NVIDIA BIOS Signature Lock Broken, vBIOS Modding and Crossflash Enabled by Groundbreaking New Tools

[Jism]

Even Polaris works with Rebar if i'm correct. Just never bothered to actually implement it. Users had to hack around it. It's nothing special - it's a PCI-E sig and it's bin there for many years.

2000W bios is'nt going to harm your card - only when you raise crazy amount of power through the chip and not having sufficient cooling.

 

[Z-GT1000]

Could this potentially be used to mod the 2XXX series to unlock Resizable BAR?

 

[Punkenjoy]

From what I've understood the benefits of AI hardware on consumer device is not about "computing stuff that cannot be done with regular hardware" but being more efficient at doing it, and not using compute ressources that could be used for something else.
While XeSS doesn't need the XMX units, even Wizzard found that the "non- native" XeSS wasn't equal when it comes to performance gain and visuals.
Remedy also eventually stopped using the "2.0 prototype" in favor of the Tensor core accelerated one.

For DLSS3 an Nvidia engineer came out and said that DLSS 3.0 can work on ampere...But the end result will not be as good, and seeing how people like to trash talk the current "ideal" implementation, they might have avoided a bullet. If it was even more glitchy and had a higher latency impact, forums dwellers would have never shut up about how laughable the tech is

View attachment 310028

There is certainly a benefits of using unused portion of the dies (Tensor cores or XMX units) to run inference based upscaler since they are much faster to run inference and also, they don't use the standard compute units. So Any upscaling technique using inference/ML will run much better on those. (FSR 2.x is not a ML upscaler and would probably not benefits much of running on tensors cores. (It could even lead to lower quality since these ai cores are lower precision. AMD already wen't back from using lower precision for few step to increase quality.)

For your exemple between DLSS 2.x and 1.x, it's not about hardware at all. It's just that DLSS 1.x was a spacial upscaler (like FSR 1.x) and DLSS 2.x is a temporal upscaler. For DLSS 3.0 and Ampere, the main problem is not the hardware support, but how quickly the hardware can do it. My understanding is Ampere tensors cores are not fast enough to perform both DLSS upscaling + Frame generation. There would be no benefits to run DLSS3 if it doesn't actually increase your framerate.

 

[Tomorrow]

Even Polaris works with Rebar if i'm correct. Just never bothered to actually implement it. Users had to hack around it. It's nothing special - it's a PCI-E sig and it's bin there for many years.

2000W bios is'nt going to harm your card - only when you raise crazy amount of power through the chip and not having sufficient cooling.

Well my hotspot temp in games is under 75c even at 380W. Much lower when looking at the GPU temp itself but i prefer hotspot as it's the hottest.
I suppose i could still set a software limit of 88c like it is currently. Naturally the voltage itself would be the limiting factor way before power consumption or even temp becomes an issue.

 

[Assimilator]

Could this potentially be used to mod the 2XXX series to unlock Resizable BAR?

That's not how anything works.

 

[Raiden85]

Great, so we can see many more "Fake" Gpu's in the near future....

First thing I thought of. The scammers are going love this.

 

[TheDeeGee]

I would only use this to change power limit table (lower it) so i don't have to use Afterburner. But it's not worth the risk.

 

[W1zzard]

so i don't have to use Afterburner

You could use the nvidia-smi command line utility, set a batch to run on startup, done

 

[Tomorrow]

That's not how anything works.

Many things are deemed impossible, until they are done. Take this topic for example. Nvidia's LHR was beat as has been Denuvo DRM numerous times.

I was laughed at as insane person when is suggested translating Direct3D calls ten years ago. An now we have DXVK, Proton, CrossOver etc.

 

[Makaveli]

Yes, for many years now

Wouldn't MPT and Red BIOS editor count?

RED BIOS EDITOR and MorePowerTool for Polaris, Navi and Big Navi | igor´sLAB (igorslab.de)

And they work up to RDNA2 but not RDNA 3 which currently doesn't have any tools that work.

 

[Beginner Macro Device]

I'm 100% sure this Q has already been asked but how do I edit the BIOS itself if no existing BIOS meets my needs? I mean, without HEX editors or other shamanisms.

 

[mouacyk]

Will it be possible to disable Boost 3.0/2.0/1.0 now, and return to the g'olden days of Maxwell custom BIOS editing where WYSIWYG?

 

[ARF]

You can now play with NVIDIA GeForce graphics card BIOS like it's 2013!
You can, for example, flash the BIOS of a premium factory-overclocked graphics card onto your close-to-MSRP graphics card.
Tampering with the vBIOS will void your graphics card's warranty.

I see that the stock is not moving, and clearly this looks like a poor and cheap PR attempt to call for some attention.
Except that it is not 2013, even in the slightest, and instead of guiding the users to try to brick their cards at their own responsibility and risk, maybe it's better to reanalyse the pricing structure and offer some very deep discounts.

