Running Quadro drivers on GeForce videocards: worth trying?
 

Has anyone here tried running Quadro drivers on their GeForce videocards (by changing the device ID)?

If so, did it have any positive (or negative) effect on your NLE or compositing applications (I'm thinking Premiere, AfterFX, Magic Bullet Looks, etc etc)?

I thought discussion on hacking was against dvInfo policy. ;-)

Whatever. Poor choice of words perhaps - I was reflecting on the 3-page article on the "method" in this month's CPU magazine.

This really isn't "hacking" in a negative sense of breaking a license. People are using RIVA TUNER to make Geforce cards look like Quadro cards to the system. Some applications, like Avid, "need" to see the quadro drivers to function properly. Fooling the system, via software like Riva Tuner, is an acceptable practice.

I was kidding/being cheeky. Perhaps i should have used :-p instead of ;-)

I have a AGP GeForce FX 5900XT in my PC. Pretty old card these days (as is the PC!). I used the Riva Tuner method to load it as a Quadro. It worked fine, but I couldn't really tell if it made a difference. At least it was no worse.

After a reinstall, I didn't bother doing it again since I couldn't see an improvement. Perhaps if I did more After Effects work I would have noticed something, but for straight video editing, nada.

Thanks Vito - given the lack of much response today I gave it a go on a spare machine and turned my 7600GS into a "Quadro FX560". Timed rendering a clip in Premiere with MB Looks applied and found it had made no difference one way or the other. Will try with AfterEffects sometime I guess - shrugs.

I think maybe you guys don't understand what spoofing the video card does and doesn't do. You never get something for nothing. In this case, certain applications look for the quadro hardware. If it doesn't see the right hardware, it won't execute a particular command. By making the 7600 card look like a quadro, it doesn't change the 7600's basic performance(memory size, speed, no. of pipelines, etc). Performance boosts could be expected when certain capabilities have been disabled in the firmware. But, this isn't the case, here.

> By making the 7600 card look like a quadro, it doesn't change the 7600's basic performance(memory size, speed, no. of pipelines, etc

I do understand that. However there's more to OpenGL etc. than just the hardware. I was not expecting a difference for video apps, but did kinda wonder for software like MB Looks that use the GPU heavily.

The CPU article lists an number of apps (mainly in the 3D arena) that were accelerated by 10-70% using this technique.

Well, I think I DO understand what the mod does.

Of course the driver doesn't change the hardware of the card, but a Quadro driver enables 3D acceleration in professional applications such as Maya. I quote:

"Quadro drivers allow the Quadro to be used to accelerate the rendering operations of such professional 3D applications while GeForce drivers do not."

Check out this particular site, which gives detailed explanations and benchmarks:

Tech ARP - NVIDIA GeForce To Quadro Soft-Mod Guide Rev. 4.0

Since I was not using the 3D applications in question, I did not see an increase in performace in my case.

Yeah...thanx for correcting me. I guess I was the one who didn't get it. I'll never quite get the way vid-card manufacturers intentionally disable card capabilities with firmware. In these cases, "hacking" really does border on breaking a license, I guess.

It must be more economical to make all chips the same, disable capability with firmware (to sell at a lower cost) than to actually make a different(and cheaper) hardware design. I used to be involved with custom circuit board design. It really is a laborious process to take a design to fabrication.

It's the same in software. I use Avid Xpress Pro, which is basically the same as Media Composer. Same code base, but many funtions disabled in Xpress Pro. Now they actually are the same, since Xpress Pro has been discontinued.

Cheers!