NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX/GTS' Killer Bug
Ever since NVIDIA released their revolutionary GeForce 8800 GTX and
GeForce 8800 GTS graphics cards, users have been complaining about
the poor Vista driver support and how these expensive cards have
failed to improve their performance in games. That may now come to
pass, in a manner of speaking.
An NVIDIA engineer, who wishes to remain anonymous, has just clued
us in on the whole deal. This engineer claims that while
allegations of poor gaming performance are correct, the reason is
not really poor drivers. Brace yourselves for the truth.
Right after the G80 was taped out, NVIDIA discovered 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.
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.
http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=391
