Nvidia GTX 680

[Fire$torm]

What I want to know now - maybe JPM or F$ or Zombie or somebody else knows - is this stupid limitation on crunching a software limitation? Like a BIOS/firmware or driver issue that could be altered or remedied is some way? Or is it a hardware limitation where nVidia somehow screw with the chip just to make sure that crunching with the card is impossible.

The whole thing just stinks. It's one thing not to have the technology period. It's another thing for that technology to be "present" but out of reach financially to all but giant corporations or Gov entities such as NASA. It is quite another thing altogether for the technology to be present, and financially accessible...and then denied the consumer because of stupidity and uber greed on the part of the corporation who makes it. I'm not against them making a profit. I am against them scalping me because I want to use the CUDA portion of their technology whch EVERY ad of theirs boasts about.

I think my next GPU may have to be an AMD just for the principle of it. Is the 7970 turning out to be that hot of a card on Moo! or Donate or whatever the hot AMD/ATI project flavor of the month is?

In the 680, it's a physical reduction of FP64 cores, which are then additionally crippled. Nothing can be done.

In the 400 series and 500 series i never found out how it's done for sure, but i DO know it isn't done through BIOS. So hacking that won't help at all.

It's possible it's done in the drivers. If that's true, the last driver release that wouldn't've been crippled would've been during the reign of the 200 series, however, conveniently enough, those drivers won't allow a 400 or 500 series card to work at all.

I thought I read somewhere it was a firmware/driver imposed limitation as nVidia didn't want to muck with fabrication layouts or some such thing. That is for pre-680 units.

Edit: For anyone that has not seen the "Pro" units ----> http://www.nvidia.com/object/workstation-solutions.html
Their top shelf card sells for $3,998.00. Now you see why nVidia limits the 680! For x8 the price you get your card unlocked..........