Singing Potatoes
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Friday, 5 September 2003
Free Upgrade!

Apparently, nVidia uses the same graphics processing unit in its consumer-level GeForce series video cards as it does in the higher-end Quadro cards; the drivers disable certain advanced capabilities if the chip was programmed with a GeForce ID, which lets them sell the "more capable" Quadro at a higher price (say, four or five times the equivalent GeForce card).

While owners of GeForce256 and GeForce2 cards could "upgrade" their cards by clipping a few resistors, a Russian programmer has written a utility which patches the drivers and reprograms the chip to identify itself as a Quadro, opening up the disabled hardware features. There's a version for the older cards, and a new version for the GeForce4 line.

The average gamer probably won't be affected, but 3D apps which use an OpenGL interface should see an appreciable speed improvement.

Update: a quick guide (PDF) to installing (and removing) the patch.

Posted by godfrey (link)
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Comments
Grrrr.... &*(%$ PC-Only....
%#@^%&^ GeForce 4 in my iMac....
Grrr....
Posted by Zachary Brewster-Geisz on 6 Sep 2003 07:19
Oh look honey, a Macintosh; isn't it cute? I hear they're thinking of making it a protected species due to it's rarity. Oh wait, Gates already did that with $250M.
Sorry, I can't help myself.

Godfrey, would it be worth it to me to do that to my GeForce 4 card? You know how leery I am of these kind of things.
Posted by Lunchbox on 9 Sep 2003 10:51
Probably not. It only affects the OpenGL subsystem, whereas nearly all commercial 3D games (for the PC, anyway) use the Direct3D interface.

These modifications do things like enabling hardware-accelerated lines and overlay buffers, functions typically used by CAD and 3D modeling applications.

Posted by Godfrey on 9 Sep 2003 11:32