Spoof dxdiag results

Question

I'm trying to play Overwatch on an AWS EC2 instance. The GPU used in the g2 unit is not compatible with the game (NVIDIA GRID K520). Although I think the game should run fine. Looking at this forum:

http://us.battle.net/forums/en/bnet/topic/20745154730

The support agent suggests spoofing the dxdiag results. Is it possible to do this? It seems the offending parameters are:

DDI Version: 9Ex
DDraw Status: Not Available
AGP Status: Not Available

Answer 1

Not unless you can hack the program or find a compatible emulator.

The results of dxdiag are most likely for reporting purposes only. I seriously doubt that Overwatch runs dxdiag to determine what hardware you have in your computer. Rather, both dxdiag and Overwatch are both asking the OS's drivers what kind of hardware you have.

Think of dxdiag as an expert newspaper reporter taking a pictures and writing a story at a crime scene. Regardless of how accurate that report might be, the police department is going to use their own photographer and detectives to collect the evidence directly from the scene rather than going through the reporter. The only ways to get the detective to report different information are one or more of the following:

• Alter the crime scene so that it is different.
• Alter the detective so that he processes the information differently.
• Alter the detective's information as he collects it.

So, in order to bypass this, you would have to figure out how to:

• Alter the computer so that it has (or appears to have) the required hardware capabilities.
• Alter the program so that it passes your hardware (or skips the check altogether)
• Alter the DirectX drivers that convey the information about the computer to the program and dxdiag, or write some sort of "shim" that intercepts and changes the data being reported.

These aren't trivial matters for the casual programmer, and it could be that the program actually is still incompatible with your hardware.

One such "shim" which wouldn't require reprogramming is if you can find an emulator which can emulate the required hardware. Perhaps QEMU, or some of the other emulator projects that are available can do this.