TO ALL GF6800 AGP owners

U

UAEstar

Weaksauce
Joined
Apr 25, 2001
Messages
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GF 6800 onboard video processor functionality
If you read this thread N V News you will see that there is a big chance that video processing fuctions will never work in Nvidia 6800 cards

I just posted this over at anandtech.... for those that arnt members there....

I've been following this thread since day one and only now have I registered...

oh well it's a sad sad day.... I just got off the phone to nvidia UK, i'm really suprised she phoned me back as from past experience the customer service has been really bad with nvidia. She found out some information from the engineers.

Anyway... this is what she said: The video processing functions will never work on the 6800, this is due to a hardware failure within the processing unit. The later cards will work fine, e.g. 6600 series, 6200 series and soon to come 6700 series.

I asked if an updated driver would enable the video processing and she explained that the fault is hardware so even a driver update would not fix the problem.

I did not ask if this affected the PCI-E versions so this is only relevant to AGP version of the 6800.... maybe it affects the PCI-E too?

Anyway does anyone else feel they have been conned not just by nvidia but by it's reseller partners? It clearly says on my box about the video capabilities.

I'll be doing an RMA on this card and swapping it for something that is usefull to me.

Kind of ironic that the lower end cards have more "working" capabilities than the king of the hill 6800

shame on you nvidia and all it's partners that couldnt be bothered testing the cards before selling it. Hoping we wouldnt notice????

fools.
 
well, it said on the web site that i baught it from, the maker of my boards web site, and on the box that it has this feature. I think a class action lawsuit is in order to force them to give us one that works.
 
Schadenfroh said:
well, it said on the web site that i baught it from, the maker of my boards web site, and on the box that it has this feature. I think a class action lawsuit is in order to force them to give us one that works.
Click to expand...

What is it with you people and lawsuits? :rolleyes: You think a lawsuit will fix everything for godsakes...you know a law suit wont get you your desired feature for a card, they'd have to remanufacture them and everything, if you want that so bad just go get an ati card or something, and i know you didnt go and buy the card just because of that feature, so have fun.
 
SaViOr- said:
What is it with you people and lawsuits? :rolleyes: You think a lawsuit will fix everything for godsakes...you know a law suit wont get you your desired feature for a card, they'd have to remanufacture them and everything, if you want that so bad just go get an ati card or something, and i know you didnt go and buy the card just because of that feature, so have fun.
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companies should not be allowed to falsely advertise product features...............

i believe there is a law against it

at least, take the advertisement for the video processor off the boxes.
 
SaViOr- said:
What is it with you people and lawsuits? :rolleyes: You think a lawsuit will fix everything for godsakes...you know a law suit wont get you your desired feature for a card, they'd have to remanufacture them and everything, if you want that so bad just go get an ati card or something, and i know you didnt go and buy the card just because of that feature, so have fun.
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No I don't think it will fix anything but get my my 450 + dollars back that i spent on a card that if i want to watch movies or do what ever i want for the card it should do what the box says .. it can do end of story
:mad:
 
can someone summarize WTF they are talking about
I dont want to wade through 20+ pages in that other thread on some *other* forum, LOL

1. Whats broken on the 6800?
2. How do we confirm its broken?
3. In What way did nVidia falsely advertise?
 
I would agree on a lawsuit.... this is bullshit that I paid so much for my card and I get this in return. I cant really RMA either
 
This is the first nvidia card I've bought (see sig) and it'll be the last too. Now I read about this on top of these shitty ass beta drivers coming out every other week. For a company making such a huge profit off us and laughing all the way to the bank they could at least update their drivers within 1-2 months. Last GOOD set was from 7/27....c'mon now.
 
Damn people, you hear rumors that something doesnt work, and you start claiming lawsuit? I have a 6800 gt, and dont really care about the video processor. My 6800 gt performs great now, and thats whats really important to me. I didnt buy it for the video processor, and I dont think many of you did. True I guess it sucks if it wont work, but its not the end of the world. Nvidia made a mistake, it happens. If it you bought the card with the video processor as being one of the sole reasons to get it then yah RMA it. Otherwise give them a break, at least until we know for sure.
 
gamer1drew said:
Damn people, you hear rumors that something doesnt work, and you start claiming lawsuit? I have a 6800 gt, and dont really care about the video processor. My 6800 gt performs great now, and thats whats really important to me. I didnt buy it for the video processor, and I dont think many of you did. True I guess it sucks if it wont work, but its not the end of the world. Nvidia made a mistake, it happens. If it you bought the card with the video processor as being one of the sole reasons to get it then yah RMA it. Otherwise give them a break, at least until we know for sure.
Click to expand...

