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NVIDIA GeForce To Quadro Software Mod
babyshiori writes "The NVIDIA Quadro family of professional graphics cards are very, very expensive. But many people know that Quadro and GeForce graphics cards are virtually identical in hardware. Obviously, you cannot just use Quadro drivers with your GeForce graphics cards. However, there is an easy way to soft-mod an NVIDIA GeForce desktop graphics card into an NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics card. Tech ARP shows us just how to do it. 'It all revolves around the driver support for professional 3D applications like 3ds Max or Maya. Quadro drivers allow the Quadro to be used to accelerate the rendering operations of such professional 3D applications while GeForce drivers do not. This is the basis for the premium prices NVIDIA (and ATI) charge for their professional-grade graphics cards.'"
I work in an engineering field where we use Quadro cards for visualization of largish process plants in an AutoCAD 3D environment.
This type of work is not as intensive as 3D animation.
Over the years I've seen not much difference between "professional" and "consumer" video cards even though the cost between the two can be $600 or more.
Even with relatively lame, $200 cards the walkthrus are pretty responsive when using the proper viewing software (the "walkthrus" are typically specially created for responsiveness so we can zoom to detail we need to see).
Perhaps sluggish performance is a result of demos given by people who intentionally attach one entire GB of 3D models to one session and use that to demonstrate (even though no 3D modeler would ever do such a thing).
The mod seems simple and useful for some, but most of the people who use these programs work for companies who would probably spend a few hundred more dollars for a fully supported graphics adapter for their piece of software that costs thousands of dollars.
I guess this explain the unwillingness from NVidia to release the specs and allow people to make gpl drivers for their cards.
That's because the Quadro drivers are optimised for accuracy, since you are using them to do real calculations you will rely on, rather than small-ish floating point which is all the regular gforce allow.
There are some other things, optimised anti-aliasing for lines, interface layering over the top of render windows, etc.
For a quick and dirty explanation, see NV docs here (warning, pdf file), page 2 onward is where it gets interesting.
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It isn't necessarily so evil. You interpret the value to only be in the circuitry, but the cost of the drivers to be able to use that circuitry is a different matter.
Game users is a very broad base, develop game-optimized drivers and you can develop very cheaply, per person.
The users of engineering software is a very tiny user base, and the cost of maintaining drivers for software that may have several thousand users instead of several million needs to by paid for by those that need to use the engineering software. The rendering for engineering software is optimized for accuracy, game drivers are optimized for speed. There is quite a disparity between the different user bases in size and what they need, so I don't have a problem with charging different prices.
I've had a look at the forum thread linked at the very end of the article. Softmodding only works up to the Geforce 6x00 series. It seems that after that NVidia put in some more checks than only the PCI ID. As reported in the thread, there's no performance increase in professional 3D apps, and OpenGL is broken.
My understanding is that the difference between the two lines is primarily the drivers. It's not that they are disabling functionality on the chip, it's that they only provide drivers for gaming applications with the consumer cards. If a professional modelling app uses OpenGL and GLSL then it will use these cards just fine. With the pro cards, they also provide optimised drivers for more specialist APIs. These may cost the same amount to develop as the OpenGL and DirectX drivers, but this cost is spread around a lot fewer people (the market for 3DS Max is orders of magnitude smaller than the market for whatever the latest FPS game is) and so these drivers cost a lot more per person.
If you are using the pro drivers with a consumer card, then you are using the drivers unlicensed, which is no different from using any other piece of software unlicensed. If you are doing this to run a pirated application better, then I doubt this will concern you, but if you are a business then it ought to.
If someone else wants to write drivers for all of these bespoke applications then nVidia couldn't complain, but I think they'd have a tough job recouping their investment.
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Ah, to your comment "There's something that bothers me about companies that sell the exact same product for two prices and the only difference is some switch is thrown on the more expensive one. But maybe there's more to it than that." There is something more to it...
While there may be only minor technical differences to the cards, the real difference is in the software. In a nutshell when you're buying the "inexpensive" card, you're not paying for the extra costs that NVidia (or ATI) incurs when they must expend resources to provide drivers that support the high-end applications. So unless you want consumers that could care less about the high end features to pay more, and the people that care about these features to pay less, you'll probably be happier with differentiated products in this way.
Don't forget companies are there to make money, and if they're not able to do this then either the company or product is likely to disappear. Personally I'd rather have NVidia around, if I need the high-end features, I'll figure out how to afford it...
Because the Quadro's extra features are not beneficial to gaming. I have a Compaq nw9440 with QuadroFX 1500 graphics (256MB, PCIEx16.) The additional features are that you can have the card render to a buffer (GPU-accelerated rendering) and you can use 10 bits per channel (r,g,b) color. Whee! Neither is useful for gaming.
The additional color depth could be neat, if it's even used when your source textures only have 8 bits per channel. I don't know the answer to that. But let's face it, 24 bit color is probably enough for gaming and frankly, I never minded so much when I had to use 16 bit color back in the day because my computers were weak. this is pretty much the only cutting-edge system I've ever had and it was only cutting-edge for a month :)
There WAS a SoftQuadro hack for some of the older geforce cards which had corresponding quadros. Quadros were offered with a lot more memory too, which is not something you can fix with a driver... But the mobile quadros certainly don't have more memory, so there's nothing lost there...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Heh... There's some extra silicon in the Quadros and little extra in the FireGL lineup. To be sure, it's not needed, but nice.
.so that does at least the combining of immediate mode ops. Now, this is
However, the difference in the drivers is that they've got a combine and optimize operation layer in the workstation drivers
that dramatically accelerates immediate mode operations. CAD, by it's nature, will be difficult to code for the mode of rendering
that games use- and it's difficult to accelerate past a point the immediate mode operations without some help. So, they provide
a special driver that does combining and optimization (dropping off of unknowingly done redundant ops, etc...) and hands it off
to the fast path rendering mode that games use.
If you want to gain most of the speed, skip using the stuff unlicensed- all someone needs to see a good portion of the speed
would be to write an intercept DLL or LD_PRELOAD
making it sound vastly easier than it would be to do (Writing it and getting it right is NOT simple or easy- period...) but
it IS doable and it explains why they ask a larger price for the workstation cards than they do for consumer parts more than
anything else.
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