nvidia 6800gt>quadro fx 4000

[mike.b]

i just turned my 2 pny 6800gt cards (home and work) into quadro fx 4000s using rivatuners soft quadro mod.i dont have benchmarks between the mod and unmodded card, but windows recognize cards as quadro 4000 and use the quadro drivers, all opengl features work great, mastercam is flawless and my 3d modeler got a huge boost in speed.

needless to say im happy about it.

[Bullines]

Just don't install newer drivers when they're relased our your softmod goes out the window. The reason being...

 

Softmodding your card doesn't actually physically change anything on your video card. It doesn't flash any ROMs on the card. It merely modifies the driver to allow features that would normally be reserved for only Quadro cards to be used by GeForce cards (recall that GeForce and Quadro cards use the same driver). An gererally, these softmod apps only work on certain versions of the driver. So when nVIDIA releases a new driver, you'll have to wait for the developer of the softmod app to support the new driver. Some soft mod apps o/c cards, too (which can be done anyways using the CoolBits tweak) which can shorten the life of the card and system if extra cooling isn't there.

[mike.b]

i'm not sure if i agree with you there...i got the latest drivers from nvidea and installed them after i softmodded the card.

when i softmodded then unistalled the gforce drivers, upon restarting my computer, windows recognized the card as a quadro even when there was no driver and tried to look for a quadro driver to install. the riva softmod uses something called "pci device id settings" where you tell it to recognize it as either a quadro or its gforce counterpart.

my device manager tells me i have a quadro fx 4000 installed. some people in the guru 3d forum are reporting equal scores with real quadro cards using the spec benchmark.

[Bullines]

quote:

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the riva softmod uses something called "pci device id settings" where you tell it to recognize it as either a quadro or its gforce counterpart.

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It modifies the id string string of your video card in the INF file. If you really wanted to, by editing the INF file, you could change your video card to be recognized by Windows as "Mike.b's Killa Vid Card". In short, all the softmod did was change the name of your video card (but not on the hardware itself), enabled some Forceware driver features that weren't enabled before and maybe even o/c'd your card a bit. Trust me, it did not physically modify your card at all. Not one bit. Not one iota, even. That's why it's a softmod...the 'soft' is for "software"

 

Plug that card into a different computer and see what Windows detects it as

 

quote:

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some people in the guru 3d forum are reporting equal scores with real quadro cards using the spec benchmark.

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Softmodded cards can never be the real thing. There's a reason why the Quadro cards look physically different from the GeForce cards.

 

I get a kick out of these softmod threads when they come up

[mike.b]

i knew it didnt physically modify it..but i understood that the 6800 and quadro graphics chips were exactly the same? anyways im just happy my card now gives me nice antialiasing and smooth performance without the bugs it did before in mastercam and studiotools ple because of limited opengl.

i think i am going to keep the fantasy that i have a real quadro card anyways

[Bullines]

quote:

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but i understood that the 6800 and quadro graphics chips were exactly the same?

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Nope, not really. The 6800 does support some of the same features as the QuadroFX but nVIDIA chooses to hide some of those features since it may contribute to instability. Softmods simply modify the to make those features available.

[deeherk]

sure wish i knew what you guys were talking about...seems to me like you should be professors or something...keep up the good work...i think!!!

dan

[mike.b]

i think bullines knows what he is talking about. im just spewing stuff i read on another forum that i used to get my card working better.