I am wondering what people did or do to make changes to drivers they used in order to improve the performance and stability of their graphics cards (non-hardware unless required).  :-/

What do people look at? What pre-existing knowledge was required to attempt this work? What are some serious precautions other than making backups that should be taken into consideration? Like could a bad driver ruin your card? I would like to give such a thing a go.

I just need to be directed to the proper resource to get started somewhere. Guess I'm curious about hardware as well, but that's more focused on electronics-based work which doesn't excite me a whole lot.

EDIT:
I believe I already found what I was looking for online. Thanks anyways!

I'm assuming you've already found everything you need (as you've stated above), but try looking for data sheets on falconfly and possibly other sources, forums posts etc.

Also, I must warn you, programming hardware of this age can be reasonably volatile, so take care when trying out new functions; start with getting data from the card (so try reading before writing). Another technique to get info about the card is by data interception (by debugging) by that can be very tedious and not worth it.

and to add what Quaker said, be aware that bad drivers can indeed screw up the card you make them for. I had two X800 ATI cards go bad on me when I was beta testing Win Vista that ended up causing green and red pixels to start showing up all over the place, even in just the bios screen before Windows had even loaded and going into separate machines.

I was stupid thinking that the first one was just a glitch and maybe the card had gone bad at just that particular time but nope, happened to the second one as well.