What's NVIDIA up to...? v2

[powerarmour]

I guess it just gives them an excuse to moan if the HD 6970 ends up faster than the GTX 580 by ~10%...

AF quality is noticeably different on my HD 5870 at least with the 10.10 drivers, and even though the AF is borked in hardware on this card, it's still not that bad really (apart from the shimmering). I do run the driver at 'High Quality' settings though instead of 'Quality' so I guess I'm not being affected quite as much.

As pedantic as their rant is though, they do have a point, and it's been thoroughly tested and proven by a few sites already. You'd think that with cards as powerful as they are today, AMD shouldn't need to 'optimize' that much that it would affect IQ in any noticeable manner, especially for something as grass roots as texture filtering ffs.

[powerarmour]

Another site, Benchmarkreviews.com has spoken about what they think about Nvidias blog and the other sites that have discovered these problems :-

This is a disturbing article, and the sources here are critical for legitimacy. NVIDIA is a direct competitor to AMD and is the author of this article, which may lead some readers to ignore the message. However, it was several independent review website's that first brought this issue to the forefront, and proved it exists. I personally trust these websites, particularly 3DCenter.org, and have found them to be unbiased over the years.

Benchmark Reviews can confirm that issues with filtering still exist, and pointed this out in our Radeon HD 6850 and Radeon HD 6870 launch articles. We also made it public that certain AMD partners were sending 'juiced' video card samples to reviews sites, ours included, with details published in our 1120-Core "Fixed" Radeon HD 6850 Review Samples Shipped to Media article. So could this be AMDs last ditch effort to compete with NVIDIA by manipulating performance?

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?o ... &Itemid=47

[daglesj]

Well we've seen AMD adjust their filtering to gain performance and as we've seen confirmed from Anandtech, Nvidia writes to 'sympathetic' review sites telling then exactly how to review their cards against AMDs (use overclocked variants rather than standard cards).

All's fair in love and war.

[thegrommit]

It's a little old, but worth the read through: http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1421792

Summary: if your card dies, try baking it.

Just remember to remove the heatsink first

[daglesj]

Yeah i'd only use that as a temp fix/last resort. If my card had dodgy solder connections it would be heading bin ward pretty quick.

I couldnt rest easy with a potentially dodgy component in my pc.

[powerarmour]

Heating it up in a standard home oven is only likely to be a temporary fix at best (I don't think the temperatures would be hot enough to melt all types of solder, you'd need something more industrial for that), but it's worth a shot if you want to try and resurrect one back from the grave as a backup or something...

[daglesj]

I tried to replace some power caps on a motherboard a few months ago. Was using my 150W soldering iron which I left for 15mins+ to warm up and that solder just would not melt. I tried for about 15 minutes but just gave up.

I hate that ROHS stuff.

Still got a roll of that lovely usable lead/tin mix solder thank goodness.

[powerarmour]

Still got a roll of that lovely usable lead/tin mix solder thank goodness.

Me too, I just have to remember not to breathe in while I'm using the stuff..

I normally get by fine with a 50W temp controlled iron myself, but it does have a fine tip (about 0.5mm) which helps get the heat quickly to the right spot. I've soldered IC's with it before while using an old microscope from a chemistry set, and I even successfully unsoldered and replaced a mobile P3 on a laptop motherboard once...

Don't use it quite so much now since electronics in general have become more reliable and PCB's and traces have got smaller, and the tech life of the thing your trying to repair/mod is often limited anyway!

[powerarmour]

NVIDIA enters the CPU market :-

As you may have seen, NVIDIA announced today that it is developing high-performance ARM-based CPUs designed to power future products ranging from personal computers to servers and supercomputers.
Known under the internal codename “Project Denver,” this initiative features an NVIDIA CPU running the ARM instruction set, which will be fully integrated on the same chip as the NVIDIA GPU. This initiative is extremely important for NVIDIA and the computing industry for several reasons.
NVIDIA’s project Denver will usher in a new era for computing by extending the performance range of the ARM instruction-set architecture, enabling the ARM architecture to cover a larger portion of the computing space. Coupled with an NVIDIA GPU, it will provide the heterogeneous computing platform of the future by combining a standard architecture with awesome performance and energy efficiency.
ARM is already the standard architecture for mobile devices. Project Denver extends the range of ARM systems upward to PCs, data center servers, and supercomputers. ARM’s modern architecture, open business model, and vibrant eco-system have led to its pervasiveness in cell phones, tablets, and other embedded devices. Denver is the catalyst that will enable these same factors to propel ARM to become pervasive in higher-end systems.

http://blogs.nvidia.com/2011/01/project ... computing/

NVIDIA's CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang just announced Project Denver - its first CPU architecture design ever, based on ARM's ISA. This is a custom design done by NVIDIA in conjunction with ARM and targeted at the high performance computing (HPC) market.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4099/nvid ... e-arm-core

[Seawolf]

And that my friends is firing back at Intel for being asshats.

I hope they do some good.