StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Seriously, the fuck is it with all the major graphics card manufacturers except Matrox? It's like trying to fucking find a specific grain of sand from the beach to find a place to download BIOS upgrades for nVidia and ATI graphics cards. Both companies basically tell the customer to go fuck himself. "Want BIOS upgrades? Well, contact your supplier or whoever, but don't ask us, we only manufacture the fucking things and design the goddamn chipsets, so sod off. And no, we won't give you any FAQ or anything liuke that either."

Goddamn but it's starting to piss me off. You can find drivers out the wazoo, but no video card BIOS upgrades fucking anywhere. If anybody can help me, I'd be much obliged. Specifically, I've got a GeForce4 Ti 4200 AGP x8 card on my machine, and the BIOS on that is from late 2002. Never been upgraded as far as I know, since my brother went "Huh?" when I asked him about that. It's his old card.

Aside from the struggling wreck at home, this knowledge would actually help me at work, since I'm interning at a computer repair shop where it's policy to always upgrade BIOSes for customers' kit on principle. Mostly that means motherboards, but it can't do much harm with all the graphics card related problems that we see.

Edi

I would appreciate a source as well. I've been planning on upgrading the BIOS for some time now.

Maybe they don't see upgrading the video card BIOS as something to be done regularly, unlike drivers?

Generally I've been told that when it comes to upgrading the BIOS, "don't fix it if it isn't broken".

Why would you upgrade a GPU BIOS? Its perfectly fine as it is unless you want to try something silly like unlocking pipes.

There is no need to touch the BIOS unless there is a specific problem which will be fixed by an upgrade. Running the risk of wrecking a card / board (admittedly, less of a problem now than 5 years back) for negligable benafits doesn't really seem worth it to me...

I think it is far less common for GPU manufacturers to release BIOS updates than it is for motherboard manufactuerers, as there really isn't the same need for them.

GPU manufacturers usually don't release BIOS updates because

1) GPU's work fine and as advertised with the original, and

2) They can be used to modify the card's functionality and performance

No. 2 is the same response I received with I was talking with a BFG rep about troubles with my card.

Back in 2004, probably even today, many people bought X800PRO cards and flashed them to X800XT, giving them the performance of a 500+ USD card. ATi eventually put out cards with laser-cut pipes to make flashing a pointless diddly. I wouldn't be surprised if your 4200 could be flashed to a 4600 or even 4800 if you found such a BIOS somewhere.

Graphics card BIOSes are released by the card manufacturer, because they are specific to the card, not the chipset.

http://www.evga.com/support/drivers/