Modded Graphics Card Drivers

[flawlssdistortn]

I always wondered how the Omega Drivers and such differed from the official releases. Nvidia and ATI's drivers are closed source, so how do people "mod" them? Don't you have to know the technical details of the GPU? Are there any significant performance advantages to using 3rd party drivers?

 

[TheRyuu]

Actually in the XTreme-G Nvidia modded drivers, the only thing that's changed is the *.inf file (there's only one). They couldn't do anything else unless they had the source code (i think).

 

[Lord Banshee]

yes wizboy is correct, most modded drivers are little changes in the inf files (which is pretty much english).

But if one really wanted to do some crazy modding you can reverse engineer the driver files. All it is, is binary code which makes up a bunch of assembly instructions for x86. But it isn't like this is easy or even possible by a normal jo. You would have to be really really good x86 assembly programming and you have to alot of Nvidia tech manauls for thier GPU and such.

 

[flawlssdistortn]

Ohh, ok it's changing the *.inf files. I remember hearing about how some high school kid was modifying drivers, and i was like wtf he must be a hell of a programmer. Now I know. I have actually done some x86 programming, but I doubt I would get very far trying to match hex to their corresponding op-codes.

 

[TheRyuu]

The only thing changed (to my knoledge) on a Nvidia Modified driver is the nv4_disp.inf (which I think changes to a dll when you install the driver) file. At least thats the file that has all the stuff that makes the modified driver so good.