Archived from groups: alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt,alt.comp.periphs.videocards.nvidia (
More info?)
"Arthur Hagen" <art@broomstick.com> wrote in message
news:d6ti1k$hhs$1@cauldron.broomstick.com...
> Wrong. Higher quality video cards (like Matrox) allow the user to flash
> the
> video card firmware -- it's only ATI and nVidia that cut corners and lower
> the price by not providing this feature.
Wrong. The BIOS is just that, *basic* IO, something that lets the card
display a picture at boot, before the drivers are loaded. The BIOS is not
meant to be a staging ground for bugfixes or new features. Occasionally
revisions are made when the manufacturer switches RAM suppliers. There
should be no need for BIOS updates; the code should be (and usually is) done
correctly when the retail cards hit store shelves.
> It's all a question of costs, and
> these consumer grade cards have lower quality and feature sets than
> others -- you pay for and get just one thing: speed.
Indeed we are. GF6 cards cost $400-500 because the GPU contains 100+ million
transistors, dictated by the 16 pipelines and full floating-point shader
units.
> Many of the current problems might have been curable with a BIOS upgrade,
> including the 6800GT and Ultra not being able to do hardware video assist
> like the 6800 plain, or
Hardware video assist, you mean that "PureVideo" thing? According to
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2305&p=11
The 6800GT and Ultra still has hardware deinterlacing (which takes care of
most of the quality issues), just not WMV9 decode acceleration. Rather than
a BIOS bug, this is more likely due to incomplete silicon on the GT and
Ultra.
It's also important to note that PureVideo was enabled through new
*drivers*, albeit eight months after the GF6 cards became available.
> vesa modes that show up as 720x400 instead of the
> correct resolution.
What applications are affected by this? Can said applications run on a
modern Matrox card (i.e. newer than G550), which has no Win9x drivers?
--
"War is the continuation of politics by other means.
It can therefore be said that politics is war without
bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed."
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