So one of my friends is starting to get into 3D CGI work like Maya and the like for uni and as a future job, and is enlisting me to help build her a rig some time early next year. Now one problem is that Maya has hella issues with just about every mainstream card brand (ie Radeon and GeForce), and all the workstation cards are stupidly expensive (already fairly high prices plus the usual "not in the US" mark-up PLUS the "Not a high turn-over item" mark-up that Aussie retailers put on anything server or workstation oriented). I've heard about people soft-modding the HD4870 1 Gb cards to FirePro V8700's (Hardware is identical minus the two DisplayPort's) using driver modifications to get the FirePro drivers installed, but they look fairly complicated, and my friend isn't computer nerdy enough to pull it off, especially whenever she had to update the drivers.
So I was thinking, why not try a somewhat easier (maybe?) if more permanent approach, and force flash a FirePro V8700 BIOS onto the HD4870 1Gb card? Now unfortunately I'm not hugely wised up on GPU BIOS's, but since the hardware is pretty much identical, would the BIOS flash be possible? Or else mod an existing HD4870 1Gb BIOS so that the drivers thought it was dealing with a FirePro V8700?
Unfortunately I don't have an HD4870 on hand to do any tinkering with, but has anybody heard of someone doing something like this? Might take a bit more work in the short term, but in the long term it'd make life a LOT easier, even if it was just modding the HD4870's BIOS to say "Hey, I'm a FirePro V8700, not an HD4870! Honest!" so that the FirePro drivers would install.
And if I did need to mod the BIOS... well where would I start? Obviously I'd need an HD4870 1 Gb BIOS and probably a V8700 BIOS to compare the two, but what tools would I be needing to first turn the BIOS into something vaguely human readable, and then make any changes to said BIOS?
Eller
Bookmarks