More on GeForce 6800 pipeline management

Alexey Nikolaychuk, the developer of RivaTuner, was worried about the fact that ASUS V9999GE (GeForce 6800 on 6800 Ultra PCB) had all 16 pixel and 6 vertex pipelines enabled after patching with 6800 Ultra BIOS despite hardware protection of disabled pipelines.

We continued our examinations and finally Alexey found the key allowing to IGNORE hardware pipeline disabling. Naturally we expected artefacts, as they don´t disable pipelines just for fun.

Thus RivaTuner gained more features (tested on ASUS V9999GE). Note that NO 6800U BIOS PATCHING. That was what we saw on the first startup:

12 pixel and 5 vertex pipelines. Let´s try and enable the rest. Note the new pipeline forcing switch near the NVStrap button:

We decided to warn users any time they decide to perform such a step:

Flag all pipelines, HW Mask column shows those hardware disabled.

That was what we got after reboot:

We did it! All 16 pixel and 6 vertex pipelines are enabled! Let´s bench the card in FarCry and Serious Sam: TSE.

You see, pipelines are really defective causing bad artefacts. After we uninstalled NVStrap the card started working normally again.

Other cards indicated that such disabled pipelines won´t be working stable and well. At least those we enabled. So we decided to delay the release of this feature until enabled pipelines work ok.

But this discovery would be an interesting statistics tool to understand which GPUs are good for unlocking without risking the quality.

And again, YOU DON´T NEED TO MESS WITH BIOS to perform operations above.

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