It works on modern systems, however all lights sources and shadows won't render, which kind of disrupts game mechanics drastically, making it basically unplayable (the stealth sections at least).

I won't go into specifics, but it has to do with the fact early Nvidia drivers treated depth in a different range than it is common today, and the game is mostly a direct XBox port to PC. Ubisoft probably decided it's not worth correcting the game engine and doing a re-release.

Fun fact, dxvk has recently added support for this feature (alternate dref scale and Nvidia Shadow Buffers), so both the original Splinter Cell and Pandora Tomorrow work just fine with it: https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/pull/4660 . The added support will be included in the next release.

It was called Nvidia Shadow Buffers, and was also an XBox feature. Nvidia hardware later dropped support for it mostly because with d3d9 you had other ways to achieve the same effect (and also deferred shading became more common).

I just watched a video of an obscenely priced pc gaming part crapping itself and all throughout all i could think was, "man, those are some shitty, shitty games".

The current climate in both which concerns the games themselves and pc gaming hardware is so utterly depressing that options that once upon a time, for me, were laughable at best, stuff like subscription and cloud based gaming, more and more are starting to look like viable (situational/stopgap) options

Are we nearing the enshittification apex? This is disgusting. Thanks for that, quite enlightening.

Already have a laptop with 3060 6gb VRAM (laptop-GPU) and a desktop with 8gb RTX 3070. I think I'm good on somewhat modern GPU's that also support 32-bit PhysX.

But for most - yeah, if you plan to play older era 32-bit PhysX games on NV GPU's: 900 series; and from 1000 up to 4000 series looks to be the way to go here.

There is a way if you have a spare PCIe slot in a desktop PC:
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/physx-feature-unlocked-for-rtx-5090-with-rtx-3050-helper-to-enable-full-performance

So in short: Add any older Nvidia GPU to the PC alongside your 5000 or later Nvidia GPU and specify in the drivers to offload PhysX calculations onto that older card instead.

Now I wonder if it still is impossible to do this trick if you have something else than Nvidia as your main GPU. Back when Nvidias 200 series was the latest I was considering adding a GT 210 to my PC for PhysX but then Nvidia went and blocked mixing Nvida and AMD/ATI.