08-07-2004, 01:47 PM
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#5 (permalink)
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Quote:
From x-bit labs
The conversion of the GeForce 6800 into a “full-fledged” chip, i.e. turning on its all 16 pipelines, does work, but to no practical effect: the disabled pipelines are really defective. The most unpleasant fact is that the conversion procedure is not revocable in home conditions: you can flash a BIOS from the full-featured card and get the visual artifacts in games, but you cannot bring the card back to the norm by simply flashing the old BIOS back.
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Quote:
So, the question sounds like this: Is it possible to turn on all of the 16 pipelines on the NVIDIA GeForce 6800?
Yes, it is! This is easy: just flash the BIOS from the GeForce 6800 Ultra. After the BIOS re-flash, the graphics processor enables all 16 pixel pipelines and the card becomes… NON-OPERATIONAL!
Why? Because those four missing pipelines hadn’t been disabled just for nothing – they have certain defects, which show themselves as artifacts in 3D applications after you enable those pipelines. You won’t have the opportunity of returning things back easily: after flashing back the BIOS from the 12-pipelined GeForce 6800 you’ll see that the situation remains the same – the card still has 16 pipelines and also has those 3D artifacts. In order to disable the defective pipe-work and restore the card’s operability you will need special software and a specially modified version of the BIOS.
Thus, although it is possible to transform a GeForce 6800 into a GeForce 6800 Ultra/GT by turning on all 16 pipelines, there’s no practical gain from that so far: the disabled pipelines are 100% sure to have defects and their turning on results in various visual artifacts.
There’s no sense to hope that some of NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800 chips have 16 “healthy” pipelines and some of them are just disabled for no particular reason – NVIDIA is not in a position to make such gifts today. The chips are tested back at the factory and are immediately sorted. Fully operational chips are transformed into the GeForce 6800 Ultra/GT, and those that have certain defects – defects that that can be avoided by disabling a few pipelines – become the 12-pipelined GeForce 6800.
It is of course possible that the NV40 manufacturing process will be improved after a while. In this case, there will be an insufficient amount of defective chips to produce the GeForce 6800 in mass quantities, and NVIDIA will have to turn pipelines off in fully operational chips. By that time, however, NVIDIA will certainly have introduced various protection techniques, and it will be less easy to make any kind of conversion to the GeForce 6800.
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Last edited by Xepidemic; 08-07-2004 at 01:49 PM..
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