CONSOLEs vs PC

[Pemalite]

SvennoJ said:

Well you tell me what was wrong with it. Games started with a bit of graphical corruption to being completely invisible behind the mess of criss crossing lines, and the only way to 'fix' it was by disabling Hardware TnL in the ini files for Everquest, and in the settings for FS2004. A video problem that gradually gets worse is a deteriorating chip in my book. It was an overclocked card, at least it was promoted that way.

I had a different video problem before with a NVidia Riva TNT2 card with the video in/out port. I had to route my Dreamcast through my PC to get it to display on my CRT projector. For some reason the signal level from the DC was not compatible with my projector. That all worked fine for a while (crazy taxi on 72" screen was awesome), until 1/4 of the top of the screen always remained blue.

I've had better luck with pc hardware since I stopped buying stuff on release :) Now I need to apply that lesson to consoles... (rrods/ylod/wii disc drive problems had em all)

Could have been a myriad of different issues, but it could have been the TnL unit at fault. (It wasn't a seperate chip, which I was pointing at in my last post.)
The difference between nVidia's Geforce FX and ATI's Radeon 9000 series at the time was ATI removed the fixed-function TnL unit and performed those functions in the shader hardware instead.
nVidia didn't, they had a seperate TnL unit on the FX, which was part of the "GPU" and not a seperate chip, it wasn't untill the Geforce 6000 series that the TnL unit was absolished in nVidia graphics processors.
When I was reverse engineering SM3.0 shaders down to SM1.1 in order to get more performance out of nVidia FX cards, I generally ignored the TnL unit completely and tried to minimise the use of the vertex shaders.

When it comes to PC hardware, avoid "budget" brands like ECS, Biostar, Asrock.
And generally, longer the warranty, the more content a manufacturer is with it's reliability.

With Graphics Card's the "premium" cards like MSI's with "Military Grade stuffs" or Asus DirectCU II are generally going to be more reliable as they use higher premium components for better reliability and power delivery and other benefits.

It's rare I don't own a card that will last for years without a problem.