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Nvidia To Recall Every 8800 GTX/GTS Card
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42
slashdottit! tm
Bill Stubbs writes "NVIDIA has admitted to a killer bug in all GeForce 8800GTX/GTS cards, and will recall all affected cards and replace them. 'An NVIDIA engineer, who wishes to remain anonymous, has just clued us in on the whole deal. This engineer claims that while allegations of poor gaming performance are correct, the reason is not really poor drivers. Brace yourself for the truth: Right after the G80 was taped out, NVIDIA discovered a bug in the vertex shader that causes the GPU to generate slightly incorrect geometry transformation data. The difference was minimal enough to escape attention but it was significant enough to render a scene incorrectly.' The article also links to a secret website which will allow gamers to purchase Nvidia cards at cost."
Well, at least I won't have to worry about that problem because I have my awesome Radeon 9200 32MB. Thanks, Apple!
Happy April 1st everyone.... fp
I got nothin'
I know this is April Fool's and all, and it looks like this year we were spared the pink ponies, but isn't this a tad close to starting a harmful rumor? People are stupid, and nVidia is a publicly traded company. I think there's enough crap to make fun of without having to resort to this type of thing? Just IMO.
Nice way for http://www.techarp.com/ to try and sell us their products...
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C1 bottles of beer on the wall. Take one down, pass it round... Oh, umm...
Just an excuse to be a lying asshole and get away with it. Much like alcohol, or drugs.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Actually i was thinking "thank god" when I read this, hoping for finally getting a card that works.
The nvidia boards are full of people getting BSOD's with the 8800 cards, in both XP and vista.
Come on. Come oooooon.
I give this story a Slashdottit rating of + Eleventy One
;-)
Glad I don't own an NVidia anymore too
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
There are more earthshaking News around. Se there http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/87582 (german). The Mozilla Foundation wants 1.4 Billion US$ from Microsoft because of a patent registered in 1922. :-D
This could really boost the NVIDIA Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) hence number crunching projects like the Netflix Prize, which needs a second wind right about now due to a slowdown of progress in recent weeks. This depends, of course, on the detected error not being critical to the programs compiled for the 8800 hardware by CUDA, and on NVIDIA making the returned 8800s available for CUDA programmers.
Seastead this.
Articles like these are why I'll once again be staying away from the internet on April Fools Day.
-signing off until 0001, 04-02-07
nt.
I am the maverick of Slashdot
Much like alcohol, or drugs.
So, in other words, you mean "awesome"?
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
If you RTFA you'll notice they tell you about a secret page you can reach by answering a quiz. Here's the link: http://www.techarp.com/0104.htm Quote from it: "Unfortunately, there is no secret page where you can buy cheap NVIDIA cards. How we wish it were true though. Graphics cards are so very expensive."
From the article:
NVIDIA might recall all affected cards and replace them right away with GeForce 8600 Ultra/GTS cards, and offer those affected a free day-trip to NVIDIA HQ and lunch with NVIDIA CEO and President, Huang Jen-Hsun.
APRIL FOOLS!
Give me them any day ... just stop with these articles!!!
I think I would enjoy the prank more if it didn't say aprilfools right on the slashdot tagging.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
... Happy lawsuit!
Where's the pink? I want my OMG!!! Ponies!!! on 1 April! Pwease? Pwetty pwease?
And they wonder why Linux is not fit for the desktop/laptop and why there will wont be any driver support and why theyre wont be OEM's queueing up to bundle it.
http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm
I was hoping Slashdot wouldn't participate this year, but ... Ugh.
Who would want to use their proprietary piece of shit space heaters anyway?
Glass
Mod me Interesting if you like Tits!
I mean... I came here specifically to see what April 1st rumors Slashdot would try to spread. But they did not get it really right this time.
0
:-) that company makes the whole year look like April Fool's day if you're the customer. Apple Fool's day, 24 / 365.
So far, the best one this year was a Swiss website that announced a traffic minister to introduce some new "climate initiative" that would contain partial dismantling of freeways.
The second best one is kuro5hin's Tron story, which I liked:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2007/3/28/132751/38
But NVIDIA trying to get their cards back? Give me a break. So far, the only company who went to replace hardware WITHOUT BEING ASKED to was AMD who went to replace some Opteron 254s for free. And when the contractor announced it, we thought it was a prank, and did background checks and all, which caused them some trouble as well. Turned out an isolated batch had been gone past some checks and AMD had Siemens fix it before it caused problems, without announcing it through "official channels".
But NVIDIA? They should be happy if they get their stuff out to the customer to begin with. My bet is before that, it will be a particularly cold day in hell, and then, Apple will call back their laptops to "fix" them before NVIDIA goes to get some gamers' xyz coordinates fixed by 0.1 pixels. So let's hear it for Apple callbacks
Maybe we should be aware of the fact that this sort of "jokes" will lead to Slashdot being pulled from the internet and replaced with Web 2.0 applications, most of which will run some sort of framework that will only be compatible with a particular browser version (Mozilla 4.78, I think).
...Except the killer bug is called "Vista".
