Jamyskis

I recently bought myself a brand new GeForce 8600GT to go with my brand new Athlon X2 64-bit 4400+ PC with 2GB RAM, 700GB hard drive space (500GB SATA2, 200GB IDE), and donated my old 6600GT to a friend who was in need of a card that could at the least do hardware pixel shader operations.

Now, at one point, I did have colour through TV-Out on the 6600GT, but that disappeared at one point. I attributed it at one to a dodgy power supply not supplying enough power to the card (the drivers complained about it often enough), but, as it turns out, that was not the reason.

The reason is that the ForceWare drivers are in an absolutely atrocious state. Neither under Windows nor Linux does the TV-Out work. We’ve had some success getting the unaccelerated nv driver under Ubuntu to produce colour, but 3D graphics on the TV is out of the question.

One contributor on the forums mentioned that NVIDIA had said somewhere that PAL support had been removed completely from S-Video support. Given that the only ports available on most cards are VGA, DVI and S-Video, that didn’t do any of us in Europe any favours. Cheers NVIDIA for your unending support for us European users.

The moral of this story - if you are planning to connect your computer to the TV to watch movies, play games, or whatever at any time - DO NOT BUY A GEFORCE CARD.