WHQL Certification Waivers

Dave Baumann

Dave Baumann

Gamerscore Wh...
Moderator
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You may remember I mentioned last year that the FX series were recieving a number of "waivers" for WHQL certification (I think these pertian to the 14 or so that Fudo listed in his article a little while back). XBit have put up a news article that actually acknowledges waivers.

Personally, I think this is the reason behind NVIDIA's present confusing driver policy. NVIDIA stands by its UDA, and the FX series is part of that UDA - I'm wondering if MS is no longer as willing as it once was to offer waivers for the FX series which is why we are seeing more releases (not at NVIDIA's main site) that have WHQL certification for GeForce 6 series specifically.
 
Money talks and bullshit walks. I thought you knew this Dave?

What you are saying has remained true for years. Ati does it as well.
 
DaveBaumann said:
NVIDIA stands by its UDA, and the FX series is part of that UDA - I'm wondering if MS is no longer as willing as it once was to offer waivers for the FX series which is why we are seeing more releases (not at NVIDIA's main site) that have WHQL certification for GeForce 6 series specifically.
Click to expand...
Uhm, I'm gonna have to admit me ignorance on another three letter acronym....what does "UDA" stand for? :|
 
I wonder if this means PS 3.0a is on the way. I know M$ said they wouldn't, but...

Jawed
 
What you are saying has remained true for years. Ati does it as well.
Click to expand...

I haven't seen it done with ATI... example?

Well, look at this:
Officially, the first DX9 driver NVidia had was the 43.45 - 3/27/03
It got FX support (FX only certified) by 44.03 - 4/14/03
Full WHQL support by 45.23 - 8/13/03

Doesn't that seem kinda slow for NVidia?

3/15/04 - WHQL driver does not certify GF1-GF3
4/1/04 - WHQL driver certifies all (though, originally the WHQL certification wasn't in the drivers initially)
7/20/04 - add GF6 support, like 2-3 months after the launch - claims no SM3 testing yet
7/27/04 - SM3 support
??/??/?? - first WHQL driver for GF6+before

Between of all of this blah, there have been more beta drivers, than secret WHQL drivers. What bothers me is that NVidia's whole UDA architecture is way too bloated (it extends as far as the TNT generation) and managing that support is become rather difficult at times. If they were smart enough, they would attempt to at least phase out the TNT generation. Though, it could just be that how they are architecting the driver is causing problems somewhere along the line. Not to say ATI hasn't been affected, but it's almost 4 months since a NVidia driver with WHQL certification across the board and ATI in a couple of weeks with another certified round for all their hardware (since the Radeon)...
 
Jawed said:
I wonder if this means PS 3.0a is on the way. I know M$ said they wouldn't, but...
Click to expand...

I doubt it. I also doubt that the SM3.0 issue raised here would be anything serious as the runtime requirements were tweaked for NV4x anyway.
 
I don't see what the big deal is with having a unified driver anyway. It was useful back in the days where you didn't know if your card had the latest driver, WHICH driver you were supposed to install, and how to tell which card model you had. We're talking Voodoo/PVR/Riva days. Then you had OGL drivers, and miniGL drivers and Direct3D drivers and sometimes GLIDE drivers, and you had IHV drivers, and AIB drivers and microsoft default drivers. It was a mess. But now it's easy to know which card you have (if nothing else than the numbering 9xx/5xxx/6xxx/Xxx, or perhaps even DX capability) and you only use IHV drivers (well, mostly).

It wouldn't trouble me in the slightest if (for instance) ATi said "from Catalyst 5.1+ only Radeon 9500 and above will be supported. Everyone else will have to use Cataclyst 4.12". Heck, they're already doing it (temp) with the CCC.

Are we getting to the point where people are actually thinking of using a 8500/9200 to play 2005 games? My GF2 GTS on my other computer is using the 41.09 drivers. Why upgrade? It's not like I'll enjoy the fixes for recent games because that card can't handle the recent games.
 
Has anyone actually ran this test on various hardware yet? I am currently skewing through the shader tests atm. I have noticed a single test ((Like the precision test, goes over several thousand tests, and it failed like 30.

I am gonna post a results of what failed as soon as I'm done. but this is taking a while. 66.77 certified drivers.

Precision Test.


