Why do people use modded desktop drivers?

Excuse me cuz i am kind of a noob when it comes to notebooks(solely used dektop till now). I bought an alienware 15 for college.
I just wanted to know if these modded desktop drivers provide a performance gain or do people use it solely to activate overclocking capabilities.(am currently on 347.88 , didn't want to upgrade to 352 cz people said it halved their 3dmark score)

 

Uninstall that garbage driver and stay away from anything after it! The best driver is 345.20

PS: I never mod the drivers, I just install them normally.

 

He has a Maxwell GPU, so 347.88 is optimal for Maxwell-based laptops. As well, it is one of the few drivers post 345.20 that allow overclocking on Maxwell drivers
352.xx and 353.00 have problems when running a benchmark (say 3Dmark) with an overclocked GPU (stock clock is fine). For games, it's as variable as any driver (except for The Witcher 3, it seems). I don't have problems with either as the performance wasn't too different/better/worse than 347.88/347.90 (except when benching an overclocked 860m). And I have both sets of drivers, 347.90 and 353.00, on my laptop.

 

Currently running stock clocks ... btw i saw a benchmark of a gtx 970m laptop(MSI) in dragon age inquisition on notebookcheck with average 60 fps on ultra with 350.12 driver(i barely get 40-58 fps,mostly around 45 fps), did alienware downgrade their laptop gpus?
EDIT: i've set the power management in nvidia control panel to prefer consistent performance as it locks the clock speed to 1038(the boost clock) while prefer maximum performance floats between 924 to 1038

 

Do you have a 970m or 980m?
As well, do you have the same settings notebookcheck had?

 

gtx 970m and yes i set it on ultra preset just different drivers cuz i heard 350.12 was bad on the forums
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-970M.126694.0.html
check out the last DAI benchmark 62 fps average on msi gtx 970m and they have msaa enabled , i disabled msaa for performance

 

Well, you could test 350.12 and see for yourself if there is a difference.
But on the good side, at least your average beats out NBC's average with the 15.

 

will try that and update post if performance increases

 

NVIDIA drivers are a mess right now. LOTS of laptops and desktops are having functionality issues with the drivers as released by NVIDIA. Some of us tweak them to help compensate for NVIDIA's serious blunders. The tweaks typically involve changes to registry entries, or the insertion of a few files with different versions than those NVIDIA provided in the driver package, and those changes are introduced during the installation process. Sometimes it makes a huge improvement in performance, sometimes no improvement, sometimes fixes problems, sometimes does not. So, that's one reason why.

The other reason is aftermarket upgrades. If the OEM did not sell a particular model with a GPU as a factory option, the hardware ID will be missing and the driver installation will fail. The hardware ID is missing because NVIDIA will only include laptop hardware IDs that the OEM(s) have "blessed" and authorized. Desktop drivers do not require a brand-specific hardware ID that includes motherboard identification, only a brand-agnostic GPU hardware ID is required.

In either case it is safe to say we typically only do it because we need to because NVIDIA did a lousy or incomplete job in the first place... not because we want to. It's really super crappy that they will not add the hardware ID information for aftermarket GPUs that the OEMs have not "authorized" them to. That's really none of the OEMs' stinking business and there's no reason for NVIDIA to make things more difficult for customers by "honoring" the wishes of OEMs but they are all in cahoots and swapping spit with NVIDIA and Micro$haft.

 

Can't a flashed vBios have an OEM hardware ID change?

Or won't the GPU boot with changed ID

 

It looks like as from 352.xx SLI is on-the-fly even for laptops

 

The part that creates the problem necessitating the driver mod for aftermarket upgrades comes from the motherboard, not the GPU. You cannot change the motherboard hardware ID with the vBIOS.

Using 780M as an example, in a laptop driver it looks like this for an M18xR2:

Code:

%NVIDIA_DEV.119F.0550.1028% = Section073, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_119F&SUBSYS_05501028

In the desktop driver mods I did it looks like this (which has no mobo ID):

Code:

%NVIDIA_DEV.119F%           = Section152, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_119F

The latter driver mod works for any machine with a 780M. It does not care what kind of laptop and the driver setup only looks for a GPU hardware ID.

 

Modding .INFs ain't as bad as people make it seem though

 

Modding the INF files is super easy. If you are only doing the mod for yourself and not making changes to support multiple machines and video cards, it only takes about 1 minute when you know what to change. When you have no idea what to do and are not careful enough to avoid typos, it can be a frustrating and daunting task. This simple task is very intimidating for some people until they learn what to do.