Hardware & Technical Modified/stripped down (mostly GPU) drivers and related tangents

Morbad

Morbad
I have a great antipathy for (subjectively) needless bloatware and I frequently run versions of Windows that may not have official support. Since I tend to modify my GPU (and occasionally other) driver packages, I figured I may as well make them available for anyone else who might find them useful.

First, some warnings and disclaimers:
  • These modifications are what I personally use on my systems, but I make no guarantees as to compatibility, suitability, or performance for anyone else. Use at your own risk.
  • I make no claims to any source materials; all rights and whatnot remain with their respective IP holders. In cases where the author is not clear, I will make all honest effort to give credit where it is due. Everything here should fall under 'fair use', but I'm not a lawyer.
  • The file hosting site I currently use out of practical convenience (ufile.io) seems to allow the odd malicious advertisement. I recommend the aggressive use of ad blockers. Everything I upload to ufile.io will be in a .7z (7-zip) archive; if you're being presented with a file with another extension from that site, it is not mine.

Second, some common prerequisies and useful tools (all except the .NET and VC++ runtimes are optional):
  • Microsoft's most recent .NET Desktop Runtimes (x64 file on the right side of the page that specifically says "Desktop Runtime"), 6.0 and 8.0 (the current LTS versions).
  • The most recent Microsoft Visual C++ redistributables, in a convienent package from TechPowerUp.
  • Wagnardsoft's Display Driver Uninstaller.
  • TechPowerUp's NVCleanstall, which is what I use to modify NVIDIA's driver packages.
  • Orbmu2k's nvidiaProfileInspector, for manually modifying hidden NVIDIA profile parameters, or importing settings files.
  • Any good text editor. I prefer Notepad++ (with the Compare plugin), but even the Windows' Notepad will work.

The manual installation procedure for a modified, and thus unsigned, Windows driver that does not include it's own installer, to make it work with a standard user account:
  • Extract the driver package to a convienent location.
  • Completely remove your old drivers, by whatever method you prefer. DDU (linked above), run from safe mode, after uninstalling any associated software from add/remove programs, is my preferred method, but not mandatory.
  • Reboot the system to the Windows start up options (by holding down shift while clicking 'restart' in the Windows taskbar, or by pressing F8 right before Windows starts) and select option #7 "Disable driver signature enforcement". This only needs to be done when installing unsigned drivers; the drivers will persist and remain usable after rebooting normally.
  • While "driver signature enforcement" is disabled, open Device Manager, browse to the relevant device, r-click on it, and select "update driver". Select "browse my computer for drivers", browse to the location of the relevant .inf file, and select your device from the list (there will probably only be one). There will be multiple warnings about the driver being unsigned; you know this, accept all the prompts to continue.
  • After the driver is successfully installed, restart the system normally.
  • Optionally, install any control panel software, configure it to taste, and restart again.
The NVIDIA drivers below should not require the manual installation procedure, as they are modified with NVCleanstall which builds a handly little installer executable that does most of the work. The AMD drivers will need it, as I have to mod them completely manually and I am not going to bother signing them or trying to retain the installer program, which I do not need.

Finally, the current (as of this post) AMD and NVIDIA drivers, with links to the original files, my archives, and notes on the changes I've made:
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This is NVIDIA's latest hotfix driver, from here, modified with the following NCleanstall options:
NLO9stw.png

uu7EODh.png

mR8dNZs.png
I have also included an nvidiaProfileInspector profile ("Base Profile.nip") which globally enabled ReBAR with a 4GiB BAR size and disables CUDA P2 state. This should be compatable with RTX 3000 and 4000 series cards. For prior cards, omit this profile, but disabling CUDA P2 state manually should still be done if you use anything that touches CUDA (including any NVENC accelerated video recording).
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This is the newest version of the 537 branch of drivers, from the vulkan beta release, which may or may not be more compatable in some applications on some hardware. It's been modified exactly the same way as 546.31 and includes the same profile.

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This was made from the the new AMD WHQL driver here, but with the following changes:
  • Removed references to any specific Windows versions from the .inf, to allow the driver to be installed on Windows Server (or any other x64 version of Windows). Installing these drivers on anything older than Server 2019, or a fairly recent build (e.g. 21H2 or newer) of Windows 10 or 11, is probably a bad idea.
  • Striped all reference to Link, Crash Defender, Noise Suppression, and Rapid Fire from the display driver .inf. Retained AMD Noise Supression as a separate .inf incase I want to use it for some reason, as it's tiny.
  • Integrated better message signaled interrupt parameters (one close processor policy, high priority) into the GPU driver .inf.
  • Set the default "surface format replacement" option to disabled; it's an ancient setting that generally provides no benefits to any hardware these drivers even support.
  • Removed all AMD applications (Link, Streaming, ReLive, Noise Suppression, LED nonsense, branding, et all) other than the the main Catalyst Control Center, which must be installed separately via the .msi file I extracted from the combined installer.
  • Dumped the main installer executable because they waste space and don't work with some of the other changes.

End result is that the drivers work on unsupported, but compatable, OSes and lose extraneous services, scheduled tasks, and features that third-party software can do better anyway.

I've tested the NVIDIA 546.31 driver fairly heavily at this point, but have only tested the AMD driver cursorily, and have barely tested the NVIDIA 537.96.

I'm aware there are custom driver packages from other sources, but most of the NVIDIA ones I've seen are also modified with NVCleanstall, while most of the custom AMD ones include buggy installers and an optional pile of dubious tweaks, without actually removing much nor enabling the drivers to work on Windows Server...so I mod my own. I'll likely post updated drivers to this thread as I continue to mod them for my use.
 

