ATI Radeon To ATI FireGL Mod Guide Rev. 4.3 Posted! The guide has just been updated! Want a FireGL workstation card but can't afford to pay ATI's exhorbitant prices? Well, why don't you grab a Radeon desktop card and mod it into a FireGL card? Yes, you can easily mod a Radeon into the FireGL with just a simple BIOS flash! Our guide will go through all the possible FireGL mods for the Radeon 9500, 9700 and 9800 series of cards and teach you just how to mod your Radeon into a FireGL! Check it out! Here are the updates:- Updated the Forsage driver section in page 21 with installation instructions as well as download links. Added links to download the FreeFireGL driver in page 19. Link: ATI Radeon To ATI FireGL Mod Guide Rev. 4.3!
@skylester According to the documentation inside the Forsage drivers, the FreeFireGL drivers have been integrated into Forsage driver. I will try to download the SpecV benchmarks and bench them if possible. There are too many restrictions in the computers I'm using here Hopefully I'm still able to download the benchmarks
Really, when I open them it says it mods to radeon (firegl->radeon & radeon->radeon, and id on the driver shows them to be catalyst which lacks firegl features, on top of this there's no improvement to viewport performance and the firegl tabs are missing). I await your benchmarks. Perhaps they simply don't want to work on my computer. slykester
Could this situation be analogous to: After flashing my own Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB card into a FireGL X2 card, I booted into Windows XP and installed the FireGL driver. My card was identified as a FireGL X2 after restarting the computer! However, the "professional features" were still disabled and the performance was not increased. There were no special control panels for FireGL X2. Somehow, the installation of the control panels were skipped during the driver installation. After some investigation, it looks like I still have to install specially-patched FireGL drivers for the modded Radeon 9800 Pro card to function like a real FireGL card. Strangely enough, the patched drivers won't install if I didn't flash the card into a FireGL X2 first. In other words, for the patched drivers to work, I must flash my card into the FireGL X2 first. I will explain this later. ATI Radeon To ATI FireGL Mod Guide Rev. 4.3! http://www.rojakpot.com/default.aspx?location=3&var1=105&var2=0
Nope, the forsage drivers simply show up as catalyst drivers and fail to enable any firegl features. It would seem that they are just a catalyst modded to allow firegl cards to use catalyst & mod radeons into other radeons. I already know flashing my card will work with patched drivers (using rivatuner). Using my flashed card with forsage doesn't work though (it would be nice to have both firegl and catalyst features). I guess I'll just be happy with what I've got. slykester Does anyone have bechmarks showing forsage actually works like the driver patch+card flash mod? Before/after bechmarks with specvp?
I can't download the specviewperf benchmark They banned .exe extension....nuts Plus it's 400MB+ my USB flash drive is not enough for it
OK, after heavy research with the web browser. I read that the newer Freefiregl6430 is an addon to the Forsage4.3. Trouble is... where can I download such an old version? If anyone out there has Forsage4.3, please help! forsage5.4 is up! check it out: http://hardwarelab.ru/files/FORSAGE_54.exe
When I used freefiregl, I just updated from the previous freefiregl packs, worked fine. If you apply freefiregl6430 over forsage you just cause driver file mismatch, which is far worse for stability than using freefiregl 6378 with the updates. You're better off doing a driver patch and a card flash than what you're suggesting. Then you can use patched firegl drivers for DCC apps and forsage for games without having to flash back to radeon just to use reference catalyst drivers (seems to work well this way). The very idea that ffgl6430 is an add-on to an obsolete catalyst...I mean forsage...proves forsage is not the way to mod to firegl. Forsage is useful if you've already modded to firegl and don't want to keep flashing between two card types, just swap drivers depending on what app you're going to use. Anyway, good luck. slykester
Thanks Sly, for clariflying things for me! As of now, I have downloaded the FireGL_Unified-Drivers_v8.083 pack from the ati site. I used Rivatuner 2.0 15.4c to patch the files. And all appears to have installed correctly. No bios mod needed!? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I guess the softmod was a sucess? Have I really updated my FFGL drivers that easily? The device manager now detects my card as ATi Fire GL X2 Pro, and no longer 9800pro@fireglX2! However, the control panel under Display Properties>Settings>Advanced shows that I have minimal tweak options for me to play with, compared to FFGL6378. Has ATi taken this route to streamline the FFGL performance, or was my softmod a complete and utter failure? I really was expecting the same if not more Control Panel adjustment options! Now I only have a few bare tabs to make adjustments on. Meanwhile, specviewperf 7 and 8 are test results will hopefully tell me that my efforts weren't gone to waste! Sometimes I want to give up and find me an older version 6800 ultra 256ddr and mod it into a Quadro 4000! smokin!
