NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX/GTS' Killer BugEver since NVIDIA released their revolutionary GeForce 8800 GTX and GeForce 8800 GTS graphics cards, users have been complaining about the poor Vista driver support and how these expensive cards have failed to improve their performance in games. That may now come to pass, in a manner of speaking.
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 yourselves 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.
Now, what's the big deal about a slightly incorrect scene? After all, you can't even tell the difference between 2xAA and 4xAA. What would a slightly different scene matter when you are zipping along at 60+ fps? Well, that's what YOU think.
Here's the bummer. What it really means is that objects can be rendered off to one side. For FPS gamers, this can cause shots aimed at those objects (like your opponents) to miss when they should really hit. In RTS games, it may cause you to click on the wrong unit or send your units to attack a different target. So, yeah, you can now blame your poor gaming skills on a bug.
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