Morbad

Morbad
Modded package for the new AMD preview driver:
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Modding was easy as the .inf was virtually identical to the 23.12.1 WHQL. All I needed to change were the directory names, versions, and dates.

I left more of the optional software packages in this file, namely the ReLive (amddvr64) and VR (wvr64) stuff. It will need to be installed manually from the .msi files in the Apps directory, but it's there if someone wants it without having to download and extract the whole package from AMD.

To elaborate on the driver installation, in addition to the notes in the OP:
  • The main GPU .inf is located in "Drivers\Drivers\Display\WT6A_INF".
  • The audio function driver should be installed automatically, but if it's not, it's located in "Drivers\Display\WT6A_INF\amdafd" which is installed over one of the "High Definition Audio Controller devices" (check the device location in properties...the one that's the same location as the GPU is--surprise, surprise--the audio device on the GPU) in "System devices".
  • The HDMI audio driver proper, for the AMD High Definition Audio, under "Sound, video and game controllers", is located somewhere in "Drivers\Audio", depending on specific device. This driver should install automatically if Windows is pointed to that directory.
  • AMD Software/Catalyst Control Center/whatever they call the control panel now is located in "Apps\cnext64". Just run the .msi.

@Rat Catcher
 

Morbad

Morbad
A bit of a niche addition here...

Just updated my MediaTek wifi 6e drivers and am very impressed with the performance of this new set, so I'll post them here too. I sourced them from the Windows Update Catalog here, then modified them to knockout most power saving features and completely remove the IHV extensions. They should work on almost any MT7922 or RZ616 device, but I would not recommend using them on laptops, due to the crippled power saving. Since they are not signed the optional installation procedure detailed in the OP should be used.

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The goal with these drivers is to minimize hardware interrupt and DPC latency without crippling wireless performance. Here is an example of what I'm getting when connected (through two walls, a floor, and ~10m distance) via the 6GHz band, to a cheapish consumer Wifi 6E router (stock firmware, no SQM), on a residential cable connection rated for 400/20, being shared with two wired and eight wireless devices:
nuu57VX.png

jAv5htI.png


I started LatencyMon to measure driver interrupts, ran the Waveform bufferbloat test, followed by the Fast.com bandwidth test (4-16 connections, 30-60 seconds), and then started simultaneously downloading all thirty parts of the Baldur's Gate 3 offline installer from GOG. Second image is while maxing out CPU load and downloading Cyberpunk simultaneously.

The images show the relevant driver execution times, with the largest network related one circled. Highest interrupt to process latency was around 400 microseconds during the 16 minute period shown, mostly due to how the NVIDIA GPU driver behaves while idle. Spikes under a millisecond are good for a wifi adapter under heavy load.
 
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Morbad

Morbad
Got around to testing the new AMD driver and the basic functionality seems fine. However, when I installed the Radeon control panel and tried to use it's metrics overlay to see if AFMF was working, I was unable to get any frame rate metrics at all, nor was any of the overlay functional. No idea if that's due to a lack of other components in the driver, something I've done to my Windows install, or just a bug. It's normally not an issue for me as I don't use the AMD overlay or metrics stuff, but it is supposed to be able to reveal if AFMF is functional...other frame rate applications only register the real frames.

I did try to use Fluid Motion Frames in Starfield and Elite: Dangerous, but I'm not sure if it was functional or not. If not, the feature is broken. If it was, the feature is still broken because the frame pacing would have to have been bad enough to not result in a perceptible increase in smoothness.
 

Morbad

Morbad
www.khronos.org

Khronos Finalizes Vulkan Video Extensions for Accelerated H.264 and H.265 Encode

In April 2021, the Vulkan® Working Group at Khronos® released a set of provisional extensions, collectively referred to as ‘Vulkan Video’ which provide seamless encoding and decoding of video streams using a variety of video coding standards. The December 2022 release of Vulkan 1.3.238 saw the...
www.khronos.org www.khronos.org

And with that NVIDIA has updated their Vulkan beta driver, which I've repackaged as above.

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Scoob

Scoob
I use a tool called NV Clean Install which takes the currently available nVidia Drivers and strips out a lot of the bloat / telemetry stuff. Makes things a little more light-weight. I also use Chris Titus Techs Debloat command... carefully. Debloat does numerous things, among them getting rid of telemetry stuff, removing Windows Store apps etc. all optional. Just these two seem to help quite a lot on older devices, with the system being more responsive. To be clear, by "older devices" I mean the collection of ancient (12+ years old) laptops I have, and an old Windows tablet.
 

Morbad

Morbad
Scoob said:
I use a tool called NV Clean Install which takes the currently available nVidia Drivers and strips out a lot of the bloat / telemetry stuff.
Click to expand...

That's what I'm using for the NVIDIA drivers. Unfortunately, the closest AMD equivalent, RadeonSoftwareSlimmer, isn't anywhere near as comprehensive, so I have to edit those manually.
 

Scoob

Scoob
Morbad said:
That's what I'm using for the NVIDIA drivers. Unfortunately, the closest AMD equivalent, RadeonSoftwareSlimmer, isn't anywhere near as comprehensive, so I have to edit those manually.
Click to expand...

I used to tweak lots of things manually, both in Drivers and Windows proper, so it both ran better (amazing how much difference such things can make) and wasn't "spying" on me so much. However, as I discovered tools done by others that did the same job, but via a one-click pretty UI, I got a bit lazy.
 

Scoob

Scoob
A quick update: The issue with Outlook.live.com and Firefox is resolved. Firefox has not been update and there have been no Windows updates that report fixing issues. I can only assume some weird back-end fix was rolled out. Very odd issue, glad it fixed. Having two separate browsers open irks me for some reason.
 
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