Trials and Tribulations of a First Time Modder

First, thanks to all that have done the heavy lifting in making this possible – gellmar, NormamBates, schoto, unwinder, welsely8, et al…it’s very much appreciated.

After a bit of work in trying to understand the nuances required here, I have been able to mod my iMac’s Mobility Radeon HD4670 to a FirePro V3750 with great success. The main benefit that I wanted was the ability to use RealView graphics in SolidWorks. Performance was really a secondary issue, but there appears to be an improvement in this regard as well. I think that the SPECapc-SW07 is probably the most telling (at least with regard to SW) showing a 15% improvement.

Attached are the before-and-after results, based on the latest (8.723) drivers for both the Radeon and the FirePro (iMac Core2Duo@3.06 GHz; 8 GB ram; Mobility Radeon HD4670 w/ 256 MB; Vista x64 SP1, SolidWorks 2010 SP3):

View attachment 3722

While schoko’s revised atiogl file is still just a tad better across all of the benchmarks, it would appear that the difference has narrowed to the point that I just kept the stock 8.723 (one less item to worry about).

The one major stumbling block that I ran into had to do with attempting to get around the enforced driver signing. I used bcdedit to suppress the driver signing issue. With this I was able to install the driver successfully; however on reboot, even though the device properties said that the driver was installed and working properly, the actual graphics driver that was really working was the SafeVGA driver. I went around and around on this, thinking that I had done something wrong with the .inf or .rts files or had a mismatch between the driver and the patchscript. Immediately after resetting test mode and using the F8 breakout, all went well. My suggestion would be to use the F8 method until you have everything working and then implement a more long-term strategy. I’m going to keep it this way until I move to 7 as it appears that one can modify the group policies under 7 instead of having to roll your own signature and then run in test mode forever.

Finally, I will post separately with some thoughts/suggestions for organizing the requisite files in a different manner so that they can be accessed in a more straightforward manner.

Again, thank you for all of your help!!

Regards,

Ken