I would like to see...

[Steve]

...a diagnostic tool for graphics cards.

I'm sure everyone agrees with me that it's difficult to diagnose graphics card problems. Artefacts could be caused by driver or windowing issues. Crashes could be RAM, chipset, drivers, Vista, anything.

There is of course a process of elimination through which you can get pretty close to being sure it's the graphics card - but not everyone has everything they need to be sure.

So I wonder if AMD and Nvidia would benefit from spending a little bit of time developing diagnostic tools. They could provide a CD image that boots into a Linux kernel, loads their kernel module, then exercises the graphics card. They'd have complete control of all the versions, so would go a long way towards ruling out compatibility issues.

What do you reckon? It'd be the GPUs answer to Memtest86+.

[kalniel]

Kind of like ATI tool you mean? Or the inbuilt test of nForce or whatever it's called these days.

[burrellhead]

it would be great so then you wont have to buy a new graphics card if something is wrong with it

burrellhead

[Steve]

Yeah, but one that uncomplicates things by not being loaded in the same environment as all the other crud on a machine.

From a pointless RMA perspective it'll probably save people time/money.

[kalniel]

Yeah, but one that uncomplicates things by not being loaded in the same environment as all the other crud on a machine.

Problem is a lot of that crud is needed to access the advanced functions on a graphics card - you can do 2d with generic drivers, but to test out the bits of hardware dedicated to 3d stuff (where most of the failures are) you need those (largely propriatory) drivers loaded. And those drivers have dependancies such as directX or openGL, and those APIs themselves have dependancies such as windows display model or the linux kernel equivalent etc.

[Steve]

But you'd have control over that.

You'd load the nvidia/fglrx kernel module, have an appropriate X version running, and you're away.

Point is, if you're AMD/Nvidia it would be (relatively) easy, and potentially quite beneficial.