Hacking the frames [Lurks]

Doom 3 is out right, and that means that they'll be a few clannies and a few general readers of ed.com out there in Internet land that may just be considering upgrading their graphics card so they can play Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 at higher than slide-show frame rates. I've been looking into it, as well you might expect, and I've come to the conclusion that what you need is a brand new Alienware PC. Ho ho. Bah. :)

Well... Okay then, what if you're just going to upgrade your graphics card? We're looking for a bit more value than just buying the top of the range ATI X800XT or GeForce FX 6800 Ultra and after a bit of digging around and some experimentation, I believe I've hit on a solution which will essentially get you the ninja graphics card you always wanted, cheaper than it's going for in the shops.

The solution is to buy a Radeon X800 Pro card with VIVO capability. A card from Sapphire, Connect3D or Club3D is what we're talking about. This one is the one that I used in my tests. An X800 Pro is basically the X800 core with 12 pipes disabled and the core/memory speed clocked down a ways. Turns out that the video-in/video-out (hence VIVO) cards, have non laser-cut X800XT parts on them and they just have a protected bit of the BIOS which tells them to disable the other four pipes.

There's a good guide here but I'm going to walk you through it with just a single download. First of all, you wanna download this which is a zip file with all the stuff you need in it.

When you extract the zip file you've got a FloppyA and FloppyB directory. You're going to need two floppy disks, all very cunning eh. First off, bang in the first floppy and go into FloppyA directory and run the Flasher+Floppy2.37.exe file which will cut a bootable floppy with the ATI flasher on it. Then copy the X800XT.bin file onto that floppy. Exchange the floppy for a fresh one and go into the FloppyB directory. Click on the drdflash.exe which will cut a bootable floppy disk with a bare DrDOS on it. There's a subdir called Bios, copy everying in that over onto your floppy. Job done!

I'd recommend uninstalling all your vid drivers first. Download the latest Catalysts, right now there's some 4.9 betas with some bigger numbers in Doom 3 but I'm not linking those as they'll be outdated soon enough. Just hack those ready for an install. You could also, just to be sure, run the ATI catalyst uninstaller util from this page. You can't do the old uninstall drivers, install drivers and reboot trick, you'll b0rk ATI shit if you do that.

Now we're set to go ahead, make sure you've got your new X800 Pro VIVO card in your box. Boot up floppy A. Then;

flashrom -s 0 backup.bin

That's written out a backup of your card's BIOS in case it all goes horribly wrong. Now reboot and boot floppy B instead. Now we wanna do this;

gvf11 -p -f r80x256v.f1

This is Gigabyte's flash util and their X800XT BIOS and, strangely, they've released a tool which writes over a protected part of the BIOS which writes over a protected part of the BIOS which unlocks the extra four pixel pipelines that we would quite like, thank you very much. The thing is, we don't really want Gigabyte's BIOS though, we want ATI's default X800XT one. So reboot and boot FloppyA again and this time;

flashrom -p -f 0 x800xt.bin

Reboot. Windows will reckon you've got an X800XT. Install your new drivers if you haven't prior, otherwise you'll just need to walk Windows through finding the new graphics card. If you do that, you'll need a reboot before benchmarks because there's a start-up service which checks AGP speed and ups it to the maximum, otherwise it'll crawl.

How about some benchmarks on what this achieves? You got it! Doom 3 benchmarks are all in 1280 x 1024 because that's native for the TFTs most of us are using. Doom 3 timedemo is 'timedemo demo1' and scores are from second run in each instance.

ATI Radeon 9800Pro
• Doom 3 'Medium': 24.8 fps
• Doom 3 'High': 22.9 fps
• 3D Mark03: 5956 3d marks

ATI Radeon X800Pro
• Doom 3 'Medium': 37.1 fps
• Doom 3 'High': 35.7 fps
• 3D Mark03: 10164 3d marks

ATI Radeon X800XT modded
• Doom 3 'Medium': 47.0 fps
• Doom 3 'High': 45.4 fps
• 3D Mark03: 12274 3d marks

You might get some graphics corruption if your memory isn't good for XT default speeds in which case just flash back your original BIOS and the four extra pipes should remain open. Or run an overclocking utility and back the card off until it's happy. Enjoy!