Posts Tagged nVidia

A new card…interesting…

Jun 17

I’m talking about the newly released nVidia GeForece GTX 200 series. Well, they had to name is something different…they’ve already finished with the 9 series…not smart to make a 10 series.

Well, nVidia touts that this card is different. As usual, it’s much faster than the 8800GT. D’oh…as if we didn’t know and expect that. Honestly, have you ever seen anyone say ‘This card is slower than our previuos generation ones. Come buy it!’. Yeesh…

PCWorld says that this card is twice the performance on Crysis for thrice the price of a 8800GT. Read the article here.

Anyway, they say that (finally), they’re trying to trying to make GPUs GPUs. Hehe. I mean, they’re turning Graphics Processing Units into General Processing Units. Well, this is good, because graphics cards have a lot of potential. You see, when you write software, you write it for the CPU. The compiler compiles it for the CPU. Nobody cares to make applications for GPUs, except game developers. The thing is that GPUs are more complex, and you need to access the hardware through drivers and all kinds of holey-kamoley crap.

So, it was upto the card makers themselves to take care of this. nVidia has released CUDA or Compute Unified Device Architecture for well, redirecting some computation to the GPU. GPUs are great at doing complex math, like vector operations, and massive floating-point calculations.

Also, since nVidia bought out AGEIA, it’s been trying to incorporate it’s line of physics processing units (now you’ll be thinking just how many different types of proccesing units there are!) with the graphics cards. You see, till developers make games with support for PPUs, the PPUs won’t sell. And people won’t buy PPUs till games with PPU support come out. It’s a Catch-22 situation.

So, if nVidia incorporates the PPU with the GPU, and the graphics card ships with both, developers can finally start writing games for PPUs as well. That’d be nice.

Too bad I couldn’t benchmark the new card, because:

I don’t have the card –
This is not a bloody online magazine. It’s a blog.

Tags: Hardware, News, nVidia

Repeat Performance

May 27

Posted by The Nut in Journal, Tech | No Comments

Well…with a bit more action, actually, in the form of a guest appearance.

Today, I went to deposit my graphics card for repair. To know more about the history of my card, read A Story series and History Repeats Itself . Anyway, it was 3:30 PM when I proposed the idea to Dad. He agreed, and didn’t seem bothered with the fact that the service center shuts shop at 4.

Were in the car by 3:35. Drive…drive…traffic…tense…boring…tense again…reached…3:42 (no kidding). Anyway, parked the car in a hurry and dashed to Mansarover Building. The lift was funny. We got in at the ground floor, and it first went to the basement, where no one got on, then to the ground floor again, 2 people got on, and the first floor was a prank as well.

2nd Floor – Get out of lift, turn right, turn left at end of corridor, do the same again and get in line behind this queue of people.

Showdown

The guard, a little guy, doing his duty, said that time was up, and they weren’t accepting any more stuff. Dad got a call, and I lingered around for some time, knowing that he would handle in his trademark manner. Finished the call, and got in line, gently got himself to the head of the little gaggle of homo sapiens, and then when the guard refused to let him through, promptly lost it.

Dad’s really good at playing the role of a frustrated and disgruntled customer, as was demonstrated in the Story series, and yet again, all hell broke lose. Unfortunately, this time I was witness to this.

‘Twas scary.

I’d hate to be in the shoes of that poor guard. But Dad simply had to make a scene to get it. God! The decibel level was amazing. He got the attention of the manager in no time, and got in as well.

I was dead scared that maybe the problem was with my motherboard, and that Dad created all that fuss for no reason at all. But thankfully(?) the card didn’t work when the guy tested it. I hope they don’t give me a 6600GT 256MB GDDR3 again, because I think there’s something wrong with that series or there’s a compatibility issue with the card and my motherboard.

Well, I’m ready for another month long wait, but I’m hoping that Dad can shorten considerably. Typically, I’m a nice guy, and hate shouting and fighting. I still have a lot to learn from him.

