Strange, i have seen another developer use 3 displays on Ubuntu with just a 660 GTX Ti. He said he plugged it in and it worked.
Resistor hack turns a Nvidia GTX690 into a Quadro K5000 or Tesla K10
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Re: Resistor hack turns a Nvidia GTX690 into a Quadro K5000 or Tesla K10
#72So this is basically a change of the PCI device ID. The capabilities are essentially the same; he just changed the device signature. A cool hack nonetheless. Edit: After looking at the screenshots closer, that seems to be the case. The device ID 0x11BA becomes 0x118F. Vendor ID remains 0x10DE on both. Memory, CPU and other important stuff are basically the same. Very cool!
Maybe the configuration is a little different too. If the professional counterpart is actually worse for gaming, perhaps its because the resources are allocated to supporting multiple displays instead? In that case, is it reasonable to consider this crippling the device?
Professional vid cards are usually about multiple displays so saying that's crippling might be a bit harsh IMO; I'd say it's "differently allocating" resources.
Is it worse for gaming only because of multiple displays (I.E. actual difference in architecture) or is it different in how the funcionality is offloaded by the software based on the device ID? Until there are benchmarks of an actual game played being played before and after, it would be pretty hard to tell.
Re: Resistor hack turns a Nvidia GTX690 into a Quadro K5000 or Tesla K10
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not about principles, it's about economics. This is a matter of price discrimination. Nvidia wants to be sure they have a chance to sell their gear to every single person who has money to spend on graphics cards at a range of price points. Consumers have smaller wallets than professionals, but both have similar needs. So the company performs a "hack" that allows them to extract maximum revenues from each segment…
Yes. That's a wonderful rhetoric, but really what it's saying is that the only people who don't deserve being screwed are the people that make it a hobby to tinker. There's many other areas of life to specialize in, not just technology/engineering side of things. I think general fair play trumps an incentive to learn and hack.
It's not "being screwed". If they didn't do this, they would have to either physically make different cards which would increase the price of both (or lower margins and reinvestment in r&d) OR keep the same hardware and sell it at only one price point somewhere in the middle (which would be more expensive for the consumer, who typically wants the cheaper gaming card). This is a win-win for pretty much the entire market..
Re: Resistor hack turns a Nvidia GTX690 into a Quadro K5000 or Tesla K10
#74It was possible to flash certain ATI 6950 cards "into" 6970s too: http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/overclocking/vidcard/159
Re: Resistor hack turns a Nvidia GTX690 into a Quadro K5000 or Tesla K10
#75That's funny how we feel about things: FastFood monopolist adding too much salt to its cheapest food products so it can sell less salty versions of same products at premium prices ... seems severely pathological. Hardware monopolist crippling cheapest products so it can sell non-crippled ones at premium prices ... sort of ambiguous. Legit market strategy or conning customers? Graphic design software make selling crip…
You keep using that word "monopolist." I do not think it means what you think it means.
I know it's bit inappropriate here. I mean provider or clique of providers entrenched in the market and large enough to shape the market.
Re: Resistor hack turns a Nvidia GTX690 into a Quadro K5000 or Tesla K10
#76Some people are comparing what NVIDIA has done to its hardware to crippled software. It's a bit different though. They didn't just cripple their hardware, they segmented their markets and crippled hardware and software as needed to make it almost impossible to use the same card for more than one application.
Geforce cards are crippled in software so you wouldn't want to use them for CAD work. Quadro cards are crippled in hardware and software so you wouldn't want to use them for gaming or computation, respectively. Although Teslas are also stress tested for data reliability so perhaps it's unfair to say the Quadro cards are unsuitable for computation because they're crippled intentionally.
Re: Resistor hack turns a Nvidia GTX690 into a Quadro K5000 or Tesla K10
#77The corresponding reddit thread is quite insightful: "It is far cheaper to make one very good chip for the highest market, and modify it slightly for lower end markets... Now, this is the part you hate: this is the only viable alternative. There's no point demanding different designs for different market segments as that would significantly increase the cost you, the consumer, pays. You can demand chips be sold at lo…
If you're linking to a specific Reddit comment, please link to the actual comment, not just the post it's a comment on.
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Re: Resistor hack turns a Nvidia GTX690 into a Quadro K5000 or Tesla K10
#78I am astonished there is no law to put you away for 10 years for posting such disrupting stuff ;)
Re: Resistor hack turns a Nvidia GTX690 into a Quadro K5000 or Tesla K10
#79Wouldn't it be easier (and less risky to your hardware) to make the kernel lie about the device ID? Or modify the nvidia kernel blob to compare against another ID?
I'm sure they tried that. It is likely that the driver uses another "proprietary" way to read the ID as well and uses that as definitive answer.
Having said that, distinguishing in software would mean that open source drivers such as Nouveau won't see any difference between the cards and can advertise all the features always.
Re: Resistor hack turns a Nvidia GTX690 into a Quadro K5000 or Tesla K10
#80That's funny how we feel about things: FastFood monopolist adding too much salt to its cheapest food products so it can sell less salty versions of same products at premium prices ... seems severely pathological. Hardware monopolist crippling cheapest products so it can sell non-crippled ones at premium prices ... sort of ambiguous. Legit market strategy or conning customers? Graphic design software make selling crip…
You keep using that word "monopolist." I do not think it means what you think it means.
NVidia may not qualify for all that they're the stronger partner in a duopoly, but Intel's done this and much worse with impunity.