No real Linux user spouts this shit. It's only 'switcheurs' who want to feel leet. Any experienced user is usually happy to help and to explain the differences. Dork.
This is a good step, but support from nVidia in the past has been poor. I bought an nVidia 5700 two years ago and the driver hangs. This is known popularly as the "nv4_disp infinite loop bug". Searched on Google and many others have had the same problem. But you can't get anything done about it, and it affects the 6xxx and 7xxx series cards too.
& st=100 http://www.nvidia.com/page/support.html
nVidia tell you to technical support requests must go to the OEM card maker. But all the OEM card maker does is slap chips on a board. They don't know about the inner workings of drivers and nVidia know that. If you ask on the nVidia forum, they always say "download and install the latest driver". I and many others have been doing that for the last two years and it makes no difference. The funny thing is nVidia don't have any presence on their own forums. As they say their 'User Forums' are "with your fellow NVIDIA users". *NOT* nVidia!!!! They offer e-mail support.. for products purchased but *ONLY OFF* the nVidia website. But nVidia sell their cards through OEMs!!! In other words, you can't get any support from them. http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=4432
So, nVidia, you've been slowly trashing your own name for years. Glad you're taking this issue seriously, but your lack of support on all your past cards is chasing us into the arms of ATI. I hope they can do better. In the tech industry you can't sell a box without support and expect to keep a good name.
this is how presidents are elected; thanks for showing why it doesn't work.
waspleg
I just submitted my card for return.
I hope it comes back with a new pony. OMG Poni3Z!!!!!!
geforce 8800 have real problem with shadows, for example in oblivion and splinter cell double agent shadows are really aliased, while on call of juarez they flash continuosly
Only on slashdot could a stooge come along and screw up a +5 troll rating.
Mod me troll if you hate jews and niggers! Mod me insightful if you you like Jewish people and Africans.
Why not pink ponies!? :( Actually in my nVidia 6600GT something in the 3D unit was cooked to death, and I even had the temp monitor on. When I installed Vista all I got was a giant unreadable psychedelic desktop. Now I have Direct3D off. :(
:(
For a millisecond, when I read "nVidia recall" - I saw hope.
Is this April Fools even technically plausible? I thought shaders were programs written by users to alter geometry/fragment processing. So there is no "vertex shader" on the card.
The world is everything that is the case
not 4 hours before i saw this post my 8800gtx died for no particular reason... the video memory is screwed so i get a nice flickery effect. then i turn on slashdot and see this post! hallelujah! oh wait, its april fools....
:-p
Just for fun i tried running oblivion... 7100GS's dont like 2560x1600
If you didn't notice it's a parody of popular Slashdot Apple troll....
No drivers since Jan 10....
:)
fuckers. I knew it
... only an insightful mod of +1 is keeping the corpse alive. An funny mod of +2 is keeping me from going zombie on the mother-fucking slashdot editors, although if I see some flame-bait out there ...
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
I have an XFX 8800GTX and ever since I installed that sucker, I've been getting BSODs out the arse. I've already had it replaced once; no dice. I've tried all the latest drivers; no dice. I've updated the BIOS, uninstalled and reinstalled the sound card, performed voodoo magic; no dice. Something is surely messed up here. My power supply is 620W and definitely enough to handle the card. I really don't understand what the hell is going on, but it's seriously unacceptable.
Man! That one reeled me right in. No jokes or sarcasm either. I even did the discount website thing. At least I didn't forward copies to friends who have 8800 cards.
you know your sad when you make an april fool gag about recalling video cards :|
Yeah, I bought it, until I looked at the comments, but you have to expect it, I just ordered an 8800 last night, and it had me scared.
Please Slashdot, one per category maximum! I want some actual news.
Amnesty International
This post was rated 42, thats the only reason I read it.
/. you failed me again.
I searched and searched, but found no answer to life,
Now I'm going to have to go to the bar again and see if any drunk chicks have the answer.
"To be is to do." --Socrates
"To do is to be." -- Aristotle
"Do-Be-Do-Be-Do..." --Sinatra
I just upgraded to a Geforce 8800GTS with the hopes of it being my last upgrade for a long time. Sadly when hooked up to my 46" Sharp Aquos 1080p TV, the 8800 overscans a bit. Now with my previous card, a Geforce 7600 I was able to simply use the HDTV Desktop Resize function of the nvidia drivers to fix the problem. This function does NOTHING on the 8800. Nvidia's website says: Question Overscan/Underscan setting does not work on Geforce 8800GTX/8800GTS Answer Overscan compensation is not supported on GeForce 8800 based graphics cards when connecting to many HDTVs over a digital interface (i.e. DVI). To enable overscan compensation, users can connect to their HDTV via Y Pr Pb component output from the 7-pin mini-din connector on the graphics card using the cable adapter included in most retail boxes. So this is a HUGE PROBLEM. Switching to the component output makes the card NO LONGER HDCP COMPLIANT. In other words you can only watch DRM protected HD content downscaled! Talk about a HUGE ripoff since the company claims the card is HDCP compliant, yet the cards don't work properly on common HDTVs!