wow, youre the perfect consumer. pay $400 for product that doesn't work as advertised, and say "bah its no big deal" i got a car that doesn't run, wanna buy it?

good for you, dont expect the rest of us to take it in the *ss
i dont mind nvidia making a mistake, what i mind is IF they try to shine it on like nothing happened. they need to man up and admit a problem, and offer a fair solution, not pretend like its no big deal

we do need to wait and see how they respond officially...so far its mostly rumors and speculation
 
Some of the hardware mpeg processing stuff doesnt work ON THE VIDEOCARD. So your CPU has to do the work. IE: your CPU utilization will be high during DVD playback. So if you want to play 3d game on one moniter, and watch a DVD simultaneously on your other moniter.. your CPU may choke.

But since most people with a 6800 series processor have a 2+ Ghz AMD, or a 3+Ghz Intel CPU, its not a big deal. I'm not happy about it, but I bought a 6800 b/c it was bad ass gaming card, not b/c it was good for watching DVD's or videos. Though it is called a videocard, you would think it could process videos on the card itself.

BTW, I've never noticed a slow down or high CPU utilization. Granted if I opened up task manager and monitered it. I might notice 80% CPU utilizations, when it should only be like 20-30%. But I guess at 3.6Ghz and 1200Mhz FSB, etc.... its hard to choke my CPU.
 
Steel Chicken said:
wow, youre the perfect consumer. pay $400 for product that doesn't work as advertised, and say "bah its no big deal" i got a car that doesn't run, wanna buy it?
Click to expand...

How about you read his post again?

Or, are you saying, you NEVER play games with your card? Is that what you are saying? Or, maybe you are saying that the card doesn't WORK when you play games with it? Oh, it does?

Tell me, would you even KNOW if the video processor worked or not if you hadn't read the above link?

Then why does it matter? If the numbers from the 6600 articles are any indication, it's not really any big deal, anyway. Only -20% CPU utilization on *some* encoded files - not even ALL media types.
 
Um, guys... you can run a DVD movie with a 500mhz PIII in pure software mode. So there shouldn't be any issue with running it on our modern systems, especially if you have a 6800. You shouldn't even have problems with running a game and the movie at the sme time, if you are so inclined.
 
onboard video functionality? is this even relevent to games at all? does it even matter? im a noob some fill me in here.
 
dderidex said:
How about you read his post again?

Or, are you saying, you NEVER play games with your card? Is that what you are saying? Or, maybe you are saying that the card doesn't WORK when you play games with it? Oh, it does?

Tell me, would you even KNOW if the video processor worked or not if you hadn't read the above link?

Then why does it matter? If the numbers from the 6600 articles are any indication, it's not really any big deal, anyway. Only -20% CPU utilization on *some* encoded files - not even ALL media types.
Click to expand...

go read the thread over @ NV news, then you will become more informed. i wasn't originally going to but decided to inform myself. does it effect games? no. does it effect certain codecs? yes. does it bother me? yes. does the card work as advertised? no. will nvidia admit there is even something wrong with it publically? that remains to be seen

so let me ask you a question. (i admit my earlier car anology was extreme).
lets say you buy a new car. the car runs. it drives. 4 months later, summer arrives and its hot out. you turn on the ac, and it doesn't work. what do you do? say "its no big deal the car still runs" or do you get the issue resolved. the fact that you hadn't used the AC yet is irrelvant. the fact that the AC is not needed to actually get from point a->b is irrelevant. it was listed as a functional feature of the car, included its design and price, and it doesn't work.

if its no "big deal" to you thats fine, you see I can actually accept that some people dont care about this...what I find odd is that some people refuse to allow other people to have differing view points...why is it wrong to have a product work as advertised? this aint no $15 PCI card...they are high end $400 cards, and for that amount of money, it needs to do EVERYTHING its supposed to, IMO

think what you want, but have the courtesy to allow others the same option
 
OMG you're so outraged (or poor) that you didn't even buy a 6800, but still feel the need to flame. :D

I started a more intelligent thread about this in the nvidia section.
 
lopoetve said:
Um, guys... you can run a DVD movie with a 500mhz PIII in pure software mode. So there shouldn't be any issue with running it on our modern systems, especially if you have a 6800. You shouldn't even have problems with running a game and the movie at the sme time, if you are so inclined.
Click to expand...

