NVWorld.ru have posted their guide to turning your Radeon 9x00 into a professional FireGL Z1/X1 graphics card using software! So there's no tricky soldering involved... here's a snip:
After we've defined the task, let's review, what exactly doesn't allow us to use ordinary R300 GPU gaming card as a professional one. The thing is that unlike Nvidia proposed unified driver architecture, ATI Company is using another approach and separates driver series for gaming and professional accelerators. Just the drivers intended for the professional boards, not installable on usual gaming cards, is the main obstacle on our way. But does it mean that the separate driver series comes out of considerable architecture differences of Radeon 9500/9700 and FireGL Z1/X1 boards? This is what we will find out today.
After we've defined the task, let's review, what exactly doesn't allow us to use ordinary R300 GPU gaming card as a professional one. The thing is that unlike Nvidia proposed unified driver architecture, ATI Company is using another approach and separates driver series for gaming and professional accelerators. Just the drivers intended for the professional boards, not installable on usual gaming cards, is the main obstacle on our way. But does it mean that the separate driver series comes out of considerable architecture differences of Radeon 9500/9700 and FireGL Z1/X1 boards? This is what we will find out today.
