I barely remember this anymore but the downgrade had certain things deactivated. Something like my card had four “pipelines” and the high-end one had eight, so a minor hardware modification could reactivate them. It was risky though, because often imperfections came out of the manufacturing process, and then they would just deactivate the problem areas and turn it into a lower-end version.
After a little while, someone put out drivers that could simulate the modification without physically touching the card. You’d read about softmod and hardmod for the lower-end radeon cards.
I used the softmod and 90% of the time it worked perfectly, but there was definitely an issue where some textures in certain games would have weird artifacting in a checkerboard pattern. If I disabled the softmod the artifacting wouldn’t happen.
I barely remember this anymore but the downgrade had certain things deactivated. Something like my card had four “pipelines” and the high-end one had eight, so a minor hardware modification could reactivate them. It was risky though, because often imperfections came out of the manufacturing process, and then they would just deactivate the problem areas and turn it into a lower-end version.
After a little while, someone put out drivers that could simulate the modification without physically touching the card. You’d read about softmod and hardmod for the lower-end radeon cards.
I used the softmod and 90% of the time it worked perfectly, but there was definitely an issue where some textures in certain games would have weird artifacting in a checkerboard pattern. If I disabled the softmod the artifacting wouldn’t happen.