re: game Video card driver weirdness
Saturday, June 9, 2007 at 6:51 am
Posted by Kiwi
(2207 messages posted)
OK, let's start with the entire nVidia FX generation of GPU devices first. There
was a serious monetary disagreement between Microsoft and nVidia about the long-run
costs of GPUs for the original Xbox after it sold quite well, and the initial development
costs were fully amortized. nVidia ended up literally ignoring Direct3D's prescribed
pixel shaders, SM 2.
All of them had a totally independent non-Dx9 version and nVidia had a major ego
hangup, so they expected game developers to use their version instead of the real
thing, but no one did. The 5200, 5500, 5600, and 5800 had even worse problems, even
in OpenGL. The 5700, 5900, and 5950 weren't quite as bad, and were very good in
OpenGL.
While rushing the 6th generation to market as quickly as possible, nVidia went back
to their GF4 Titaniums and reduced the prices to move those, but Radeons blew them
all away right up to generation seven. Meanwhile, drivers for the FXes are extremely
problematic, and for the most part, you should use 7x.xx series ForceWare.
Even the Geforce 6200 and 7300 have some defects when used for anything other than
2D. At the end of the FXes' retail sales life, the 5200s were available wholesale
for about $180 for ten at a time -- that's $18 each with the shipping from eBay.
You need to yank that awful thing out and stomp it into smithereens!
.
Kiwi
**
On Saturday, June 9, 2007 at 12:12 am, signoftheserpent wrote:
>I enjoy playing a few video games, including warcraft 3, rome total war and galactic
>civilizations 2 among others.
[Reply or follow-up to this message]
|
