since opengl fps goes way up after modding, does that mean that opengl based games will perform better after modding to firegl.
FireGL cards have better support for OpenGL than Radeon cards...even after modding, a true FireGL card should still perform better.
The simple answer to that question is NO. I have experience with using Quadro/FireGL cards (at my workplace) vs GeForce/Radeon (at home) for more than 15 years. The only difference is in the proprietary certified drivers custom tailored to specific professional applications. Professional cards usually perform WORSE in games than their gaming counterparts since they are usually conservatively designed in order to keep the hardware stress to a minimum (less glitches / stability is always favored over high performance)
There is a difference there between a soft-modded and a real workstation card. Performance wise, I had a rather good experience with soldering a short, soft-modding and flashing the BIOS my GeForce 2 MX. But I doubt that the same can be done and gained with current generation of cards.
I have experience with both softmodded and genuine professional cards. Properly modded GeForce256, GeForce2, GeForce3, GeForce 5800 Ultra and GeForce 6800 Ultra cards were indistinguishable from the real Quadros at equal clocks. GeForce4 series were not fully moddable. Only the original NV30 5800 and NV40 6800 cards were fully moddable. All the rest variants NV5X/NV6X were not. After that, NVIDIA is making the chips differently configured at the plant using bonding methods at "birth", so no modding can be done anymore unless you write your own drivers. On the ATI side, properly modded Radeons were always perfectly equal to FireGL/FirePros, but the main problem is modding the drivers properly, since due to constant bug fixing, the driver revisions are coming much faster than the authors of the SoftFireGL patches can keep up - you usually end up with older, buggy driver which makes the whole "pro" advantage nullified.
