I think that's actually happened a few times before. I can remember some hardware hacks that actually caused the gfx card to be recognized as a higher end card, causing it's features to become enabled.

Wether or not that's in the ROM or driver is up for debate though.

Edit: Found an example more recent than I was thinking, but it's been around a long time: http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/hacking-nvidia-cards-into-...