You should at least have a 'configuration' tab under advanced display properties. That is where you would enable optimizations specific for individual apps. (Check out the guide for the details). If you're missing these additional tabs then you may not have been successful in patching with the antiprotection script. Also keep in mind that newer ATI drivers may not be 100% patchable, but older drivers may work fine. Try the extra antoprotection script first if you haven't already, if you cannot patch successfully you can: a) try slightly older firegl drivers (8.062.x for example). b) go for the flash (be careful & follow the guide to ensure success) and then retry your current patched drivers (as long as at least the first patch script works, this is likely the best choice). In the end, it takes some patience but when it works, it's worth it for dcc apps (and forsage allows you to continue enjoying your games). Good luck, and if your patience runs out, you could always use the freefiregl drivers for the time being. slykester
Hey Max! Thanks for ATI Radeon To ATI FireGL Mod Guide Rev. 4.3! I just have a question for you, which control panel is complete for 9800pro@ffglX2? Page 17 and page 21 indicate the mods were both sucessful, however, they look very different! Please explain! thanks!
6430 is not really an ADDON per se, it's just missing files that are present in the FORSAGE package. 6378 is better, since 6430 is broken.
I've applied the latest forsage drivers and seem to be half way there. I have a Radeon 9600 SE card. Shows up as a FireGL T2. The ony tab i get in the video settings is the "configuration" tab. I aslo ran the spec benchmarks and had no improvement at all. I guess either my card is not compatible - or the drivers are not installed correctly. I didn't mod my card at all, just installed the drivers.
The one in page 17 is done by original driver+RivaTuner patching while the one in page 21 is done using FreeFireGL driver
new freefiregl drivers? Please help!!! Cannot patch the newer firegl drivers with rivatuner. currently the freefiregl6378 drivers deliver these specviewperf7.1 scores: 3dsmax-02 Weighted Geometric Mean = 21.99 drv-09 Weighted Geometric Mean = 118.5 dx-08 Weighted Geometric Mean = 119.3 light-06 Weighted Geometric Mean = 26.61 proe-02 Weighted Geometric Mean = 23.35 ugs-03 Weighted Geometric Mean = 38.37 BUT: my specviewperf8 scores were not amusing at all: 3dsmax-03 Weighted Geometric Mean = 11.42 catia-01 Weighted Geometric Mean = 11.31 ensight-01 Weighted Geometric Mean = 12.88 light-07 Weighted Geometric Mean = 9.708 maya-01 Weighted Geometric Mean = 14.28 proe-03 Weighted Geometric Mean = 16.42 sw-01 Weighted Geometric Mean = 7.017 ugs-04 Weighted Geometric Mean = 19.41 why are the scores so low for the latter? are these results normal? the real fireglx2 has 3dsmax-03 scores of 30 or so. i am banking that newer drivers will fix the problem, but newer unified drivers can't be patched. PLEASE HELP!!!
If you are using the newest drivers then that is your problem. The newest drivers (or performance drivers) cannot be patched properly by rivatuner (until a newer version of rivatuner). Try using slightly older drivers from the site. You mentioned that you were trying to mod to x2. If that is the case then you don't really need the newest drivers (they provide enhancements mostly for newer fireGL cards anyway, based on R4xx cores and newer). Another possibility is that you may need to do a VGA driver cleanup and then reinstall the freefiregl drivers (see previous posting). There may be newer ATI reference files on your system interfering. Otherwise, start by trying slightly older drivers for your card until you find the newest that is patchable, then follow the guide to mod your card (you will need to mod+flash with newer drivers, as none are fully patchable anymore). You can check the revision history on the ATI site to get the past version numbers, then do a google for 'ATI' or 'fireGL' and the version number. You should get links to previous versions on the ATI site and/or other sites (8.062.1 unified-21MB works for my 9800pro=>X2). slykester
