Monitor return rates soar amidst dead pixel pandemic *updated*

AMD's Combinatorial Reverse Cinematics & NVIDIA's hidden GPU features

Update: 1st April 2009 - 17:22

A few of the most notably expert people who have contacted HEXUS, are from the two World Class operations most focussed on delivering the pixel pushing adrenalin which most of the HEXUS.community rely upon - AMD and NVIDIA.

For your delectaion, the world infamous Richard Huddy, Worldwide Developer Relations Manager from the AMD Graphics Product Group explains: -

Paul,

I regret to say that I think this _is_ AMD specific.

I ran your test screen on a large flat panel display manufactured by a manufacturer of large flat panels and you’ll be unsurprised to hear that I see dead pixels here too.

I think the problem is probably caused by the fact that flat panel manufacturers probably had not anticipated how high quality our AMD pixels would be.

With NVIDIA pixels the problems never shows up because their pixels are usually flickering and horrible often with quite a lot of unwarranted nastiness along the edges.  But ours have a rapturous eternal perfection to them and I think that’s what’s causing the problem.  It’s the perfect colors which are sticking...

Try formatting your hard disk to see if that solves the problem...  I tried it and it didn’t work for me – but that shouldn’t stop you...

I suggest you post my response pretty much verbatim as soon as possible.  It’s important that users understand that using good quality hardware has a consequence.

I forgot to mention that we believe that we’ve partially addressed the problem in ‘a very soon to be announced product’, (Ed: Read Radeon HD 4890) by adding DirectX 10.1’s unique pixel equalizer technology (“PET 4.1”) which is capable of turning some white pixels black again quite quickly.  Unfortunately doing the opposite remains an unsolved problem in Combinatorial Reverse Cinematics so we don’t believe that we’ll be able to do that until at least until DirectX 11 arrives...

Thanks,

Richard "7 of 5" Huddy
Worldwide Developer Relations Manager
AMD GPG

A helpful and insightful helpful response came to HEXUS from the almost as infamous Lars Weinand, NVIDIA's Senior Technical Marketing Manager of EMEA. Lars advises:

Woah… I think that mostly happens to displays used by hardcore gamers. The panel itself sometimes falls in love with certain pixels on the screen… when playing computer games and shooting at those pixels, it leave a hole into the panels soul… resulting in those dead pixels. To people complaining about it, I can only recommend to play less violent games.

Btw: a special feature of NVIDIA GPUs is to heal the soul of the panel and bring the dead pixels back to live. To do this, just move the mouse cursor over the dots potentially showing up  on your test side and stroke them lovingly. After doing that for a while, just press CTRL+T (T for “Tataaaaa!”) and the NVIDIA GPU did its magic.

I’m currently writing a white paper on this…

Lars

Lars Weinand
Sr. Technical Marketing Manager, EMEA
NVIDIA

So there you have it - always come to HEXUS for über coolness from the people in the know...


Do let us know your thoughts on the the views from the experts at AMD and NVIDIA in the HEXUS.community and also whether the previously unknown technological features mentioned, are the 'must have' features you'll want in your next graphics accelerator!