Tags: Hardware, nVidia

Can Warranties be fun?

Mar 8

Posted by The Nut in Journal, Tech | 1 Comment

Let me take up a situation to elaborate. In fact why not the one from The Story. Suppose my 6600GT is beyond repair, beyond all hope, in the tech graveyard. Now what if Rashi Peripherals does not have another 6600GT. They can’t give me a less powerful card. So would they give me a card from the GeForce 7 or 8 series? Would they?

It’s a proper dilemma for those guys. I wonder how many such situations arise, because manufacturing a graphics card through a fabrication process at a factory is onething, but trying to repair one, trying to pinpoint a problem among all those millions of transistors, might be a pain in the neck, unless it’s burnt out, in which case, the guys can simply declare the warranty null and void. But in the sequel to The Story, they did accept the card. Now I can just wait.

But, on second thoughts, I think that it’s rather insensitive of me, towards my 6600GT, y’know, hoping I get something else in return. After all, that card has given me 2 years of faithful service, and I’m not quite ready to part with it yet. But that’s how everyone feels about their belonging till they get something better/meaner/whateva…

And by the way, typing on laptops is a bore. Soft keys, weird key placement and bad wrist placements…

Tags: Graphics, Hardware, nVidia

A Story

Mar 7

Posted by The Nut in Journal, Tech | 4 Comments

CHAPTER 1

I’m going to tell you the whole story, right from the beginning.

I’m planning to host a birthday party on 11th March, which is … well … my birthday, of course. When I first bought my computer, I noticed that there was a port for TV-out on my graphics card. For two years, it’s lay unused…

Yesterday, Thursday, I went to Nehru Place, to get a connector/converter, to connect that 9-pin DIN TV-Out connector to my TV. My TV did not have S-Video, so I couldn’t use the wire bundled with my nVidia 6600GT. So, as I said, I went to Nehru Place. Before going, I had had a chat with a guy from Rashi Peripherals, the supplier (NOT retailer) of XFX cards. I asked him what could be done about the wire. And he gave me the address of GD Cables, in Masarover Building in Nehru Place. So I went, and found such a shop didn’t exist. But I found that Rashi Peripherals was in the sane building…so I went there, and asked again about the wire. He redirected me to GD Electronics, and said that the guy on the phone was probably a twat.

I went to GD Electronics, and asked for the wire. He gave me one, but it had 3 RC (you know, the 3 coloured connectors – Yellow, Red and White) connectors for output, whereas I only wanted one, just for video. I wasn’t that sure if that would work. Plus he said it would cost me Rs. 150, so me and bro decided to look around a bit more. We then went to SMC International in Meghdoot Building. This was the shop from where I got my PC assembled. I went into the main shop, and he redirected me to there spare parts/wire department in the back. I went, and the guy there said, he only had 7-pin connectors, no 9-pinners. However, after a long chat with the owner of SMC International (long because he was constantly on 2 mobile phones, one landline and a laptop, sometimes concurrently!), he told me to go to Bharat Cables in the basement.

I went there, he gave me a 7-pinner, identical to the one given by GD Electronics. Then we jogged back to GD Electronics to see if he had given us a 7-pinner or a 9-pinner. We practically lost all hope when he noticed it was a 7-pin connector. We roamed aimlessly, trying to see if any shop had the connector. One guy had an oversized connector, which didn’t fit. Then we struck gold. We found a guy with a connector, which had a whole lot of connector hanging off it. This was the way the 9-pin connector is supposed to look. It has 9-pins which translates into lot of bandwidth, so there are supposed to be 2 S-Video cables, 3 RCs, and one video-in or something like that. Unfortunately, he charged Rs. 350. So, heartened by our find, we continued to search, because we weren’t happy with the price. Just a few shops away we found another guy with a similar wire, with less connectors but the video RC I wanted was there. So we decided to go for it. Rs. 150 well spent.

