ATI: ATI Radeon 9500 SoftMod Steps
 DISCLAIMER:
The methods outlined below can cause severe system instability or artifacting on some ATI Radeon 9500 video adapters. No guarantee of success is implied.
WARNING: Attempting this modification on any ATI video adapter besides the ATI Radeon 9500 will produce undesirable results, such as random crashes or a non-booting operating system.
DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, ATTEMPT THIS MODIFICATION ON A NVIDIA-BASED VIDEO CARD. THIS GUIDE IS STRICTLY FOR THE ATI RADEON 9500. |  |
ATI: Soft Modding Your ATI Radeon 9500
Introduction:
You have one of the most powerful video cards on the planet and you want to push it even further. With this modification, you can utilize the official ATI Catalyst drivers & a couple of software patches to modify your ATI Radeon 9500 video card to perform like an ATI Radeon 9700. After the launch of the ATI Radeon 9700, ATI realized that they needed a product that still performed well (inline with or better than the NVidia GeForce 4 Ti4200 & 4400 series) and was more cost effective to produce. To remedy this problem, ATI disabled 4 of the 8 pipelines on the R300 GPU (used on the ATI Radeon 9700) and shipped them as the ATI Radeon 9500. With this modification, you can re-enable those 4 extra pipelines and gain a substantial increase in fill-rate.
Note: This modification can only be performed on systems running Microsoft Windows 2000 & Windows XP.
Software Required:
->
ATI Catalyst Driver 3.9 (V.6.14.10.6396)
->
Patched ati2mtag.sys (must match driver version)
->
FutureMark's 3DMark2003
->
FutureMark's 3DMark2001 SE
Steps To Perform The Modification:
1) Install the ATI Radeon 9500 into your PC (refer to the video card's documentation on how to do that).
2) Restart the PC and install the latest ATI Catalyst Drivers for it (currently 3.9).
3) Install 3DMark2001 SE & 3DMark2003 onto your system.
4) Run a default benchmark for each application and note the "Fill-Rate's" (both Single-Texturing & Multi-Texturing).
5) Unzip the "patched ati2mtag.sys" driver to the following directory: ("C:\ATI\support\wxp-w2k-7-95-031028m-011774c-efg\2KXP_INF\BX_xxx").
6) Navigate to the directory mentioned above and delete the original "ati2mtag.sy_" file.
7) Open Device Manager (Start -> Control Panel -> System -> Hardware -> Device Manager).
8) Expand the "Display Adapters" list.
9) Right click on the "Radeon 9700/9500 Series" device and choose "Update Driver".
10) Select the "I will choose the driver..." option.
11) Click the "Have Disk" button and navigate to the following directory: ("C:\ATI\support\wxp-w2k-7-95-031028m-011774c-efg\2KXP_INF\").
12) Select the appropriate driver (if you have multiple listings of drivers available, you can choose any of them as it does not matter which one you choose).
13) Proceed with the driver update.
14) Restart your PC.
15) Re-run the same default benchmarks for 3DMark2001SE & 3DMark2003, again noting the "Fill-Rate's" (both Single-Texturing & Multi-Texturing).
16) Compare the "after-mod" Fill-Rate values with the "before-mod" Fill-Rate values. You should see an increase.
Note: If you wish to enable overclocking on your ATI Radeon 9500, please download
Warp11's Overclockable ATI Radeon BIOS and flash your card with it.
Originally found @ OCFAQ.com.
Instructions originally written by Wizzard.
Instructions adapted & re-vamped by SimGuy.
Files downloaded & organized by SimGuy.