its about newer codecs, with higher resolutions. HD specifically.
people are getting 100% CPU utilization and dropped frames, de-synched audio, etc on top of line AMD cpus, and some P4's as well.

the point is, it looks like the GPU is not handling decoding right, and so the burden goes to the CPU...which is fine for low res older codecs, but newer stuff breaks
 
Steel Chicken said:
its about newer codecs, with higher resolutions. HD specifically.
people are getting 100% CPU utilization
Click to expand...
I was getting 40-55% CPU utilization on playback of HD (1080/720) WMV files, but I have a fast CPU.
 
pxc said:
I was getting 40-55% CPU utilization on playback of HD (1080/720) WMV files, but I have a fast CPU.
Click to expand...

yeah not everyone is getting it...and thats the crux of the problem...so many different cpus, different gpus (early vs later cores) different versions of codecs, media players, directx, etc

the p4's w/HT enabled seem to do the best, the AMD XP's seem to do the worst
there is significant evidence (and unoffical response from nvidia) that *something* is wrong in some of 6800's...

im not home so i can't test mine till the weekend, but i will for sure
 
Steel Chicken said:
so let me ask you a question. (i admit my earlier car anology was extreme).
lets say you buy a new car. the car runs. it drives. 4 months later, summer arrives and its hot out. you turn on the ac, and it doesn't work. what do you do? say "its no big deal the car still runs" or do you get the issue resolved. the fact that you hadn't used the AC yet is irrelvant. the fact that the AC is not needed to actually get from point a->b is irrelevant. it was listed as a functional feature of the car, included its design and price, and it doesn't work.
Click to expand...

The purpose of the hardware codec is the reduce CPU load. Those who are affected are the people that want to multitask while watching a movie on their PCs. They can still multitask, but power will be greatly reduced.

The AC works, it just draws more power from the engine than you expected. And this feature isn't something like AC anyway. AC is something you really have to have running while you are also getting from A to B. That's like saying you have to be able to play games and watch movies at the same time. Maybe a small percentage of people do this, but for me, it's not going to be a determining factor for which video card I buy.

There have been other features that graphics cards didn't do as expected. Not that this is an excuse, but how about the x800's adaptive filtering that was kept secret when everyone thought it was doing true trilinear? At least that issue affected games. I don't hear UAEstar saying that he'll never buy ATI when they deceived everyone on their filtering. This is more like not having AC IMO.
 
mbmadness said:
The purpose of the hardware codec is the reduce CPU load. Those who are affected are the people that want to multitask while watching a movie on their PCs. They can still multitask, but power will be greatly reduced.

The AC works, it just draws more power from the engine than you expected. And this feature isn't something like AC anyway. AC is something you really have to have running while you are also getting from A to B. That's like saying you have to be able to play games and watch movies at the same time. Maybe a small percentage of people do this, but for me, it's not going to be a determining factor for which video card I buy.

There have been other features that graphics cards didn't do as expected. Not that this is an excuse, but how about the x800's adaptive filtering that was kept secret when everyone thought it was doing true trilinear? At least that issue affected games. I don't hear UAEstar saying that he'll never buy ATI when they deceived everyone on their filtering. This is more like not having AC IMO.
Click to expand...

just my 2 cents....if u spend $400+....it better damn well do everything a shitty videocard can do...
 
Jesus Christ, it was just an analogy, no need to nitpick it to death.

ill sum up my opinion, if its OK with everyone else
Nvidia advertised hardware level decoding/encoding
it *seems* that in many cards it doesn't work
i dont like that fact, its called false advertising/defective product
im waiting for more info before i decide what to do, proof I have a problem, nvidias official response

is that OK?? I mean, I dont want to hurt nvidia feelings or anything, I mean im glad to take it in the *ss so they can make a buck
 
My VPU works fine, and with recent drivers, it takes even less strain off of the CPU.
 
mbmadness said:
Maybe a small percentage of people do this, but for me, it's not going to be a determining factor for which video card I buy.
Click to expand...

That is why you shouldn't even be in this thread.

I guess you haven't read the rest of this thread; HD could be directly effected. As soon as I get home, I am going to run T2 Special edition DVD (which has an HD versoin that requires a 3GHz CPU, 1Gig of ram, etc.). If I get stuttering, dropped frames, or any problems, I am going to be pissed.

If nVidia come out and say, "yeah its busted" and then don't offer a fix, I am going to be pissed. You seem to completely forget the fact that you paid for the card... if that feature wasn't built into the GPU it may have reduced cost... It shouldn't matter if you don't use it... It is not that difficult to understand... whether you use it or not YOU STILL PAID FOR IT. Paying $400 for a card that doesn't work AS ADVERTISED is rediculous.

