Unlocking instructions (cont’d)

NVStrap driver tab, note everything is disabled at first

Now everything is on

Since you’ve just booted up RivaTuner, you’ll next need to click the “install” button to enable system tweaks in the NVStrap driver panel. Under this tab you can control AGP functionality and at the very bottom, the pipeline configuration of the card itself. In the “Active pixel/vertex units configuration” field” you’ll see that the pixel and vertex units are initially controlled by the card’s BIOS. To change this, click “Allow enabling hardware masked units”, this will prompt a warning, so click “Yes” to continue.

See the active pixel/vertex units configuration at the bottom? You need to set this to custom

Click yes here

Here you can see the pixel/vertex configuration of our GeForce 6800 card before mods

Next, it’s time to start customizing things. Change the “active pixel/vertex units configuration field from “determined by VGA BIOS” to “custom” then click the “customize” button. Now you’ll see all four quads that your NV40 chip supports up top, followed by the vertex units in the middle.

Notice in our screenshots how the very first pixel quad on our EVGA card says “disabled” for the first pixel unit? You’ll also see that the first unit is masked in the “HW masked field”. In order to turn it on, click the first pixel unit. You’ll immediately see a checkmark, indicating that the pixel unit is now turned on!

This is pixel shader unit 0. See how it is disabled by default?

Now the pixel shader unit has been turned on!

Now it’s time to turn on the vertex unit that has been disabled. In the case of our EVGA card, this is vertex unit 3. Once again, click on it so you see the checkmark, which turns on the vertex unit.

This is the vertex shader unit highlighted

Now the vertex unit is on, time to click okay and then reboot

Once both are checkmarked, click “ok”. You’ll now be back at the NVStrap driver tab. From here you should see that all 16 pipelines have been enabled, as well as 6 vertex units. This is indicated in the “active pixel/vertex units configuration” field. In our screenshot, this field says “custom (16x1, 6vp)”. If you see this, it means you’ve successfully reconfigured your card to now support 16 pixel pipes, and six vertex pipes. If it says “(12x1, 5vp)” you haven’t turned them on yet.

This is how low-level system tweaks should look after your mods, note the 16x1,6vp

This is how your custom graphics processor configuration menu should look after mods. Note that it now says enabled in the state field

Now that you’ve got all the pipes up and running, you can check your work by entering RivaTuner again and checking to make sure that the “State” field in the NVStrap tab now says “enabled” for both the pixel and vertex units. If it still says disabled, that means you didn’t turn the pipelines on properly. Go back and try again.

Once you’ve got everything turned on, you’ll now want to boot up a few games or any other graphics-intensive programs that you have such as 3DMark to check for artifacts. If you see lots of artifacts or any other form of corruption on the screen, that means your card won’t run properly with all pixel and vertex pipelines enabled and you’ll have to disable them with RivaTuner. Just go back to the NVStrap are an uncheck them. A lot of users have reported that leaving the sixth vertex unit turned on and disabling the pixel units works successfully. This results in a 12 pixel pipe configuration, with six vertex units, rather than the stock GeForce 6800’s 12 pixel pipe/5 vertex pipe configuration.

In our game testing, we did note an increased level of artifacts once the card was modded, but the artifacts would only pop up occasionally and would usually go away after a few frames, then come back a minute or so later for a frame or two. It was nothing substantial basically, and some titles would cause artifacts more frequently than others (in Half-Life 2 for example, we very rarely saw artifacts).

Before we get to the benchmark results, we should note that the pixel/vertex shader units that are disabled from the factory will vary from card to card. For instance, a Chaintech GeForce 6800 card we tested had pixel and vertex units 3 disabled). Also, don’t check “Unlock professional capabilities, as that will attempt to convert your GeForce card into a Quadro. Remember that RivaTuner is a powerful app that can damage your card if you're not careful. Using it to mod your card will void your warranty.

In this scenario, the card is running with 12 pixel pipelines. Note that pixel unit 0 is disabled. However, vertex unit 3 is turned on for 6 vertex units.

You can also overclock with RivaTuner