The battle of the drivers

To discover exactly what goes into a modded driver, we approached several of the well known groups on the Internet that tirelessly work on making stock standard GPU drivers better for the community. Among them Eran Badit, editor in chief and software manager of NGOHQ.com, who looks after the team responsible for NGO modded drivers for ATI and NVIDIA products.

"We’re unable to make deep driver-level modifications (aka,cracking). We thought about it in the past and even tried, but it generated more problems than it’s worth. First of all, our target audience is gamers and we don’t want to get them banned, since many anti-cheat mechanisms like PunkBuster have major issues with deep driver modifications. At this stage we use more basic methods to modify the drivers, like installation scripts, registry entries and playing with the in-built features."

The motivation for creating the drivers seems to be uniform regardless of who you speak to; it all comes down to squeezing better performance or image quality out of hardware, or according to Eran, creating a more user friendly product. "The original driver developers (in this case ATI and NVIDIA) have their own policies, bureaucracy and marketing plans," he says. "They’re unfortunately more likely to act with the best interests of the company – rather than the consumer – at heart. There’s nothing wrong with that, but we’re coming at the driver purely from the customer angle, and spend our time making the driver more consumer-friendly, producing better image quality/performance or retrieving crippled features to offer maximum compatibility with older hardware."

Eran cited mobile GPUs as a perfect example. "Due to agreements and licences with OEM producers like Dell, Acer and Toshiba, there is no ‘official’ support from NVIDIA or ATI for mobile GPUs." The driver modders get around this by adding DeviceIDs to the driver for any number of mobile or aged GPU devices, like the Mobility Radeon 9500 et al, allowing them to offer the full gamut of support for just about any card you can think of. Doesn’t that just give you that warm and fuzzy feeling?

Wandert ‘KillerSneak’ Van Bruggen, who looks after the DNA driver modding team at www.donotargue.com, pulls the official drivers apart in much the same way.

"A lot of the tweaks we do are the result of picking through the ATI or NVIDIA source code (not the actual source that the drivers are built from, but the resulting .sys and .dll files produced). We use tools to get inside those files and muck around with settings to see what we can come up with. The .ini and .inf files that look after the driver install itself are also a pretty good starting point to alter features or settings, as it allows us to make changes within a certain range of values (quality settings for example) without having to touch the source code."