No softmodding for me !

Hardware & Gaming Graphics Cards & GPUs
1

Hmm, I loaded up Riva Tuner and this is what the Diagnosis Report says :

So no Software Masked pipes and I am not going to unlock any HW masked pipes. Just don’t wanna take the risk !

I am already getting 56 fps average in Doom 3 at 1024x768 with 4x AA and 4x AF

2

Did u check “allow enabling hardware masked units” under Nvstrap driver tab ?

U shud try unlocking the hardware masked pipes there isnt any risk involved ! If you start getting artifacts then you can switch back to Bios defaults.

3

Yup, it is enabled. Plus I am happy with my performance, lets see later !

4

Is this thread about unlocking the remaining Pixel Pipes on the Nvida GPU

I really wanted to know this thing.

Can we unlock the Pixel & Vertex Pipelines on the Gainward 6600GT PCI-E x16
After unclocking do we really get a performance rise

5

There is nothing to unlock on that :face_with_tongue: . Unlocking only works on the vanilla 6800 AGP cards :slight_smile: and 6200(NV43 core) PCI-E/AGP cards.

6

Sorry didnt new.

Isnt the 6600GT is restricted to 8 Pixel Pipelines is it & dont know the amount of Vertex Pipelines

Plz correct me if i am wrong

7

Yeah 8 pixel pipes and 3 vertex pipes. But the 6600GT is a different chip(NV43) in which physically only those many pipes are present. In the 6800GT/Ultra(NV40), there are 16 pixel pipes and 6 vertex pipes. The vanilla 6800 AGP uses the same chip as well. However 4 pixel pipes and 1 vertex pipe is disabled in the bios. (In the 6800LE, 8 pixel pipes and 2 vertex pipes are disabled) So this softmodding business works in those chips. Same is the case for 6200(NV43 based ones) cards in which 4 pixel pipes are disabled and can be enabled by rivatuner.

8

What sort of a performance rise is acheived with this unlocking on 6800 Plain
Is the performance rise a huge one , what are the other + points of this unlocking

If there is an article link explaining the benifits & the unlocking procedure it wud be gr8

9

There u go :slight_smile:

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/geforce_6800_unlocking/default.asp

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10

Thanks for the link Chaos.
The article is a wonderful read.

The Performance increase is there but not very big one.
Also they have said that after unlocking the pipelines they were not able to OC it.
If the cards wud have OCed it wud have been gr8.

Is it so that the cards that they tested were not able to OC after unlocking.

11

Well that cuz after unlocking the extra pipes a lot of extra heat is generated, hence the low mileage on oc’ing the card after unlocking the pipes. Although a generous helping of as5 and artic silencer shud solve that too.

12

Thanks Blade now got it

13

Also most of the people were getting artifacts after unlocking the pixel pipelines, the cards were stable with only the xtra vertex shader enabled. The performance diff was that high too.

14

“artifacts” - what are they technically speaking.
I not much into graphics so dont know

15

Artifacts occur due to corruption in textures. They appear either due to the core overheating or memory overheating.
If the core overheats you normally will notice purple colored texture corruptions in 3d games or black dots appearing in games. If the memory overheats you most probably will get white dots called “snows” over the screen. Genreally if you start getting artifacts at stock speeds it indicates the card is dying, after a while even 2d becomes corrupted as Masky had posted earlier.

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