The indexes only work on MyISAM. Who needed transactions anyway? Every feature MySQL lays claim to is always full of gotchas like this.

The compiler does a lot of unrolling. Newer GPUs do have actual branch instructions, but they have enough locality restrictions that you'd have a hell of a time making them fully general. Restrictions on what you can write back are also not particularly fun.

It's still turing-complete all right, but the memory fetch latencies and other restrictions would make it absolutely hellish to run an OS on a GPU, which is why they don't run one.

Video cards run nothing like an OS on the hardware, and you won't be getting one running yourself. Most GPUs don't have branch instructions (newer ones kind of do, but only in the "skip forward" sense). It's kinda hard to run an OS without those.

Now it is fair to say that the _driver_ is a sort of microkernel OS all its own (and also has an optimizing compiler at that), but it does still use your CPU to execute it.

Nvidia's entire 19x series of drivers have consistently been a problem with fallout 3, ranging from stuttering to BSOD's. I recommend installing the WHQL Release 186. I never had bluescreens, but it stuttered like mad til I reverted to 186. Got a few graphical glitches in complex geometry (clipping mostly) but they were minor and the smoothness was worth it. I'll give this to nvidia, at least they do make the earlier drivers easily available.

Now if someone could tell me which drivers will play nice with both Dragon Age and Anno 1404... Don't tell me, ATI, right?