dougjnn,
The thing that makes me leary of that hack is that it doesn't make much sense that the manufacturers wouldn't have shipped the card with those mods themselves, if it improves image quality without sacrificing anything.
Well, the mod does sacrifice something - FCC compliance. But as people who've actually tested it have found, they can't find any real difference (e.g. interference with the display or radios or TVs in the vicinity of the video card). I personally haven't found any downside at all, except possibly for the fact I voided my warranty (and if you're real good at soldering SMDs, you could probably put the capacitors back so no one would know they'd been removed). The reason the manufacturers don't leave the components off is because they don't want to expend the time (and money) to redesign the circuit - it's much easier to copy the reference design. The other problem, which may be related to how variable nVidia-based cards are, is the quality of the components. Some manufacturers like Canopus have totally redesigned the filter circuit and don't have the problem. You also pay a premium for Canopus products - to the point that they've left the US market because most US consumers won't pay the premium, which IMHO is rather unfortunate. I've said in other threads discussing nVidia's 2D quality that it's ultimately nVidia's problem because it's their reputation that's affected.
This is different. What purpose is there to having their whole line of 3D cards look less good in 2D than they could if the moved a few wires around in on the components they supply anyway???
Probably because, as I've found, many people aren't horribly picky about 2D. If as many people were picky about 2D as are picky about the Quake3 compressed sky issue, nVidia would have been pressed to take care of this a long time ago. I've used Matrox cards a lot, so I'm REAL picky about 2D. If the G800 had come out when it was supposed to, I wouldn't be in this thread. This 2D issue is far from new to nVidia, because 2D has pretty much sucked on their boards all the way back to the Riva 128 (and I know this personally). To be fair to nVidia, they don't have a whole lot of control over what OEMs do with their chips and, as the mod shows, the issue isn't with the GeForce2 chip (which nVidia controls), but the filter circuit on the board (which nVidia doesn't control). Matrox, ATI, and 3dfx (RIP) all manufacture their own boards or control manufacture.
The other thing that really doesn't get discussed is how the mod affects 3D. If you did a blind test, you'd be VERY hard pressed to tell the difference between a modded GeForce2 (with appropriate gamma adjustments) and a Radeon. In fact, after I modded the GeForce, a friend came over and thought I still had the Radeon in the computer. Before the mod, you could easily tell the difference. I've been playing Gumman Chronicles recently, and with the GeForce2, it looked pretty good. Then I installed the Radeon and immediately noticed that the Radeon's colors were better saturated and in places like the weapon selection bar particularly, the image was sharper. Modded the GeForce2, reduced the gamma a bit, and every point I had checked critically in the game was noticeably sharper. In 3DMark2000, the details in the Adventure test and the Demo in particular are also much sharper.
I understand how people would be a bit hesitant about the mod, but my theoretical perfect choice was a card with the GeForce's performance and the Radeon's image quality. I wasn't terribly enthused about either card individually, and if I hadn't accidentally killed my Voodoo3
, I would have returned both the Radeon and GeForce2 and waited. Since I didn't have that option, I gambled, did the mod, and (luckily) ended up with the best of both worlds. I should add the disclaimer here that YMMV, since I've heard of one or two people for whom the mod did very little. I don't know if they did the complete mod, since it can be done in stages (I did the complete mod). I also haven't heard of anyone for whom the mod made their display worse.
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