Radeon LE to Radeon Hack 2
2001.02.23

Radeon LE is the budget version of ATI Radeon, and there are two versions of Radeon LE in the retail channel now. The OEM version (without ATI logo on the card) isn't an ATI product. These cards are distributed and supported by another company -Althon Micro. While the retail version (with ATI logo on the card) is a product that ATI distributes only in the China market.

Besides the speed differences of video core and memory, the main difference between Radeon and Radeon LE is that the feature of ATI HyperZ, which claims can boost the effective memory bandwidth by 20%, on Radeon is disabled on Radeon LE. Two weeks ago, we have reported that the Radeon LE can be modified to a Radeon by the registry editing method listed below and thus unlocked the disabled HyperZ feature on Radeon LE.

Radeon LE to Radeon Hack
Open the Notepad (text editor of Windows). Copy and paste the text below:

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\ATI Technologies\Driver\0000\atidxhal]
"DisableHierarchicalZ"="0"
"EnableWaitUntilIdxTriList2"="1"
"DisableHyperZ"="0"
"FastZClearEnabled"="1"
"Vsync"="0"
"AntiAlias"="0"
"ZFormats"="3"
"ExportCompressedTex"="1"

Then save it as a file with a file name of "radeon.Reg". Double click on the "radeon.Reg" file from Explorer to introduce the above values to the registry. Reboot the Windows and you get a Radeon from that Radeon LE.

 

As a follow up info, we would like to point out that this hack only activates HyperZ in Direct3D and doesn't enable HyperZ in OpenGL. These are showed clearly by the benchmarking results in Fig. 1. To obtain whole HyperZ supports on Radeon LE, we have to do more which may concern BIOS modifying or soldering works.

Figure 1. Benchmarking Results of Radeon LE, Hacked Radeon LE and Radeon 
*  Duron 700MHz, 128MB PC133 Ram, Win98 SE
** Radeon LE / Radeon LE HyperZ ( core/memory = 150MHz/150MHz ),
      Radeon ( core/memory = 166MHz/166MHz )

 

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