You claimed you had the minimum video graphics covered, in spite of my warning that the symptoms sounded otherwise. It was your own choice to avoid giving me the full rundown.
With regard to the defective shader rendering problem, nVIDIA's 6n00 generation needed to be better than it was, really, to win back the lost trust after the debacle of the Geforce FX 5n00 (junk) generation. Only the top card, the 6800, was really good, and there were two crippled junker versions of it sold (SE & XT). The 6600 GT was limited to 128 MBs of VRAM, and really didn't handle shaders particularly well, especially compared to the Radeon cards.
Some of the 6600 Vanilla cards and the 6200s shared the same silicon, and were all very weak, very slow, and as eventually showed up, had some shader defects built into them. That wasn't true of all 6200s or all 6600s, but the defect was propagated into the various onboard chips from the 6100 to the 7150, and the several low end 7n00 cards such as the 7100, 7200, the 7300 GS, and the mobile Go 7400. The 7300 GT was a cut down 7600 GS, without any serious problems, sitting near the top of its low end class, in fact, with the also very good (for its cost) X1300 Pro card.
The symptoms of the Geforce defect vary from rendering a cloudy sky as a checkerboard, to a variety of semi-transparent textures (that are not supposed to be transparent). As long as OpenGL, or the earlier Dx8 shaders (SM 1.4) are used, they work about the way you'd expect a $35 - $40 card to work.
There was also a built-in firmware problem in a huge proportion of the Geforce 8n00 cards, that caused the fans' speeds to be managed badly, and in the case of many of the mobile versions, to kill the motherboards they were attached into. It was correctable through software, unlike the unusual shader renderings.
ATI managed to miss getting almost any possible benefit from nVIDIA's serious stumbling, through being late to market, and also seeming to have unlearned their driver creation skills between the high end 9800 and the X850 following it, and in particular, the X1800 XT after that.
Gorath
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Modifié par Gorath Alpha, 28 juillet 2010 - 06:59 .