Code: 
Elapsed Time: 00:01:14 
Device Mode Cmdline: PSPrecision.exe -DX9.0 -SRC:PUREHAL -DisplayMode:1024x768xX8R8G8B8 -M:1 -WHQL 
Total Conformance: 100.00% 
Total Run: 452 
Total Passed: 415 
Total Failed: 37 
Total Blocked: 0 
Total Warned: 0 
Total Skipped: 0

Pixel Shader 1.1 not logged due to passing all tests


Pixel Shader 1.2

Code: 
Elapsed Time: 00:12:29 
Device Mode Cmdline: Pshader.exe -DX9.0 -SRC:PUREHAL -DisplayMode:1024x768xX8R8G8B8 -Ver:1.2 -M:1 -WHQL 
Total Conformance: 99.79% 
Total Run: 9008 
Total Passed: 9005 
Total Failed: 3 
Total Blocked: 0 
Total Warned: 0 
Total Skipped: 0


Pixel Shader 1.3

Code: 
Elapsed Time: 00:12:12 
Device Mode Cmdline: Pshader.exe -DX9.0 -SRC:PUREHAL -DisplayMode:1024x768xX8R8G8B8 -Ver:1.3 -M:1 -WHQL 
Total Conformance: 99.79% 
Total Run: 9068 
Total Passed: 9065 
Total Failed: 3 
Total Blocked: 0 
Total Warned: 0 
Total Skipped: 0


Pixel Shader 1.4 No log as all tests passed



Pixel shader 2.0

Code: 
Elapsed Time: 00:06:00 
Device Mode Cmdline: Pshader.exe -DX9.0 -SRC:PUREHAL -DisplayMode:1024x768xX8R8G8B8 -Ver:2.0 -M:1 -WHQL 
Total Conformance: 98.24% 
Total Run: 3461 
Total Passed: 3422 
Total Failed: 38 
Total Blocked: 0 
Total Warned: 0 
Total Skipped: 1


Pixel Shader 2.0 Extended
 
Mordenkainen said:
Are we getting to the point where people are actually thinking of using a 8500/9200 to play 2005 games? My GF2 GTS on my other computer is using the 41.09 drivers. Why upgrade? It's not like I'll enjoy the fixes for recent games because that card can't handle the recent games.
Click to expand...

Not that simple. For example, your GF3 would support GL_vertex_shders and that extension only got into the drivers a couple of months ago...
 
Has anyone actually ran this test on various hardware yet?
Click to expand...

I'd definately appreciate it as well...

What hardware are you using to test though? 6800GT?

Also, doesn't this look wrong?

Elapsed Time: 00:01:14
Device Mode Cmdline: PSPrecision.exe -DX9.0 -SRC:pUREHAL -DisplayMode:1024x768xX8R8G8B8 -M:1 -WHQL
Total Conformance: 100.00%
Total Run: 452
Total Passed: 415
Total Failed: 37
Total Blocked: 0
Total Warned: 0
Total Skipped: 0
Click to expand...
 
Are we getting to the point where people are actually thinking of using a 8500/9200 to play 2005 games? My GF2 GTS on my other computer is using the 41.09 drivers. Why upgrade? It's not like I'll enjoy the fixes for recent games because that card can't handle the recent games.
Click to expand...

Well, to add to Sigma's point, he's right. You're probably not going to get any performance enhancements (more likely the optimizations will just only apply to the newer hardware) but you do get a better OpenGL driver (for better compatibility in newer games, but not much). Of course, there's just a point where it's almost pointless and I guess it's up to you to decide where that is. I don't see any benefits to the GF2 and newer drivers, except maybe the game profiles. The 8500/9200 will probably receive... perhaps one more performance enhancement, and at some point, access to the CCC (though, that might just be a bad idea by then... heh)
 
Deathlike2 said:
Has anyone actually ran this test on various hardware yet?
Click to expand...

I'd definately appreciate it as well...

What hardware are you using to test though? 6800GT?

Also, doesn't this look wrong?

Elapsed Time: 00:01:14
Device Mode Cmdline: PSPrecision.exe -DX9.0 -SRC:pUREHAL -DisplayMode:1024x768xX8R8G8B8 -M:1 -WHQL
Total Conformance: 100.00%
Total Run: 452
Total Passed: 415
Total Failed: 37
Total Blocked: 0
Total Warned: 0
Total Skipped: 0
Click to expand...
Click to expand...

I thought it looked wrong. But thats what it told me. So I can only speculate the failures arent require for conformance or something.

The Sm 3.0 test had over 26,000 tests to run and it would take me over 3 hours to run it. Unless I messed it up. (Dont see how I did though) So I havent gotten around to do it.
 
I really don't know what a UDA actually is...;) (I know what it is supposed to mean, but...) AFAIK, the term is more accurately applied merely to a driver installation package which simply rolls all disparate drivers into a single installation package, as opposed to being "one driver" fits all "UDA" gpus. At installation the hardware is identified and then the correct driver for it is installed out of all of the separate ones included in the UD. I think we should probably drop the "A" completely as I don't think it has any meaning...;)
 
WaltC said:
At installation the hardware is identified and then the correct driver for it is installed out of all of the separate ones included in the UD.
Click to expand...

Ugh.. You don't know anything do you ?

The only thing preventing a same install running on all hardware is the device id detection mechanism by Microsoft.
Other than that, if you already have installed a driver for each device id, any update you did will benefit all other devices (but sometime it is better to reinstall because of the registry..)
 
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