"but itll still run, just on your CPU" <-- I DON'T WANT IT TO TAX THE CPU.

People in here that think other people are over-reacting, are ignorant and if you don't care, you shouldn't be here anyway, let alone post in this thread.

With that said; I am going to wait for concrete proof and also wait to see if nVidia does anything about it... If nothing happens, I am going RMA this bitch and get a replacement (ATi or 6900 or Whatever).

peace,
OriginalOCer
 
Steel Chicken said:
Jesus Christ, it was just an analogy, no need to nitpick it to death.

ill sum up my opinion, if its OK with everyone else
Nvidia advertised hardware level decoding/encoding
it *seems* that in many cards it doesn't work
i dont like that fact, its called false advertising/defective product
im waiting for more info before i decide what to do, proof I have a problem, nvidias official response

is that OK?? I mean, I dont want to hurt nvidia feelings or anything, I mean im glad to take it in the *ss so they can make a buck
Click to expand...

Then return it and buy ATi. I personally think that 90% of the people with these cards don't give a damn. I sure don't, I've got a TV for watching DVD's on, thank you very much, and I'm certainly not downloading them. What do you NEED those codecs for anyway?

My contribution to this thread is dumb. This is, as far as I'm concerned, a pointless feature in the first place. It not working is hardly a bug to me.
 
lopoetve said:
Then return it and buy ATi. I personally think that 90% of the people with these cards don't give a damn. I sure don't, I've got a TV for watching DVD's on, thank you very much, and I'm certainly not downloading them. What do you NEED those codecs for anyway?

My contribution to this thread is dumb. This is, as far as I'm concerned, a pointless feature in the first place. It not working is hardly a bug to me.
Click to expand...

I rest my case :p
 
lopoetve said:
Then return it and buy ATi. I personally think that 90% of the people with these cards don't give a damn. I sure don't, I've got a TV for watching DVD's on, thank you very much, and I'm certainly not downloading them. What do you NEED those codecs for anyway?
Click to expand...
depending on whether or not my card is broke, and how nvidia responds, i just may do that. maybe 90% of people dont care...does that make the fact that i DO care irrelvant? im glad you got a DVD player, I DONT, i play DVD's in my puter, according to you, thats dumb and i shouldn't expect a product to work as advertised


My contribution to this thread is dumb.
Click to expand...
no arguements on this point

This is, as far as I'm concerned, a pointless feature in the first place. It not working is hardly a bug to me.
Click to expand...
good for you, thank God your opinion is not the only one that matters

why do people insist on forcing their opinions on others!?!
 
I think I can give a little more perspective on the issue, as my career is advertising ;)

I don't have the card yet, but it's a month or so from purchase, but now I plan on waiting to see what happens around this issue...the AC analogy was a GOOD analogy, get off his ass....if you don't like it, take any part of the car....heated side-view mirrors for instance...even less neccessary...but something you pay for. If a line of cars comes out with a defect, it's repaired for free by the dealer. If it's a bad messup (cars are more life and death tho) they have what's called a 're-call'. Think you might of heard of that before :) nVidia WILL have some answering to do if this function does not work on any 6800s. How this got past quality assurence is completely beyond me...I find it hard to believe they worked this hard on NV40 and never noticed video playback diddn't work right. The person saying they diddn't want to tax their CPU is right....$500 (even more for lack of availability; 6800 u's) damn well better do everything it should....that's like getting a porsche to realise oh my, one of the cylinders doesn't fire...or moving into a house and realising the phone lines dont work....you have to run a huge phone cable to the poll instead.

To say it's okay for nVidia to fuck up because computer's can do the work anyway is dumb, plain and simple. And don't even think about me loving ATI, because im an nvidia lover (after years of hatred after the 3dfx buy-out). This is actually making me consider ATI for my next purchase....but time will tell how nvidia handles the issue when they announce if it's all 6800's or just some older ones. If they are aware of this flaw and are STILL manufacturing NV40's errorous, they deserve to be sued....I know if I advertised a vehicle as a lower price than it was, or a different model year, i'd be in some shit :rolleyes:

My two cents.
 
Steel Chicken said:
wow, youre the perfect consumer. pay $400 for product that doesn't work as advertised, and say "bah its no big deal" i got a car that doesn't run, wanna buy it?

good for you, dont expect the rest of us to take it in the *ss
i dont mind nvidia making a mistake, what i mind is IF they try to shine it on like nothing happened. they need to man up and admit a problem, and offer a fair solution, not pretend like its no big deal

we do need to wait and see how they respond officially...so far its mostly rumors and speculation
Click to expand...

