Nvidia is sneaky and deceitful (in my opinion)

Download game today
Die prematurely tonight!

Advanced search

If you registered for membership on this site but have not yet received the confirmation activation email, there are 3 main reasons.

1. It ended up in your junk or spam folder, please look there to see if it's in there.

2. You did not enter your correct email address.  Please register with a new username and the correct email address and try again.

3. Your IP address and or your Email Address is listed in the Stop Forum Spam (spam protection) database as a known spammer and when either your IP address and or your email address appears in that database, your account can not be approved.  As such if you are a spammer, please move along, our community is too small for you to bother with.  If you are NOT a spammer, contact the owners of Stop Forum Spam and get your information removed from their database and register a new account.

[City Builder]

Yeah I snuck that (in my opinion) in there just in case Nvidia is watching 

I bought a new Acer computer about 2 or 3 weeks ago now and the Nvidia graphics chip that comes with the computer is absolute trash, it is a Nivida Go 7100.  So you know I have to have good graphics to play meh games like we all do, so I borrowed one of the Nvidia 8800GTS 320MB video cards out of my old computer until I could find a new graphics card to buy and exchange into the new computer.

So today I was down at Best Buy and I see an Nvidia 9800 GT with 1GB of memory onboard.  And it's on sale at $149.00  I asked the clerk how much it is when not on sale but she said she couldn't tell me and didn't know herself.

I asked about the return policy and they told me I have until Jan 02 even if I open it.

So I got home and installed it in the new computer, updated to the latest Nvidia drivers (released today) and loaded up meh games, of World of Warcraft.

I've never seen the game so jerky, and it seemed like my fps couldn't have been any better than about 10fps, which is absurd, normally I get like 100fps.

So I loaded up the sacred 2 demo, and again it was all jerky.  So I did some investigating and what do you suppose I found out?

I found out that the 9800GT is no different than the 8800GT, it uses the same chip, and the primary difference is a new feature that when your computer doesn't need stellar great graphics (like in windows word processing), it will shut down the graphics card and switch to the graphics chip (assuming you have Nvidia chipset),  I would have thought that 1GB would have made a huge difference in prefetching textures and what not since it's like almost 700MB more than what is on my 8800gts video card but apparently not.

So why do I think that Nvidia is sneaky and deceitful?  Simply because they are taking an old chip (the same chip that is on the 8 series cards) and putting them on the 9 series cards, and giving them the new 9 series numbering making the public think that they are an improved or better graphics card.  It's just plain wrong and Im about fed up with both ATi and Nvidia and their deceitful immoral ways.

Yeah, it's already back in it's box and will be returning it the next chance I have to go down to Palm Desert.

On a positive note, I did buy a PC case exhaust fan since this computer doesn't come with on, but has the punch out on the back for it, so as to exhaust out the hot CPU air.  Fortunately the CPU pulls the air in a giant cone from the side of the case, so it's gettng the cooler room temperature air constantly being brought in to cool the CPU and I must say, it's a pretty nice design and the first of it's kind that I've seen that is effective.  My last case had a cone attached to the side of the case, however it was so far away from the CPU fan that there was no way it was pulling in cooler air through the funnel.  Nice design on Acer's part, and nice to finally have a computer that doesn't tower 3 feet above my desk and especially nice that it's a beautiful gloss black case which looks like a match to my monitor.

[RhiannOn]

Oh, that sucks CB, how disappointing for you... (I make mental note not to buy 9800 GT) but your Gloss Black case sounds very, very nice!!!!     Pickie please   
It is so good that cases have got away from that yucky beige colour  which discolours over time...

Tell me about it with nvidia....I get ticked off with their new drivers they put out.  I try the latest ones and not one will run thief2 with all it's colours and stars at night, even with the game modification, so I still use 163.75 so I can still play thief in it's true glory.  I'd have thought they would have fixed it with their later drivers..but noooooo  .  Apparently system shock 2 has the same problem since nvidia 6600 series cards too.

[City Builder]

The only good thing that was introduced in todays drivers (or maybe it was yesterdays drivers) is that Nvidia finally made it so that you can run two monitors while in SLI mode.  Of course my new computer doesn't support SLI so I can't take advantage of that new features now and waited patiently for it for over a year of drivers hoping each time it would finally be introduced.

It got to be a right pain to have to switch in and out of SLI mode to boot up my second monitor, everytime that I wanted to run my second monitor, and then have to reboot to get back into SLI mode and lose the second monitor.

Okay, in all fairness, I've reinstalled the 9800 GT again because I had a feeling that it couldn't be as bad as it seemed to be, and because I just installed Nero the other day, and today I found it running with 100% cpu power so I feel it was what was making my games all jerky and not the video card, since it's supposed to be equivelant to my 8800, it should be as smooth as that if not smoother since it's got the 1GB of video ram on board.

Yeah, it's definately smoother now that I've uninstalled Nero so that it can sit there sneakily behind my back doing what ever it was doing using up a full cpu core.  My guess is it was scanning my drives for content, but it just never quit scanning, I caught it doing this the other day too and had to kill the process.

Anyway, it still sucks that Nvidia is using the 8 series GPU inside of a 9 series video card and seems deceitful to me and makes me not want to trust them.

But switching back to ATi wouldn't leave me feeling any better since I no not what is their top of the line cards anymore and there whole fiasco of adding the word "PRO"  to their cards names to make the consumer feel he was getting the top of the line card, when in reality if you bought a video card from ATi with the word Pro on it, then it meant you were buying there midstream line, the mass market card that would appeal to the most people due to it's price tag.  They caught me on that one once, when I bought my X1600 Pro card and thought I had bought the top of the line 1600 but soon found out afterwards, otherwise.