Current nvidia lineup:

RTX 4090 24GB: 1600 - 3772 - sky is the limit
RTX 4080 16GB: 1100 - 2310 - sky is the limit
RTX 4070 Ti 12GB: 800 - 1600 - sky is the limit
RTX 4070 12GB: 600 - 1265 - sky is the limit
RTX 4060 Ti 16GB: 500 - 625 - sky is the limit
RTX 4060 Ti 8GB: 390 - 600
RTX 4060 8GB: 290 - 392

Lower limit is the cheapest available model, the higher limit is the most expensive available model at time of writing. Source: newegg.

 

[PK1]

man...I honestly did not know Nvidia even (tried to) locked this out....what a crappy move.
has AMD locked this out as well?

Yes AMD is even more restrictive. Newer 7000 series AMD gpus require a CH341A bios programmer to flash different vbios. Perhaps in the future people will figure out a way to use AMDVB Flash on newer AMD gpus.

This is sooooo awesome! I can't wait to see what interesting new programs and mods develop from this.

DLSS3 uses hardware fourth generation tensor cores and Optical Flow Accelerator that do not exist on 3xxx series, it's not just software

Cool news! I'm wondering if removing TDP limit on my 4070 could change anything performance wise.

Is there a tool which allows to modify the existing bios of our own cards? I had 2 cards dying on me quickly after I used an xoc bios on another model in the past while they were properly cooled so now i wont flash anything that has been specifically designed for a specific model.

Just flash the highest power limit vbios available for the 4070. Typically Galax and Asus have them. I use Galax 666w vbios on my MSI 4090 since December 2022 with no issues.

 

[dyonoctis]

There is certainly a benefits of using unused portion of the dies (Tensor cores or XMX units) to run inference based upscaler since they are much faster to run inference and also, they don't use the standard compute units. So Any upscaling technique using inference/ML will run much better on those. (FSR 2.x is not a ML upscaler and would probably not benefits much of running on tensors cores. (It could even lead to lower quality since these ai cores are lower precision. AMD already wen't back from using lower precision for few step to increase quality.)

For your exemple between DLSS 2.x and 1.x, it's not about hardware at all. It's just that DLSS 1.x was a spacial upscaler (like FSR 1.x) and DLSS 2.x is a temporal upscaler. For DLSS 3.0 and Ampere, the main problem is not the hardware support, but how quickly the hardware can do it. My understanding is Ampere tensors cores are not fast enough to perform both DLSS upscaling + Frame generation. There would be no benefits to run DLSS3 if it doesn't actually increase your framerate.

1.9 was a special case apparently, Control was the only game to use it. HUB said that it was temporal, and it had a bigger performance uplift vs 1.0. It was a "transitional" DLSS.
Nvidia DLSS in 2020: Stunning Results | TechSpot

 

[heavyarms2112]

man...I honestly did not know Nvidia even (tried to) locked this out....what a crappy move.
has AMD locked this out as well?

yep. they've locked it from 6000 series.

 

[JAKra]

Which you still cannot, because the cores are disabled through on-die fuses. Unlocking through BIOS modding was possible on older ATI cards until they figured that using the BIOS to lock shaders is too easy to circumvent. It's how I got interested in the hardware scene over 20 years ago (ATI Radeon 9500 to 9700 mod, http://web.archive.org/web/20030118032341/http://www.maxdownloads.com/~ian/wizzard/)

Those where the times...
20 years ago, following your guide I've moded my Radeon 9800SE (4 pipelines) to Radeon 9800Pro (8 pipelines). It was 128 bit card though... still made a huge difference. So thanks for bringing back these memories!

 

[PanosX]

Ι remember old days on GTX 9XX series i can speed up more fan rpm than stock biosflash!!can i with this tool?i not say about fan curve but more rpm on 100%

 

[ir_cow]

So RTX 20 series and below now get to enjoy voltage BIOS mods while 30 and 40 series still have cross flashing like before?

 

[Luke357]

Does this mean I could flash a 3090 BIOS onto a 3080 Ti and unlock the extra CUDA Cores that were disabled?

I hope so. I also hope my 3080TI FE is actually binned well enough for it to work!

 

[Double-Click]

Man it has has been a while...

The last card I flashed was a 5850 ref to an unlocked 5870.
Also an extremely late thanks to TPU for the VGA BIOS Collection lol.

 

[Frozenlord]

So RTX 20 series and below now get to enjoy voltage BIOS mods while 30 and 40 series still have cross flashing like before?

Is there some tool for modding voltages on Paacal? My 1080 could use a bit of help and I have not thought it possible that we might finally be able to mod a Pascal vBios.

 

[PanosX]

I hope so. I also hope my 3080TI FE is actually binned well enough for it to work!

yes but only cuda cores not VRAM

 

[kefi]

Design preview of the nvflashk UI I'm working on.. feel free to make suggestions - release later this week!

 

[ir_cow]

Is there some tool for modding voltages on Paacal? My 1080 could use a bit of help and I have not thought it possible that we might finally be able to mod a Pascal vBios.

You could always flash it to a XOC BIOS with unlimited power, but the voltage was still locked without shunt mods. Now it seems BIOS modding is back. So the this news post makes it seem.