This may seem like a dumb question but...

Is a Video card "CPU aware"..?

With AMD + ATI => Daamit

and

vNidia + Intel => "The enemy of my enemy is my friend"

what if..

Lets say ATI/AMD had a killer video card, could the program it to throttle off say 20% when running off an Intel CPU?

Could nVidia make their card run 20% slower on an AMD chip?

This way, for example, AMD could make it look like their CPU was faster than the intel part, even if it wasn't...

Of course this assumes they can make the fastest GPU....

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Unrelated....

Now that we have 150 watt+ graphic cards, do graphic cards have something conceptually like "cool and quiet" where they throttle back while you read your email and are not playing a game?

Not really. The Nvidia Intel thing is possible, since Nvidia could tweak their drivers to throttle performance when using an AMD cpu in conjuction with one of their cards. But I really can't see them doing it, it would just hurt sales.

It would be harder for Intel to screw with AMD's gfx card performance, but it's possible. Though, again. It would just hurt sales.

With all of nVidia's talk about how they're neutral between AMD and Intel, I doubt they would do it. They couldn't care less if a system used an AMD processor, or an Intel one, just as long as the graphics is being provided by one of their cards or internal graphics chips.

As others have mentioned, anything could be possible through the use of drivers. Frankly, I don't see anyone doing this, as it would be easy to catch. The backlash wouldn't be pretty.

As for the GPU version of cool and quiet, its been in use since the days of the x1800. ATI has seperate clocks for 2D and 3D. When your just sitting in windows playing solitare or surfing the web, it uses lower clock speeds on the core. (possibly the memory to, I don't remember.) Once you turn on a game however, the drivers load the 3D clocks, and the card speeds up to run the game. This is one problem with Vista. If you enable Aero, it uses DX9 to render the visual effects, forcing your GPU to stay in 3D mode all the time. I'm not sure if ATI has fixed this yet.

There was a TGH article on this a month or 2 ago.
All tests showed no correlation between gfx card and chipset(cpu)

Actually, the 2D/3D clocks have been implemented far earlier than the X1800 cards. I'm running a fairly ancient 6600GT on my office PC and it has separate 2D and 3D clocks.

Sorry, ATI fan here, not sure how early Nvidia had them. Actually, the x800 series might have had it also, but i'm not 100% sure. (if anyone with an x800 series card wants to educate me, please do.) I know the 9800 didn't have it.

I believe my Geforce4 MX440 had 2D/3D clocks as well. I think I remember trying to tweak it for some silly reason.

The video card "thinks", is smart, it "knows" the CPU, it "knows" the user.
Be good to the video card or it might not like you. Or the video card can make you run 25% slower!

No real problems. I just avoid all problems with the law now... It did cause me to add the troll comment to my sig. Some people are just so stupid that your best not replying to them at all.

Are you sure about the MX? I wouldn't think it had seperate clocks.

I had an GeForce 4 MX440 SE. It didn't have separate 2D/3D clocks.
My 6600GT has this feature, though.

Nope, not completely sure but I remember trying to tweak it a while back on something. It could very well have been my 5900 which I spent more time trying to make faster than actually playing on it lol.

Hell yeah. The GMA950 gfx chipset actually rivals the hd2900xt in terms of performance. It's just that ATi and Nvidia have struck up deals with all the leading game developers to optimize games for THEIR products. It's fairly common knowledge, but Intel isnt going to do anything since their gfx division accounts for such a small percentage of sales, and ATi and Nvidia pay Intel tons of cash under the table to keep quiet about it.

Not quite. Intel graphics suck because they only make onboard graphics. Onboard graphics needs to use system memory instead of their own. This means that GPU memory is smaller then card amounts, has a much longer path to go through (request for ram needs to go through the NB AFAIK), and the memory bandwith is lower then the mob informant in the east river. I'm kinda curious how well Intel GPUs would be if they put them on their own card with their own memory.

To add to this, ATI has now implemented the 3D to 2D settings in hardware, I cant remember if they fixed it for AERO tho

In a way, what you've said is possible, but unlikely considering the consequences for being discovered. The drivers for any device sitting on the bus (PCI Express, for example) do the translation for the device. They pass data needed by the card to the card and take information from the card to pass it on to the rest of the system. This is all done through a standardized bus architecture, though, so any "corruption" like you speak would have to be at the driver level (and therefore easily detectable) or in the OS. The cards themselves are not really "aware" of anything on the other side of that bus unless it has been passed to it by the drivers.

Consider that you can have an entire "computer" running on a PCI card complete with CPU, video, audio, etc. But, to be honest, I don't know how broad the two-way communication can be using the bus/driver architecture. I don't really know for sure if the card can "query" the driver for information on the main system, or if the driver has to do all of the thinking. I'm sure the driver could pass ANY information to the card, but I'm not sure if the card can actually "ask" for it.