Wrong analogy with the car not running. It would be more appropriate to say that the car didn't have 1 of its headlights. Nothing too important towards its running, but something that some people can't live without.
I didn't buy my ultra for its video processor. I got it simply because it was an incredibly fast video card. I couldn't care less if the video processor did work. I never encode anything.
 
video encoding isn't the issue (i don't think...ive always understood that as CPU)...its the playback.
 
botreaper10 said:
Wrong analogy with the car not running. It would be more appropriate to say that the car didn't have 1 of its headlights. Nothing too important towards its running, but something that some people can't live without.
I didn't buy my ultra for its video processor. I got it simply because it was an incredibly fast video card. I couldn't care less if the video processor did work. I never encode anything.
Click to expand...

i already admitted the car running was a bad analogy
thanks for your opinion though, but I do care if it works
 
botreaper10 said:
Wrong analogy with the car not running. It would be more appropriate to say that the car didn't have 1 of its headlights. Nothing too important towards its running, but something that some people can't live without.
I didn't buy my ultra for its video processor. I got it simply because it was an incredibly fast video card. I couldn't care less if the video processor did work. I never encode anything.
Click to expand...

the idea is that the gpu should take the load of the cpu when it comes to video encoding/decoding...every new card should support this simple basic feature...
 
It's already been determined that some do and some don't.. The newer revision weeks do have fuller support then older weeks...
 
I agree that the card should do the work. I just don't give a crap if mine does or not. When i watch video's on my comp, that is all i do. If my athlon 64 3000+ @ 2200 mhz can't playback a video, then something is wrong. Sure, it would be nice to have the video processor working, I just didn't buy my card expecting it at all. My card does all i expect it to. Maybe i just set my standards too low when it comes to features. The card is awesome performance wise. That is all i really care about.
 
So this explains why when I tried to watch a DVD in a computer I just built for somone, it had a really low framrate and was all chunky?
 
OriginalOCer said:
That is why you shouldn't even be in this thread.

People in here that think other people are over-reacting, are ignorant and if you don't care, you shouldn't be here anyway, let alone post in this thread.
Click to expand...

The name of the thread is "TO ALL GF6800 AGP owners" and the original poster asks "Anyway does anyone else feel they have been conned not just by nvidia but by it's reseller partners? It clearly says on my box about the video capabilities."
 
I'm just curious if any of you guys have actually checked the HD playback performance on your systems. M$ has some HD clips that you can download to play on WM10. My AMD64 3000+ sits about about 30% processor usage during playback. Not a problem in my book.

IMO, it's a shame that the hardware decoding doesn't work properly on the NV40s, but considering the fact that I didn't even know it could do that when I bought the card (and based a purchase on gaming performance), it doesn't matter to me, but I'm sure it'll matter to some people.

botreaper10 said:
I agree that the card should do the work. I just don't give a crap if mine does or not. When i watch video's on my comp, that is all i do. If my athlon 64 3000+ @ 2200 mhz can't playback a video, then something is wrong. Sure, it would be nice to have the video processor working, I just didn't buy my card expecting it at all. My card does all i expect it to. Maybe i just set my standards too low when it comes to features. The card is awesome performance wise. That is all i really care about.
Click to expand...
 
Well I probably wont use mine for playing movies but I am disappointed in nVidia. If this turns out to be true, I dont plan on buying from nVidia in the future unless they have a huge turn around....
 
This is direct from Nvidias site regarding tech specs on the geforce 6800 card line, so am I to assume that all of the below does not work and will not work?

Advanced Video and Display Functionality

* Dedicated on-chip video processor
* MPEG video encode and decode
* WMV9 decode acceleration
* Advanced adaptive de-interlacing
* High-quality video scaling and filtering
* DVD and HDTV-ready MPEG-2 decoding up to 1920x1080i resolutions
* Dual integrated 400 MHz RAMDACs for display resolutions up to and including 2048 × 1536 at 85Hz
* Dual DVO ports for interfacing to external TMDS transmitters and external TV encoders
* Microsoft® Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) supports multiple video windows with full video quality and features in each window
* Full NVIDIA® nView™ multi-display technology capability
Now unlike the rest of the crowd I only own a nu6800 that cost me 230$, but I would like to some video editting....am I to assume that I'm FUBAR? I'm just as confused as the next guy....

-Rikus
 
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