatibility.

you will be right if Alder Lake does come with bit advantages over traditional CPUs. I mean, big little has to bring big advances in all the metrics that count, and not just a way to get their hot CPUs to be competitive against the elegance of Zen3 (high performance with low power consumption in a "traditional" way (used to be Intel that had that)). Otherwise, it will be just a novel technology that brings more problems than it solves.

 

[salty85]

So, expecting devs of games past, or even devs who no longer exist to update games. This is a giant miss on intel's side, and the expectation of older games with minimal future profits to get these updates is almost laughable. And it doesn't seem to just be Denuvo, thats just the partner they likely have worked with and confirmed that it works with an update.

 

[TJ Hooker]

Do game developers themselves need to make any updates, or is it just the DRM middleware developers that (potentially) need to make updates? I have no idea how DRM middleware is packaged with a game, whether it part of the game itself such that a DRM update is equivalent to a game patch. Or if it is a separate program that is bundled with the game, such that it could be updated separately.

 

[bigdragon]

Did Intel fail to learn anything from the HDCP 2.2 nightmare they unleashed upon consumers?

I expect Alder Lake to be a similar sort of mess. Unstable compatibility, bizarre errors, and some hardware and software unexpectedly no longer useful. Breaking away from the limitations of legacy compatibility is one thing. Repeatedly shooting yourself in the foot via DRM is something completely different. Alder Lake would not be an option for me given how many older games I play. Not everyone enjoys the overly-monetized, casino-like, time-devouring, mod-unfriendly, formulaic games mostly produced today.

 

[spongiemaster]

and not just a way to get their hot CPUs to be competitive against the elegance of Zen3 (high performance with low power consumption in a "traditional" way (used to be Intel that had that)). Otherwise, it will be just a novel technology that brings more problems than it solves.

Zen3. As in third generation Zen. The old cliche in tech is never buy before revision 3. Zen 3 is a great product, however, Zen 1 was not exactly "elegant" out of the gate. Remember Game Mode/Creator Mode? You just bought your brand new HEDT CPU (back before AMD abandoned the desktop part of Threadripper), and every time you want to play a game, you have to enable game mode and reboot to disable half your cores to get decent game performance. That's not elegant by anyone's standards. Memory compatibility was awful for all Zen 1 platforms. Zen 1 was also slower than Intel (Coffee Lake? Don't remember) on a per core basis, so the "elegance" wasn't there. AMD's chiplet design was highly innovative at launch, but it was quite a rocky launch when you look back at it. Intel is going to go through a similar challenge with Alder Lake. By the time Intel hits gen 3 with Meteor Lake, we'll know if they had they right choice going hybrid. One thing we can definitely count on is the hybrid compatibility issues will be gone by the time Meteor Lake releases in 2023.

 

[Ogotai]

Yes, everybody that doesn't share your opinion is sell-off to the government or intel or whomever, it can't possibly be that someone just has a different opinion then yours.

you mean like YOU do with all of your posts where you defend intel ? come on, again, hypocrite much ? i have seen a few people on here post a different opinion then yours, and you come back and do the same. even when someone posts with links that prove you are wrong, you still defend intel to no end, just like an intel PR rep would do. but what ever, you keep defending your beloved god intel, its what you do best it seems.

 

[UnCertainty08]

Some games I own I've had to download pirated versions because of drm problems with older games. When you had to have disk or CDs in the drive to play games it was common to use a "crack" just so you didn't have to put the disc in every time. Games that require an internet connection push people to download cracked versions as well. Sometimes the more devs try to stop piracy the more the push people to want cracked versions.
When you pay for something you don't want to stop jump through a bunch of hoops to play. Internet connection is BS, what happens if the internet is down in your area or problem with the internet in general. You don't get to play the game you legit paid for even if it's not an online game.

 

[salgado18]

Zen3. As in third generation Zen. The old cliche in tech is never buy before revision 3. Zen 3 is a great product, however, Zen 1 was not exactly "elegant" out of the gate. Remember Game Mode/Creator Mode? You just bought your brand new HEDT CPU (back before AMD abandoned the desktop part of Threadripper), and every time you want to play a game, you have to enable game mode and reboot to disable half your cores to get decent game performance. That's not elegant by anyone's standards. Memory compatibility was awful for all Zen 1 platforms. Zen 1 was also slower than Intel (Coffee Lake? Don't remember) on a per core basis, so the "elegance" wasn't there. AMD's chiplet design was highly innovative at launch, but it was quite a rocky launch when you look back at it. Intel is going to go through a similar challenge with Alder Lake. By the time Intel hits gen 3 with Meteor Lake, we'll know if they had they right choice going hybrid. One thing we can definitely count on is the hybrid compatibility issues will be gone by the time Meteor Lake releases in 2023.

Nevermind the word "elegance", then. HEDT cpus are not meant to game well, Game Mode was a way to make it work but it was never the target audience.

I don't expect Alder Lake to work flawlessly at start, just like Zen 1 and Bulldozer (with the later never working). But the thing is that none of those required devs to actively think that there were two different kinds of CPUs available at the same time. The game is not performing correctly? Oh, it's being allocated to the slow cores, so now I have to open a white paper to fix it.

I believe that most games will just lock themselves to fast cores and call it a day, making Intel lose more than win.

 

[TerryLaze]

I believe that most games will just lock themselves to fast cores and call it a day, making Intel lose more than win.

That would actually be a win scenario for intel because alder cores are still faster than rocket cores so all games would run 1:1 but on faster cores and if that allows the OS to put the smaller cores into sleep mode and push the bigger ones higher then even better.

The loosing scenario would be for devs to use the smaller cores but do so incorrectly because then you could have performance degradation from 11th gen, games could run slower and/or have stutters.

 

[salgado18]

That would actually be a win scenario for intel because alder cores are still faster than rocket cores so all games would run 1:1 but on faster cores and if that allows the OS to put the smaller cores into sleep mode and push the bigger ones higher then even better.

The loosing scenario would be for devs to use the smaller cores but do so incorrectly because then you could have performance degradation from 11th gen, games could run slower and/or have stutters.

The first part makes sense, especially for games that like fast cores more than many cores. Maybe they won't use slow cores on purpose?

About devs in general, I was thinking this earlier:

Imagine you have 1000 work items to parallelize between 8 cores. That's 125 items per core, and you get optimum performance.
But imagine you have 4 fast cores and 4 slow ones. You can't divide them evenly, otherwise performance will suffer (the fast cores finish first, but you still have to wait for the slow cores). So what is a good distribution of work? How will you do it in code? I see frameworks letting you choose that, but it also means more code to achieve good results.

I'm not mad at Intel for trying to inovate, I'm mad because it feels like a way they found to be competitive against a much better architecture. It feels like they just couldn't design something fast and cool, but their competitor has, so there is no excuse.