X-bit labs

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

Web-Sites Accuse GeForce 7800 of Low Image Quality. Image Quality Got Lower on the G70 – Media

Even though contemporary visual processing unit offer truly admirable performance and capabilities, benchmarking wars sometimes force designers of graphics chips to perform certain tweaks to get additional speed. Sometimes those tweaks degrade image quality, and while the majority of users never notice those slight degradations, demanding customers complain about them.

3DCenter and nV News web-sites have found that NVIDIA’s latest GeForce 7800-series graphics processor has lower quality anisotropic filtering (AF) compared to predecessors, which contradicts to what NVIDIA said about its latest chip.

“The G70, delivering a texel power of more than 10 Gigatexels, but using 2x AF for some angles only–while the user enabled a mode called "16xAF"; plus the tendency to have textures which tend to shimmer, is an evidence of the G70's incapacity,” 3DCenter web-site notes.

NVIDIA has admitted the problem and said it would fix it. By now NVIDIA has posted a beta driver that may fix the issue for at least certain games.

“We have isolated the problem and we are working on the fix. We will also be working on a fix for the application profile problems that some users were experiencing. We hope to have a fix soon,” said Brian Burke, a spokesman for NVIDIA Corp.

• 3DCenter: High-End Chip G70: Only Shimmering AF?
• nV News: Shimmering Bug Fixed!
• nV News: 7800 AF Quality Not as Good as 6800’s? Shimmering?
• NZone: NVIDIA ForceWare 67.02 Beta.

VIA C7-M Processor Previewed. VIA’s Latest Chip Under Investigation

While VIA is world famous as a chipset designer, its intentions to produce central processing units for certain markets have a relatively long history. In the light of the fact that the market of x86-compatible microprocessors is almost monopolized by two companies – AMD and Intel Corp. – these attempts deserve respect. PCStats.com web-site has decided to take a closer look at VIA’s latest achievement – the C7-M microprocessor.

This CPU is made with a 90nm IBM SOI (Silicon-On-Insulator) fabricating process with a die size of 30mm square NanoBGA2 package. The VIA C7-M processor uses a 16-unit execution pipeline, features a large L1 cache of 128KB and 128KB L2 cache, and is designed to operate on frequencies starting from 1.50GHz up to 2.00GHz with TDP from 16W to 20W.

The main features of the VIA C7-M microprocessor are PadLock co-processor and PowerSaver technology. The PadLock is a security co-processor, which is dedicated to encryption tasks, while PowerSaver technology dynamically reduces frequency and voltage.

“The VIA C7-M’s tiny size and thermal capabilities will definitely help it’s chances in the laptop market, though the lack of PCI Express support in VIA’s chipset lineup will not. As things appear now, look for VIA C7-M CPUs to appear in ultra-portable and budget laptops near you before the end of the year. As we said earlier in the article, Transmeta’s demise has left a hole in the laptop market which VIA seems well-positioned to fill,” concludes PCStats.com.

• PCStats.com: VIA C7-M Processor Preview.

Power Supply Tutorial Posted. Everything About PSUs Explained

Contemporary microprocessors and graphics cards consume significant amount of power and getting a high-quality power-supply unit (PSU) is tremendously important these days. With a wide choice of models from different manufactures present on the market it is becoming difficult to purchase the product that will satisfy your needs. Hardware Secrets has posted an article about PSU, where the author explains the importance of different PSU parameters such as form factor, cooling, stability, power, efficiency and power factor correction.

“The power supply is probably the most neglected component on PC. Many times, when buying a computer, we just take on account the processor clock, the motherboard model, the quantity of installed memory, the hard disk storage capacity, and we forget about the power supply, which, in fact, is the one who supplies the “fuel” for the PC parts to operate properly. A power supply of good quality and with enough capacity can increase the durability of your equipment. Just to have an idea, a high-quality power supply will cost less than 5% of the PC total amount. On the other hand, a low-quality power supply can cause several intermittent problems, which are mostly difficult to be solved. A defective or bad-intentioned power supply can lock the PC, can result in hard disk bad blocks, can result in the infamous “blue screen of death” errors and random resets and freezings, added to many others problems,” starts the article.

• Hardware Secrets: Power Supply Tutorial.