softmodding to unlock vid card pipelines

[corinthos]

If you use RivaTuner to unlock disabled pipelines on a card and find the unlocked pipelines are nearly 100% good based on what artifacts you see being hardly noticeable unless you really look for them, will you do permanent damage to your card by continuing to play games with the pipelines unlocked? And is there such a thing as degrees of pipeline damage? Lastly, do damaged pipelines worsen over time?

I've played MOHAA and BF2 and while I do notice artifacts they are minor and I don't notice them much at all when I don't look for them, so it's acceptable to me but if any permanent damage will be done to the card by playing with slightly damaged lines enabled, I'd like to know.

 

[Avalon]

No, you will not be doing any permanent damage to your card. The artifacts are just an after-effect of quirky silicon. The only direct result unlocking can do to your card in the way of "damage" is by increasing your heat output a bit. 99% of the time this is not an issue, and I've never heard of someone burning down one of their cards from simply unlocking.

My friend has a Radeon 9500 that is similar to your card in that it unlocked 95% successfully. When he plays the Airstrip multiplayer map in FarCry, if he peers inside the jet, he sees funky colors. He's never had a problem with the single player mission as far as I know, and he plays CS, Natural Selection, HL2, UT2004, and Doom 3 just fine without any glitches. He's had the card unlocked for 2 years now with no degrading effects.

Hope that helps.

 

[corinthos]

thanks for the info, i don't know about the technical aspects of how a vid card works, so I thought I'd ask to be sure.

 

[corinthos]

I have one more question... is it possible for artifacts to be cause by something other than hardware problems like bad pipelines or overheating? like, is it possible to be driver related?

I see some minor artifacting in MOHAA and BF2.. but I also just noticed artifacting while playing back MPEG2 and DVD discs using both WinAmp and Video Lan. These tiny black dots appear and go away, and if I resize the window they kinda just stick in some places rather than go away.

I was reading a post in a forum somewhere where this guy said installing the latest beta nvidia video drivers (77.76) fixed his artifacting in BF2. I gave it a shot but the problem still exists for me. I'm wondering if there could be some other cause of this, like a BIOS setting I should look into?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Keysplayr]

Originally posted by: corinthos
I have one more question... is it possible for artifacts to be cause by something other than hardware problems like bad pipelines or overheating? like, is it possible to be driver related?

I see some minor artifacting in MOHAA and BF2.. but I also just noticed artifacting while playing back MPEG2 and DVD discs using both WinAmp and Video Lan. These tiny black dots appear and go away, and if I resize the window they kinda just stick in some places rather than go away.

I was reading a post in a forum somewhere where this guy said installing the latest beta nvidia video drivers (77.76) fixed his artifacting in BF2. I gave it a shot but the problem still exists for me. I'm wondering if there could be some other cause of this, like a BIOS setting I should look into?

Thanks in advance.

Unlikely a driver would cause artifacting, but maybe in certain games, one driver may give issues where another driver revision may not. Only way to rule out the driver is to change it to another version. Most popular causes of artifacting are overheating, bad memory, or an enabled quad/pipelines that arent' quite perfect.

 

[corinthos]

I still can't figure out if it's a hardware or driver problem... here's what's happening.. I recorded a TV show using my PVR-500 in mpeg2 format and when I play it back in videolan and winamp i see these black specks distributed around the screen that come and go. But I play some other mpegs and avis and they look fine with no artifacts. Then I load a DVD and I see those same black specs, except they are stuck on screen instead of disappearing after a second. I've tried only 2 drivers.. 77.72 and 77.76 so far.

Anyone know what could possibly be going on?.

UPDATE: I just played with winamp settings and unchecking the box that says
'Allow hardware video overlay (recommended - best performance'
got rid of the artifacts! More specifically, in winamp, if I check 'Allow hardware video overlay' but uncheck the sub-checkbox 'Allow YV12 overlay mode' then the artifacts go away too.

Also, going into VideoLan setup-> Video->Advanced Options->uncheck 'Overlay video output' got rid of the artifacts there too!

So something about enabling overlay is causing the artifacts...

I still have no idea what the problem is exactly...
maybe this gives you more of an idea of what could be wrong?
Is it some conflict with Nvidia's PureVideo?