Are These Artifacts From Overclocking?

[westy159]

This is a picture from Hitman Blood Money. Notice the small distortions on the top of the box on the right and on the red chair? Its not as simple as "yes those are artifacts from overclocking, revert to the original settings" because I didnt exactly overclock.

My Geforce 6800XT has 8 disabled pixel pipelines (16 total) and 2 disabled vertex pipelines (6 total). If I were to enable them I would be on par with a 6800Ultra (except for the core/memory frequencys). I decided to go to vanilla 6800 so i unlocked 4pp and 1vp. I have huge boost of frame rate which I am very happy with but I just noticed the distortions in question. Now if the vanilla 6800 can do it, why cant I? And what would happen if I were to unlock all pipelines and take myself to Ultra/GT speeds?

The GPU temperatures remained the same as before the unlocking.

Cheers.

[ProudNerd]

This is a picture from Hitman Blood Money. Notice the small distortions on the top of the box on the right and on the red chair? Its not as simple as "yes those are artifacts from overclocking, revert to the original settings" because I didnt exactly overclock.

My Geforce 6800XT has 8 disabled pixel pipelines (16 total) and 2 disabled vertex pipelines (6 total). If I were to enable them I would be on par with a 6800Ultra (except for the core/memory frequencys). I decided to go to vanilla 6800 so i unlocked 4pp and 1vp. I have huge boost of frame rate which I am very happy with but I just noticed the distortions in question. Now if the vanilla 6800 can do it, why cant I? And what would happen if I were to unlock all pipelines and take myself to Ultra/GT speeds?

The GPU temperatures remained the same as before the unlocking.

Cheers.

Well they are very small artefacts. Thanks for providing such a detailed post your ruled out many things so the most obvious thing to go with is that sometimes pixel pipelines aren’t disabled to hamper performance since its a cheaper card but sometimes because that pipeline is broken from being manufactured poorly and as a result was blocked off to prevent the card from malfunctions and as such its sold for cheaper. So the ones you unlocked may have been broken pipelines and are causing the artefacts you see. Id try locking one back up and see if they disappear. Also enjoy the game its one of my faves! Still in the picture they really don’t look that bad.

[Erik]

I'm with ProudNerd:
The artifacts can very well be caused by malfunctioning pipelines that you enabled.

Many chips get sold with broken, but disabled, pipelines.
They also sell 100% functioning chips with disabled pipelines to fill demand for cheaper parts (the type you were hoping to get, no doubt)
But you can't tell which one you buy in advance, and it seems you were unlucky.

The artifacts don't look at bad though, so maybe you can just live with them?
Or maybe you can make up some excuse and get your card replaced.

[westy159]

You are right, they are very small. In fact in the M2TW demo there are no artifacts and a significant boost in frame rate. However do I risk damaging my card further if I use broken pipelines?

[ProudNerd]

You are right, they are very small. In fact in the M2TW demo there are no artifacts and a significant boost in frame rate. However do I risk damaging my card further if I use broken pipelines?

well sicne i have a crappy card (6600 ) I haven't tried i myself but you can kiss your warnantity goodbye.

[Erik]

However do I risk damaging my card further if I use broken pipelines?

No, there is no danger to the hardware in using broken pipelines.
But some games might cause more severe artifacts, so I wouldn't do anything permanent to that board.

well sicne i have a crappy card (6600 ) I haven't tried i myself but you can kiss your warnantity goodbye.

Depends on how you unlocked the pipelines.
If you use software you can always lock the pipelines up again and nobody would be able to tell what you did with it.
But if you physically change the card (remove or add some jumpers/resistors) then it will become much harder to change it back to it original state without leaving traces.

btw: the fact that you think your card is "crappy" is just more reason to try a mod/overclock.
Worst thing that can happen is you void the warranty on a crappy card (very unlikely anyways, unless you do something serious like replacing the heatsink)
best thing: you turn your crappy card into a good card.