With the advent of digital games stores such as Steam, Origin, and GOG, we've seen a resurgence of older titles given new life through digital downloads. We all expect a game bought through one of these services to remain playable for many years to come. However, AMD is demonstrating that isn't the case with its latest Radeon driver release.
As Gamerevolution reports, just before the end of 2017 AMD released a new Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 17.12.1 driver package. Adrenalin replaces the Crimson Edition drivers and brings with it a host of updates and new features as well as resolving existing bugs. But Adrenalin is also breaking a number of old DirectX 9 games.
Once Adrenalin is installed, Command & Conquer 3, Command & Conquer Red Alert 3, Command & Conquer 4 Tiberian Twilight, Battle for Middle Earth and Middle Earth 2, and The Witcher Enhanced Edition all have problems. The most common problem seems to be the games crashing with the error "exception in exception handler."
Bugs introduced by new drivers are not uncommon. However, in this case it doesn't look as though there will be a fix. In a thread on the AMD forums concerning Command & Conquer 3 and Red Alert 3, AMD technical support engineer ray_m responded to the crash reports by stating, "This title is from 2007, so we are unlikely to devote any valuable engineering resources to this issue, which is most likely caused by outdated API modules."
Not all DirectX 9 games are affected by the new Radeon software, but we don't yet know just how many games are. The problem for AMD now is how gamers will react to some older games not being playable with Radeon graphics cards. The most obvious reaction to that is going to be "don't buy Radeon." With that in mind, I am confident AMD will reassess the situation and work to find a solution, even if that solution ends up falling at the feet of game developers through updated APIs.