What would that prove?
It would prove that things have changed in the mean time.
Like what? Are you suggesting that newer drivers do more crippling and better faux-Quadro detection than the old ones?
Can you please list an old driver version that produces markedly better results in SPECviewperf tests on a pseudo-Quadro?
People have soft-modded their GTX cards to Quadros in the past, remember RivaTuner? It had a soft-strap editor that would change PCI Id to match whatever other card.
Also, remember that fellow who posted on NVidia CUDA forums about modding vbios soft-straps on his GTX 480 to a Tesla.
Soft-modding still works to a large extent. The only limitation is the strap bits that are exposed in software.
In the past three weeks I have soft-modded:
GTS450->Q2000
GTX470->Q5000
GTX480->Q6000
GTX580->Q7000
GTX680->Tesla K10
Q7000 and Tesla K10 aren't "MultiOS" capable, so the driver doesn't make them work with VGA passthrough, which makes the mod of limited usefulness, over and above enabling TCC feature in Windows.
Everything required to do this is pretty well documented by the nuoveau project. There are also other things that are useful (and easy) to mod, for example BAR1 size to be >= the size of the RAM on the card. This lets you take, say, a 4GB card and when you're not gaming, you can map it as a really fast block device for some fast swap or whatever you might need.
Kepler BIOSes are quite different, but having spent an hour looking at the dump out of my GTX680, I've worked out most of the bits relevant to this thread. The strapping on them is... odd. It's done in two places, but what is odd is that it is done
the same way in two places.
The other odd thing is that the PCI device ID is set in two places, but it has a profound effect on the way the card is handled. For example, just changing the the strapping for the device ID from GTX680 -> Tesla K10 works fine. But if you also chance the PCI ID, at least in the primary location, the card no longer works properly - it gets detected as a standard unaccelerated VGA adapter, even though the Quadro driver is still running it, and the RAM on it shows up as 2990MB instead of 4096MB. Put the device IDs back to GTX680 (but keep the K10 strapping), and it works fine. I'm guessing there may be a checksum on the blocks containing the PCI IDs, but I didn't have a genuine Tesla K10 BIOS handy to cross-check against it last night.
Also, I'm not 100% sure, but I
thought I saw a substantial boost in Crysis benchmark fps when running as a K10, but I could have just been dreaming that - will need to re-test that later today when I am more properly caffeineated.
How do you figure that? How does the driver know it's not a real Quadro? I'm using the latest, 319.23 on Linux. There are no separate Quadro and GeForce drivers on Linux, it's the same driver for both.
I might as well say the same thing back at you: How do *you* figure that?? Obviously you have not done anything past installing the latest drivers and drawing a conclusion based on a quick look at it.
I'm guessing that on the basis that laser cutting chips is cheap and easy during production, and the technique is widely used.
Plus the fact that the GF106 in the Q2000 has a different part number etched into it compared to the GF106 in the GTS450 (sample size 3 for GTS450, 1 for Q2000).
I suspect the functionality is laser cut out.
Then again, it could be there is extra strapping on the PCB (e.g. a cap across chip pins) that disables certain functionality, but this is hard to eyeball. All 3 GTS450 cards hav emarkedly different cap arrangements under the GPU, which is different again from the real Q2000.
Prove it.
Everyone assumes some kind of manufacturing process or what not involved to cripple GPUs. I suppose because this is an electronics forum that's inherent, but if you have not looked into other aspects, I would not draw conclusions so fast.
Actually I am somewhat positive that crippling occurs on the software side because, unlike you, I tried an older driver giving me different result than the new one, AND I took a peek under the hood (inside the driver).
Prove it.