gunsmoke on 14/3/2010 at 02:51
Speaking of RMA'ing faulty PC components...how did your GPU RMA go, EvaUnit?
EvaUnit02 on 14/3/2010 at 03:05
Oh, I'm not doing that until I'm back up in Auckland at the end of the month, saves me the postage. It's not time critical, as I was just using it as a dedicated PPU for hardware PhysX.
Turns out it was no coincidence that my PPU died just after I had updated to the latest driver. Nvidia driver v196.75 WHQL had a critical bug relating to fan control which could put your card under serious stress, thus potentially cooking it.
Nvidia pulled the driver from their site and posted the following message:-
Quote:
196.75 Alert!
We are aware that some customers have reported fan speed issues with the latest 196.75 WHQL drivers on NVIDIA.com. Until we can verify and root cause this issue, we recommend that customers do not download this driver. Instead, please stay with, or return to 196.21 WHQL drivers. Release 196.75 drivers have been temporarily removed from our website and we also are asking our partners and others to remove temporarily this 196.75 WHQL driver as well.
Needless to say, I've rolled back to v196.34 beta for the time being. I don't need my expensive and discontinued GTX275 dying as well. There's no other high end Nvidia cards at the moment and I'd likely have to opt for an equivalent ATI. The last thing I'd want to do is have to put up with shithouse Radeon drivers (yes, I realise the irony).
lost_soul on 14/3/2010 at 03:20
Quote Posted by EvaUnit02
Oh, I'm not doing that until I'm back up in Auckland at the end of the month, saves me the postage. It's not time critical, as I was just using it as a dedicated PPU for hardware PhysX.
Turns out it was no coincidence that my PPU died just after I had updated to the latest driver. Nvidia driver v196.75 WHQL had a critical bug relating to fan control which could put your card under serious stress, thus potentially cooking it.
Nvidia pulled the driver from their site and posted the following message:-
Needless to say, I've rolled back to v196.34 beta for the time being. I don't need my expensive and discontinued GTX275 dying as well. There's no other high end Nvidia cards at the moment and I'd likely have to opt for an equivalent ATI. The last thing I'd want to do is have to put up with shithouse Radeon drivers (yes, I realise the irony).
I personally would rather eat a bag of motherboard stand-offs and computer screws than buy another ATI video card. They have a history of dropping support for 3-year-old video cards in their new drivers on Linux. Sure, you can use the open-source driver at that point, but performance seems to take a big hit.
(
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_r500_legacy&num=1)
I'll stick with NVIDIA, because they still support my ancient cards from the 2003 era.
gunsmoke on 14/3/2010 at 17:12
Lifetime ATI geek here. Out of the last 12+ years and probably 10 video cards in that time, I bet 90% were ATI, even back to the RAGE/128 days. My only deviations being an FX 5200 (best.budget.card. ever. $30 and it played Half Life 2 well, and at launch to boot!) and the 3DFX years resulted in a Voodoo 3.
My HD 3870 512MB is awesome. Running Call of Pripyat on full-dynamic lighting at better framerates than Shadow of Chernobyl. The built-in video decoder which allows you to de/encode video on the GPU solely, (thus freeing up the CPU) is a treat. I have yet to meet a game where MSAA x2 changes the framerate more the 2 fps, the power consumption is next to nil, and it is easily overclocked even with the beefy stock cooler. The Radeon Catalyst Control Center is extremely improved from the early days, and is actually installed for once. I used to use Ray's ATI Tray Tools exclusively. I dunno. Ever since the 9700/9800 PRO days they are doing great. They had a bit of driver problems in the X1xx/X2xx era, but they have learned from their mistakes.
Hell, they ain't frying boards with their drivers, at least. :p
My next card will definitely be the HD 5870. By summer it will be cheaper, and will still be ace.
Just my opinions, but I have had great experiences with my ATIs over the years, and they are very competetively priced.
lost_soul on 14/3/2010 at 18:54
... and there was also that issue with NVIDIA chips overheating in laptops a couple years back. I'm sure glad I didn't get that laptop with the 8600 and instead waited for one with a 9800gtm.
(
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13554_3-10020782-33.html)
EvaUnit02 on 15/3/2010 at 03:36
Please quit quoting the entire post that's directly before yours. Not only is it irritating to read, but it's a punishable offence according to the Admins.
TheOutrider on 15/3/2010 at 20:07
Working for a games company that does support Linux, I'd like to point out that "all that matters is what libraries it depends on" is sadly nowhere near the dire reality. Considering that for a large number of media things (graphics drivers, Java, sound daemons, you name it) there's at least two different solutions, some open-source and others closed and vendor specific, this is bound to cause massive hilarity. Even in our limited officially supported environment we have more than a few problems.
As an example, Ubuntu's 3D support is utter shite. Just look at the frequent problems with different versions of the distro coming with buggy or straight up broken versions of graphics drivers (anyone who's tried to run compiz on a netbook in one of the recent versions will know what I'm talking about). Then look at how Debian steadfastly (and, for their concept, justifiably) refuses to make available closed-source drivers, which are frequently far better for feature support. Then look at the three different sound systems, and consider that anyone who does not have whichever one you might choose is going to complain because they'll have to install another one, which might break their current setup.
In summary, it's genuinely nowhere near as simple as one might think, and considering the amount of market share there is to gain by supporting Linux most developers decide that business wise it's just not worth bothering with. And the bigger the studio, the less likely they are to have any need to consider fringe markets.
That said, it IS a step in the right direction. And who knows, maybe Valve will eventually hax up their MacOS version of Steam and Source and officially support Linux. They're just not doing it now.
gunsmoke on 16/3/2010 at 17:55
I just wanted to add this: I am by NO means an ATI/AMD fanboy. I would buy an Nvidia card in a second, just depends on the current price vs. performance when I go to order.
Renzatic on 16/3/2010 at 20:52
Good thing you posted that. I was just about to PM you a scathing letter that would totally shame you.
Jason Moyer on 17/3/2010 at 18:24
I went from 3dfx to nvidia to ati and back to nvidia, and I have to say that while nvidia's image quality has improved, the first thing I noticed going from my x1950 to an 8800gt is the poor 3-d rendering. It's not as crap as the Geforce 2-4 days, but it's pretty clearly inferior. I'll probably pick up a 5770 in the near future, not much of an upgrade, but it's a cheap card for the rendering quality and the huge savings in power usage.
