What if a stream processor breaks?

[thesnowtiger]

Hi,

I've been trying to find out what the effect would be if a single stream processor broke on a video card.

Would it be noticeable? Would it just make performance slower, or would there be visual artifacts?

Thanks.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

Your video card wouldn't work.

 

[Ketchup]

From what I understand, it depends on what type of card you are talking about, Nvidia vs AMD.

A couple years old, but as an example:

Each company uses a separate architecture for their graphics cards. It use to be 5 units were the equivalent of 1 core, but with the AMD Radeon HD 6900 series that changed. Essentially for AMD, each unit does a separate instruction and function while Nvidia has consolidated the set of functions and instructions into a single and dynamic core.

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/855177-Video-Card-Stream-Processing-Units-vs-Processor-Cores

also
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090129015947AA1STqY

So, to answer your question, I am not entirely sure, but I suppose you would have crashing games.

 

[thesnowtiger]

I'm talking about AMD cards.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

Unless (and even still doubtful it would work) you could flash the card to disable the broken CU the card would continue to try to use it and thus continue to fail.

 

[Vesku]

If a stream processor completely breaks the card should fail to work at all or fail during boot up. If it is instead unreliable then you'd get data corruption which should show up as visual artifacts or "random" crashes.