We returned home, jubilant and I dragged my PC to the living room, to connect it to the TV. The final moment, I switched on the thing. The TV just gave a flicker, nothing else. I frowned…maybe I was supposed to change some settings in te nVidia control panel. So I dragged my monitor there as well. I connected the monitor to the graphics card as well, and I switched on the PC.

No output.

I broke into a light sweat. This had never happened before. I have had instances where the graphics card doesn’t work, but then my BIOS gives an error message. But the BIOS signalled that everything was just fine. The screen, too, degaussed, but just remained blank. It did go off and back on when the resolution changed, when it goes from BIOS screen to Windows boot screen to log in screen. But it didn’t show anything. I tried yanking the graphics card out, and fitting it again…didn’t work. I dragged everything into my room, to work there. I set up the PC, and as expected, it didn’t work. I continued for about half-an-hour, and then progressively, went into shock and withdrawal.

My 6600GT was dead.

I will not be ashamed to say this, but I was on the verge of tears. I had every right to. It was so young. Just 2 years of service. I just sat there motionless for a few minutes.

Then mom came. She had a laptop. With WiFi, and we have a neighbour who has an open WiFi connection. I started on the road to recovery. I found out that my card had a 3 year warranty. I hope to go to Nehru Place again, on Friday, and get this thing fixed. But maybe they won’t replace it. And these things can’t be repaired. Only replaced. That needs money…

Then I realise, my bro needed to submit a report the day after (Saturday), and the file was still on the PC. My Mom’s laptop didn’t have an external SATA port of course, so I coudn’t just yank out the hard disk. Then I did something that I’ve never did before. I turned on the PC, waited for some time, and logged in. My user was at the bottom of the list, so I just kept the ‘Down’ key pressed. After I heard the login tune, I waited for some time for the startup programs to run. Then I opened the Run dialog box by pressing Windows key+R. I typed in the address of the folder (D:DocumentsVineet’s Documents). Now I had the folder opened. I kept the bottom and right keys pressed for some time, to get to the bottom right of the contents of the folder. Then I selected a 5×5 box of contents by using the Shift Key and Arrow Keys. I knew my brp’s file was somewhere around the bottom, because he didn’t use Auto Arrange, and this file had been made recently. Then copy, by Control+C. Now, I stuck in an empty pen drive. When the drive is empty, it just opens up the pen drive’s folder…no Autorun dialogs. So once that was done, I did Control+V, to paste. I knew that data was getting transferred because the light on the pen drive was flashing. When it stopped flashing, I yanked out the pen drive and put it into the laptop’s USB port. It opened, and there was the report. All without looking at the screen. Then obviously I shut down the PC, by first Windows, then U to open the Shut Down box, and then U again, for shut down.

I didn’t sleep well that night.

Tags: Graphics, Hardware, nVidia, Tips

Here we go again…

Dec 4

Posted by The Nut in Tech | No Comments

nVidia has plans to release the GeForce 9 series next year, which is going to make 8 series owners miserable, PS3 owners even more miserable than when the 8800GTX was released, and the rest of feeling like utter crap!

It is a sickening feeling. Being the owner of what was (once upon a time) a ‘great rig’ (rig read as system config; config read as configuration; if you don’t know what configuration is, go boil your head), when some new hardware is released, it really burns a hole in my heart. Especially if it was released at a price less than what I bough my newly ‘outdated‘ hardware.

Sob!

But then…we do need something to make Crysis-like-and-even-better games playable at high framerates.

But you know what? The graphics card is only a part of the rig. In all (nope, not even a rough estimate percentage…ALL) PCs, it’s either the processor or the hard drive acting as a bottleneck. The graphics card is way to fast for them. This is where we need <fill in name of new prototype/codename/whateva…> from AMD, which will succeed Fusion. I’m quite certain about that.

Tags: Graphics, Hardware, News, nVidia