The Animal Farm Research

The nVidia GeForce 8 Documentation explicitly says that loops should now support run-time condition testing, which to my mind means that non-const variables should be permissible in the condition test. Either way, I should be able to create an infinite loop and have a statement inside which breaks out of the loop once a counter variable reaches a certain, dynamically calculated number. And barring that, I should be able to create a for-loop that executes some max number of iterations, but also has a statement inside which breaks out once the counter variable reaches a certain number.

Of course, none of the above works on my 8800 GTX. I speculated that there was some loop unrolling going on that might be throwing the system off, but a quick look at the generated assembly (using NVemulate, handy little program that it is) indicated otherwise. The last example I gave above is especially weird: I can create a for-loop that executes a max number of iterations and put a break condition inside, but the number I put in as the max number of iterations matters and is very, very touchy, despite that the underlying assembly doesn't change at all. Sometimes I can use 70 just fine, sometimes I can only go up to 10, which is highly restrictive.

This isn't an app-killer; I've got my system basically working and working well, but for some of my requirements the restrictions might get in my way.