Saving Money on equipment : Soft-modding Nvidia GeForce cards to Quadro

As we all know, working with 3D in After Effects require a somewhat decent graphics card, it’s true that you can make by using Geforce Cards that’s actually intended for gaming. the caveat is, Nvidia took out parts of the driver files so Geforce cards don’t work as well as Quadro cards in 3D apps. After effects, Maya, 3ds MAX, cinema 4D, and a slew of others uses special openGL commands that’s only available in these pro cards.

but there’s something they don’t tell you, that the thousand dollar Quadro is same at the hardware level with the $100+ Geforce, and these were true especially for series 8, 9 Geforce cards. the objective here is, how to make the system recognizes it as a Quadro, and take full advantage of it.

With that in mind, I looked around some tech guides online and found an article detailing this from TechArp. and succesfully soft modded my aging Geforce 8800GS into QuadroFX 3700, which is 5x the price. After effects run smoother when scrubbing 3d scenes, and Maya doesn’t display weird jaggies in the viewpanel anymore. all in all, it’s a good thing because now the card can use its full potential.

however, don’t get your hopes up yet, this is not guaranteed to work with all geforce cards, even though most of them can be soft-modded. and it affects the working pace more than rendering, rendering is partly dependent on processor, although there’s an improvement when using openGL as a rendering engine, so I’m kinda outta luck there with my mediocre E8400 Wolfdale(core2duo 3Ghz).

so try it out if you know how to get around. their instructions are pretty solid.

Good Luck