Is it possible, to force download an AMD driver onto an older Nvidia card, and vice versa?

[Frinetic]

Just curious about whether or not that would work, and if so would it then make the system think that it was an AMD card, or an Nvidia if done to an AMD card?

[Firewrath9]

No.

[XR6]

Nope. It wouldn't work, and even if it did it wouldn't make your card think it was an AMD card.

[FloRolf]

You can download amd drivers with Nvidia gpu, yes. But you can't use them.

[Fasauceome]

The driver isn't actually downloaded onto the graphics card, it's downloaded for your operating system to know what to do with the graphics card.

[mariushm]

The driver wouldn't work.

Each card you plug in the computer sends some unique codes to the operating system, you can view those yourself by going in device manager... here's for example what's shown for my RX 570:

 

 

See there ... ven is short for Vendor , who makes the card, DEV is device code, and so on.

When the operating system installs a driver, it compares these codes with the codes inside a text file that's part of the driver package. You can trick the operating system and add the codes to that file and that's how you can install the driver on those nvidia mining cards.

However, the drivers then also check the codes and they'll refuse to communicate with cards that don't match the codes they recognize. 

 

But a nVIdia driver would not be able to communicate with an AMD card, simply because the chips have totally different sets of commands and instructions... it's like one talks German and one talks French, and the drivers talk only one language.

The most likely outcome of loading a bad driver would be your pc hanging (the driver asks the video card something in his language but the video card never replies because it doesn't understand the language the driver talks so the driver keeps waiting or repeats the question for ever) or maybe you'd get a blue screen (because the driver asks something and the video card thinks the driver asked for something else and sends back an incorrect reply and so on)

 

[Frinetic]

2 hours ago, mariushm said:

The driver wouldn't work.

Each card you plug in the computer sends some unique codes to the operating system, you can view those yourself by going in device manager... here's for example what's shown for my RX 570:

 

 

See there ... ven is short for Vendor , who makes the card, DEV is device code, and so on.

When the operating system installs a driver, it compares these codes with the codes inside a text file that's part of the driver package. You can trick the operating system and add the codes to that file and that's how you can install the driver on those nvidia mining cards.

However, the drivers then also check the codes and they'll refuse to communicate with cards that don't match the codes they recognize. 

 

But a nVIdia driver would not be able to communicate with an AMD card, simply because the chips have totally different sets of commands and instructions... it's like one talks German and one talks French, and the drivers talk only one language.

The most likely outcome of loading a bad driver would be your pc hanging (the driver asks the video card something in his language but the video card never replies because it doesn't understand the language the driver talks so the driver keeps waiting or repeats the question for ever) or maybe you'd get a blue screen (because the driver asks something and the video card thinks the driver asked for something else and sends back an incorrect reply and so on)

 

That actually explained it perfectly.  But if thats the case, then how does modifying a driver lets say for the mining cards and whatnot work at all..?

[mariushm]

36 minutes ago, Frinetic said:

That actually explained it perfectly.  But if thats the case, then how does modifying a driver lets say for the mining cards and whatnot work at all..?

The processor (the chip) on the mining cards is pretty much the same as the one used on gaming cards, but the mining cards are simply tweaked a bit to make them cheaper to make. They lack HDMI connectors so the maker doesn't have to pay license costs and royalties for the HDMI connector.

The mining video cards also have modified firmware (a sort of BIOS on the video card itself) and through that firmware, the manufacturer may have tweaked everything to cut costs or to "optimize" the card for mining..

My guess is that in the case of the mining video cards, that older version of the driver didn't check things so thoroughly... so just by adding those codes to the text file with codes is enough to get things to work.  Let's say it checks if the chip is made by nVidia, it then checks if it's a chip used in the nvidia GTX 1060 series, but that particular version of the driver simply didn't check "is this a gtx 1060 for mining" or "is this a gtx 1060 for gaming", or maybe that particular driver version doesn't ask the video card "do you have any outputs?"

Later drivers added a further check, looking in the video card bios for some codes that tell it it's not a card meant to be used for gaming, basically a sign that says "don't use this video card as primary video ouput, because there's no output connectors"

 

Newer drivers could be hacked by somewhat skilled by changing some bits in the driver, in an extremely simple way somewhere in the driver there's a part where the driver asks the video card a question like "Are you a mining video card? Do you have these codes?" and the video card answers "Yes, my code is this and I'm meant for mining" then the driver will refuse to use the card for gaming. Well, you could modify the driver to make it think that the video card answered No, and then the driver would think it's a regular gaming card.

However, drivers these days are signed - basically this means if one character in the driver file is modified, a "signature" the driver comes with no longer matches and the operating system will refuse to load it, assuming the driver is corrupted or infected by viruses, or hacked (rightly so). So people would only be able to get those drivers to work by disabling driver signing, which Windows doesn't like...

 

Anyway, there can be some other differences between mining cards and gaming cards.

 

For example, a game often reads big chunks of data from memory chips at one time, like let's say the average amount of data read or written to memory would be 500 KB to 1 MB, a few thousand times a second. In contrast, mining programs may read only 1-4 KB of data at a time, but they do it way more often (like hundreds of thousands a time per second). So through the firmware on the card, the manufacturer may set some parameters to make the memory chips work way better when some application reads small amounts of data all the time, but when this pattern changes. the memory chips may not be able to handle things and the chips could send corrupted data to the processor. Games wouldn't crash, because the processor would detect these corruptions and request the data again and again until the memory chips give the data correctly, but you'd basically get stutters, hiccups, maybe a few frames lost in a particular place in a game level.

 

The firmware may also configure the processor to run at lower frequencies by default compared to regular gaming cards, or adjust the frequency dynamically in a different way compared to the gaming cards in order to keep the power consumption much lower than gaming cards. For example, this would allow them to put a cheaper voltage regulator on the video card - instead of 8 power chips that may cost 40$ in total which can handle 150 watts of power, they could use 8 cheaper chips that cost only 25$ but have a peak power limit of 120 watts only, and they restrict overclocking and reduce frequencies in order to keep power consumption below around 100 watts (compared to up to 125w for a GTX 1060).

With a carefully controlled power consumption, on mining cards they could also use cheaper coolers and heatsinks... for example use only 2 heat pipes in the cooler instead of 3-4 heatpipes, or use Aluminum only instead of Aluminum with a copper core heatsink.

They could also change the fan curve profile so that fans would always spin or spin at higher rpm to keep the card cool, compared to the gaming card version.

 

So yeah, you MAY be able to get mining cards working and game on them, but there's some fineprint... they're not quite the same as regular gaming cards. If you're aware of these and you're fine with risking up to 100$, then go for it.

 

AMD RX 570 and RX 580 cards that were used for mining are cheap on eBay, under 100$, and unlike with nVidia cards, on these you can even flash them with different firmware (bioses) so even if someone uploaded a custom firmware into the video card, you can download the originals from a site like Techpowerup and you have a working card with outputs and everything, no need to use hacks. 

 

Here's an example of RX 570 on eBay at 98$, guy says he has over 30 of them  : LINK

Why would you spend 80$ on aliexpress and wait weeks for it to come and hack things...