why do people flash the bios to the next step up (ie flashing pro to xt)? is there a difference between the ati se, standard, pro and xt bioses? the nvidea le, standard, gt and ultra bioses?
i think they flash em as one dude said to try and unlock extra features. for example the difference between a PRO and an XT card is usual less or more pipelines etc.... like my x800 pro has 12 pixel pipelines but for manufacturing costs it actually has 16 pipelines with 4 disabled. so they try to flash it to get more out of it..... BUT... theres always a but, this can cause serious problems as it is not guruanteed to work everytime and if it doesnt then there is a very HIGH chance of F**KING the card over itself plus the compliment of a voided warranty!!! personally my legs still melt seeing the performance my card can throw out so i really cant see why anyone would run the risk on high perormance products.....
why would anybody manufacture a card with 4 piplines disabled? i know its so they can sell it for more, but why not make a higher clock speed or something? also, what exactley is a pixel pipeline?
Basically in this case, ATI/NVIDIA are trying to manufacture as many fully functional video cards as possible that will run at their highest-end specification. On AGP this is currently the X800 XT PE in ATI's case. Now, the card is renowned for being very hard to get hold of due to poor yields, and if the GPUs do not pass ATI's stability tests at 520MHz with 16 pixel/fragment pipelines enabled, they then see if it is stable at 500MHz/16 fp, if it doesn't pass there, they then see if it is stable with 12 pixel/fragment pipelines at X800 Pro clock speeds (i.e. 475MHz). Quite often, the card will not pass X800 XTPE clocks, but due to demand, is turned straight down in to an X800 Pro with 4 fragment pipelines disabled. These may well be perfectly stable at 520MHz/16fp with extra cooling, it would depend how daring you are. I very simple terms, it is where the pixels are processed inside the GPU - the colour value of each pixel is calculated after the texture is applied to the normal map. The normal map is the geometry (or 3 Dimensional) data for the scene being created by the GPU, that is calculated in the vertex shader.
