back to article Gamers reach for BFG after Nvidia turns back the overclock

Laptop-wielding gamers are up in arms over a driver update from Nvidia, which disables overclocking in the company's gaming-laptop-targeted GeForce GTX 900M devices. Those who installed the drivers had their clock settings wiped, and according to TechPowerUp, even third-party overclocking tools have been blocked. The change …

  1. Graham Marsden
    WTF?

    "a user risks serious damage to the system"

    Erm, excuse me, but isn't that THE USER'S CHOICE?!

    Tell them that it's dangerous to over-clock it and, if they do, it voids their warranty, but don't be so bloody arrogant as to say "we're going to stop you from doing this because it's bad for your computer"!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "a user risks serious damage to the system"

      "Tell them that it's dangerous to over-clock it and, if they do, it voids their warranty,"

      How would Nvidia prove any damage was caused by overclocking?

      No doubt there is some logging but I would have thought a careful overclocker could cover their tracks and try and claim a failure under warranty which was perhaps caused by their own actions.

      I think it reasonable to design the drivers to work within hardware limits.

      1. keylevel Silver badge

        How would Nvidia prove any damage was caused by overclocking?

        It can be done - the Raspberry Pi allows "safe overclocking" and "risky overclocking" - enabling the "risky" mode sets a permanent bit in the chip which can be used to reject warranty claims.

    2. This post has been deleted by its author

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "we're going to stop you from doing this because it's bad for OUR BUSINESS"!

      Each passing year I think Mr. Huang makes it clearer that he has no problem crippling his own drivers to drive up prices and purchases of his other offerings. It has been known for some time that most (or all) of his GPUs have to be intentionally engineered so that they cannot be softhacked into one of his flagship products. Beyond softhacking, it's also known that they have been intentionally crippling their drivers in their desktop GPUs to bleed sales of their "Quadro" lines 10bit support.

      At this point, the people who are actually paying attention to Mr. Huang's bad business practices pretty much will give him the middle finger too! Mr. Huang is pretty much the Mr. Greed of the GPU world....Ellison wannabe.

    4. Gordan

      Translation

      Translation: "Our manufacturing process is crap, and following high failure rates a number of OEMs have asked us to prevent OC-ing because the warranty claims are killing us."

      Frankly, I'm amazed it took this long. On my last laptop I went through 3 GPUs (GeForce GTX260M, followed by two underclocked (yes, I modified the BIOS to underclock and undervolt to keep temperatures reasonably sane) Quadro FX3700Ms).

      The simple fact is that Nvidia don't actually make laptop GPUs - they rebadge desktop ones and ship them with a different power profile (lower clock speeds and voltages) programmed into the BIOS.

      Either way, this will only be an issue for people who feel the need to be on the drivers' bleeding edge for some reason. The previous version of the driver already supports all the GPUs available today, so this will only really become an even remotely serious issue when the next generation of GPUs comes out (which isn't expected to happen any time soon).

  2. This post has been deleted by its author

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: hmm

      It's more like one of the main reasons of high-end laptops is 3D rendering, if not the only reason left. You don't want to let loose a cheaper GPU that can compete with a higher end GPU when so few of either are being sold. It's a business decision, albeit one with a feasible excuse. However, who's complaining about overclocking to begin with: The sales department or the fire department?

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    /sigh

    It's been a long time since I've bothered with a gaming laptop as the one I had died... due to overheating. So yeah I think that Nvidia has a valid excuse. That said if they, or the laptop manufacturer, made any overclocking claims in their marketing then Nvidia has one again failed to deliver.

    I say once again because of the recent issue with the 970 desktop card. While it's technically true that the card has 4Gb of vram on it the last 512Mb doesn't have it's own dedicated memory bus due to parts that have been disabled from it's elder the 990. Effectively this means the last 512Mb runs 10 (or 20? I forget) times slower by Nvidia's own admission.

    Nvidia has downplayed the importance of the marketing snafu and says that it doesn't impact and current generation games by more than a few percent. What about games coming down the pipeline? Or other non-graphics based workloads?

    All I know is I picked a bad time to switch back to Nvidia.

    1. DryBones

      Re: /sigh

      Did AMD ever work out their Z-buffering issues? I seem to recall that every time I tried one of their cards textures would pop through each other like a mofo.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: /sigh

        The only popping I ever noticed was due to LOD settings being conservative by default in most games. Don't get me wrong neither brand is especially good these days. There's always pro's and con's. Something I wish both of them would stop doing is adding features to their driver suites. I don't need social media, automatic driver settings, streaming, etc. By choice? Sure. By default. @#$@ %$#.

        Just waiting for a story about remote hijacks via streaming features or social media widgets.

        1. Lionel Baden

          Re: /sigh

          well you may not like it.

          But I for one love the fact, i can easily stream or save a recording of the last 20 Min of gameplay.

          Automatic driver settings can be useful, I have not had an issue with them yet.

          The point im getting at, just because you don't use it doesn't mean nobody does, some of the features I find very useful.

          1. Joe 48

            Re: /sigh

            I'm running a 970M in my MSI laptop and can honestly say the improvements from overclocking are so minor It wasn't even worth the risk so I fail to see the big issue.

          2. Oninoshiko

            Re: /sigh

            Gotta admit, I'm with Lionel. I actually HAVE used that feature. Not a lot, mind you, but I have used it when someone wanted a look at what I was playing (poorly).

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    They also got rid of

    long standing, flexible 3D stereoscope support a few years ago, replacing it long after with some awful crippled DRM riddled 'feature'.

    It was a shame- the old drivers let you play stacks of games on an HMD or other 3D display without patches or suchlike (if you were willing to put up with a few graphical artifacts where the programmer had cut corners).

  5. Brian Souder 1

    Melt Down

    I wonder if they had one sort of melt down a bit. Probably freaked out some lawyers in the back room. Imagine the bad press from that! I think they would rather take the hit from people being upset over a missing feature vs. hey this product catches fire. Don't buy it. I would have taken this action too. Especially with the limited OC benefit.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Seriously, buy AMD...

    You'll get better engineering, better drivers, less bullcrap and less fuck-the-consumer-out-of-as-much-money-as-we-can malarkey.

  7. nct123

    Erm, excuse me, but isn't that THE USER'S CHOICE?!

    Tell them that it's dangerous to over-clock it and, if they do, it voids their warranty, but don't be so bloody arrogant as to say "we're going to stop you from doing this because it's bad for your computer"!

    Webmaster,

    http://explorequotes.com/

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