Re:The Truth on OpenGL Driver Quality
by exDM69 on Tuesday May 13, 2014 @05:00AM
(#7737151)
> IIRC one could also flash a consumer-grade card with a Tesla BIOS and "convert" a couple-hundred-dollars-card into a thousand-dollars-card.
No, this guy was soldering resistors on his $1000 card to spoof the PCI vendor:device IDs and fool the driver to enable a software features (4 displays at once). The same could have been done by patching the kernel.
IIRC Nvidia fixed the "bug" that made this work but enabled the feature on the consumer cards (it was available on Windows but not Linux for reasons unknown).
But he did not get access to the hardware features which are fused off.
And as others have said, every chip manufacturer out there does same. Intel has 20+ models of their most recent CPUs, which are probably all the same silicon or perhaps a few different designs. i5's are "crippled" i7's (perhaps ones that were not 100% successfully manufactured), but you get them at a discount.
No, this guy was soldering resistors on his $1000 card to spoof the PCI vendor:device IDs and fool the driver to enable a software features (4 displays at once). The same could have been done by patching the kernel.
IIRC Nvidia fixed the "bug" that made this work but enabled the feature on the consumer cards (it was available on Windows but not Linux for reasons unknown).
But he did not get access to the hardware features which are fused off.
And as others have said, every chip manufacturer out there does same. Intel has 20+ models of their most recent CPUs, which are probably all the same silicon or perhaps a few different designs. i5's are "crippled" i7's (perhaps ones that were not 100% successfully manufactured), but you get them at a discount.