Sunday, April 01, 2007

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX/GTS' Killer Bug

NVidia engineer gave clarification about bad performance found on NVidia GeForce 8800 GTX/GTS and poor Vista driver support which was complained by most gamers who uses this card. He/She (i don't know, since it remains anonymous) admit that the report was correct (although the report of bad driver support is not the main cause of the bad performance). NVidia found a bug in the vertex shader that causes the GPU to generate slightly incorrect geometry transformation data. The difference was minimal enough to escape attention but it was significant enough to render a scene incorrectly. Here's some analogy from Tech ARP:
Now, what's the big deal about a slightly incorrect scene? After all, you can't even tell the difference between 2xAA and 4xAA. What would a slightly different scene matter when you are zipping along at 60+ fps? Well, that's what YOU think.

Here's the bummer. What it really means is that objects can be rendered off to one side. For FPS gamers, this can cause shots aimed at those objects (like your opponents) to miss when they should really hit. In RTS games, it may cause you to click on the wrong unit or send your units to attack a different target. So, yeah, you can now blame your poor gaming skills on a bug.

So, our next question as a consumer will be "What's the solution?". The answer is NO SOLUTION (yet). The engineer don't know what will happened in the future, but he/she think that one of this two possibilities are the highest one:
1. NVIDIA might recall all affected cards and replace them with GeForce 8900 GTX/GTS cards when they are released in the "near future".

2. NVIDIA might recall all affected cards and replace them right away with GeForce 8600 Ultra/GTS cards, and offer those affected a free day-trip to NVIDIA HQ and lunch with NVIDIA CEO and President, Huang Jen-Hsun.

PS: I don't know whether this news is april fool jokes or not (hey, it's april mop's day, so anything can happen). You can see the detailed information on Tech ARP site.

Remember, today is April 1, so please be careful when reading a news. It might be true, but it may be hoaxes

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