Upcoming Rivatuner to allow unlocking of NV40 pipes

[Bigjakkstaffa]

http://www.ixbt.com/news/hard/index.shtml?hard107341id

http://www.ixbt.com/short/2k4-08/rt2.png

Should give a nice little performance bump

--Jakk:t

[Midknyte]

The 6800s with the 12 pipes are that way because 4 are defective. It might take a long time until 6800 yields are good enough that they have to purposely disable good pipelines.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/gf6800-oc.html

So, the question sounds like this: Is it possible to turn on all of the 16 pipelines on the NVIDIA GeForce 6800?

Yes, it is! This is easy: just flash the BIOS from the GeForce 6800 Ultra. After the BIOS re-flash, the graphics processor enables all 16 pixel pipelines and the card becomes… NON-OPERATIONAL!

Why? Because those four missing pipelines hadn’t been disabled just for nothing – they have certain defects, which show themselves as artifacts in 3D applications after you enable those pipelines. You won’t have the opportunity of returning things back easily: after flashing back the BIOS from the 12-pipelined GeForce 6800 you’ll see that the situation remains the same – the card still has 16 pipelines and also has those 3D artifacts. In order to disable the defective pipe-work and restore the card’s operability you will need special software and a specially modified version of the BIOS.

Thus, although it is possible to transform a GeForce 6800 into a GeForce 6800 Ultra/GT by turning on all 16 pipelines, there’s no practical gain from that so far: the disabled pipelines are 100% sure to have defects and their turning on results in various visual artifacts.

There’s no sense to hope that some of NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800 chips have 16 “healthy” pipelines and some of them are just disabled for no particular reason – NVIDIA is not in a position to make such gifts today. The chips are tested back at the factory and are immediately sorted. Fully operational chips are transformed into the GeForce 6800 Ultra/GT, and those that have certain defects – defects that that can be avoided by disabling a few pipelines – become the 12-pipelined GeForce 6800.

It is of course possible that the NV40 manufacturing process will be improved after a while. In this case, there will be an insufficient amount of defective chips to produce the GeForce 6800 in mass quantities, and NVIDIA will have to turn pipelines off in fully operational chips. By that time, however, NVIDIA will certainly have introduced various protection techniques, and it will be less easy to make any kind of conversion to the GeForce 6800.

[bob05]

Originally posted by Midknyte
The 6800s with the 12 pipes are that way because 4 are defective. It might take a long time until 6800 yields are good enough that they have to purposely disable good pipelines.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/gf6800-oc.html

That's some food for thought, I'm considering getting a next-gen card this fall/winter. By then yields should be better, and hopefully allowing for easier modding. But thats great that Rivatuner will allow for unlocking pipes. This will (virtually) eliminate the need for flashing, and take the risk out of ruining the card. :t

[Midknyte]

you should just get a 6800GT to be safe. all you gotta do is overclock. no messing with pipes or bioses. it's up to you. The xbitlabs guys are pretty crazy with their mods, so I don't think they would lie about the 6800s. If you seen some of the voltmods they did, then you know what I mean. :x

[Bigjakkstaffa]

Yeah, i would agree with buying the GT rather than the standard 6800 to be safe, even if the yields on the 6800 do improve, its a relatively "low spec" card (for the NV40 range anyways) and if you were unlucky in that you didnt get an upgradable one, you may have spent a lot of money on not a lot of extra performance.

--Jakk:t

[Midknyte]

The problem is that if you flash the bios or do the softmod to enable the pipelines, it is not easily reversible.

In order to disable the defective pipe-work and restore the card’s operability you will need special software and a specially modified version of the BIOS.