Friday, June 8th 2018
NVIDIA Has a DisplayPort Problem Which Only a BIOS Update Can Fix
NVIDIA "Maxwell" and "Pascal" graphics architectures introduced support for modern display connectivity to keep up with the breakneck pace at which display resolutions are scaling up. The two introduce support for DisplayPort 1.4 and 1.3, however the implementation is less than perfect. Some of the newer monitors that leverage DisplayPort 1.4 or 1.3 standards don't function as designed on "Maxwell" (GeForce GTX 900 series) and "Pascal" (GeForce 10-series) graphics cards, with users reporting a range of bugs from blank screens until the operating system loads, to frozen boot sequences.
Unfortunately, these issues cannot be fixed by driver updates, and require graphics card BIOS updates. Luckily, you won't be at the mercy of lethargic AIC partners looking to limit their warranty claims by going slow on BIOS updates, or NVFlash rocket-science. NVIDIA released a tool which can detect if your graphics card needs the update, and then updates the BIOS for you, from within Windows. The app first unloads your driver, and flashes your graphics card BIOS (a process which must not be interrupted, lest you end up with an expensive brick).
Update: We have confirmation that the tool is intended for both reference-design and custom-design graphics cards.
DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA Graphics Firmware Update Tool for DisplayPort 1.3 and 1.4 Displays
Unfortunately, these issues cannot be fixed by driver updates, and require graphics card BIOS updates. Luckily, you won't be at the mercy of lethargic AIC partners looking to limit their warranty claims by going slow on BIOS updates, or NVFlash rocket-science. NVIDIA released a tool which can detect if your graphics card needs the update, and then updates the BIOS for you, from within Windows. The app first unloads your driver, and flashes your graphics card BIOS (a process which must not be interrupted, lest you end up with an expensive brick).
Update: We have confirmation that the tool is intended for both reference-design and custom-design graphics cards.
95 Comments on NVIDIA Has a DisplayPort Problem Which Only a BIOS Update Can Fix
So not sure what kind of shitty tool those guys are pulling....
An ASUS Strix GTX 960 2GB and a PNY XLR8 GTX 1060 6GB, so both custom cards, for anyone interested.They also have twice as many GPUs per capita. The actual crash percentage when taking into account the fact that they have more GPUs is pretty even.
gtx 1060 6g gaming x no problem
In other news, I wonder if this just patches a portion of the bios (GOP Table) and resigns it. If so, it almost certainly could be hacked to sign pascal bios images that have been modded... hmmm....
Really curious how this works...Strange. Fermi was great for me. I only started having issues around Maxwell and Pascal...
Before that, checksums.Any evidence to support this? It ran on mine and told me I was up to date. :laugh:
Almost nobody has those monitors, somehow even new HDR models still sport DP1.2 only :kookoo:
Every modern bios has one tagged somewhere in the bios. It's essentially a mathmatical sum of the file (or section) contents, like a hash. Change one thing and checksum won't add up without correction.
Signatures will be invalid the same way and can't be corrected without the private key. Only NVIDIA has that. They only started enforcing that on Pascal though, and even with pascal, you could still use a hardware flasher until recently.
i'm interested how you modded a pascal bios myself . .
btw, flashing issues w/modded bios is posted in guru3d driver thread HERE.
The flashing is still hardly easy, you need a programmer like the CH341A I use and a clip, and will probably need to take your graphics card apart to attatch it.
I may write a guide but first I want to see if I can patch this so people can just use nvflash. There are... interesting things in this patcher from nvidia, to say the least...
as mentioned this does not update the vbios only the GOP
Just semantics really. Point being...it's all the same thing, or merely different parts of the same thing. There can be additional parts too. But they aren't really related to this topic. You can read about them here.
Really, MrGenius is spot on that it's almost semantics for my purposes here.