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

[Frozenlord]

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.

Well, this is a bit awkward, but I am trying to reduce my voltage. I have been running my rig with Windows and an undervolted GPU - after switching to Linux I have lost the undervolting and want to reduce the voltage via the vBIOS. My 1080 is a mobile one and the heatsink is not perfect, which is why the stock voltage causes it to thermal throttle under load, with the undervolt giving me better performance.

 

[evernessince]

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.

3000 series cards do have an optical flow accelerator. It's just not as good.

This is straight from NVIDIA Vice President of Applied Deep Learning Research Bryan Catanzaro

"The OFA has existed in GPUs since Turing. However, it is significantly faster and higher quality in Ada, and we rely on it for DLSS3. [RTX 2000 and 3000] customers would feel that DLSS 3 is laggy, has bad image quality, and doesn’t boost FPS."

 

[Tomorrow]

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

Well you have dark mode straigh off the bat. It's surprising how many bigger developers who have more resources still manage to burn people's eyes.
Looks pretty good an clean.

 

[kefi]

Well you have dark mode straigh off the bat. It's surprising how many bigger developers who have more resources still manage to burn people's eyes.
Looks pretty good an clean.

Light mode, too, for those who love burning eyeballs!

 

[R-T-B]

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

I see that as totally worth it to open up the bios scene again. Just quit ordering cheap obvious garbage cards off places like aliexpress.

 

[mbze430]

The last time I was able to mod my vBIOS was on my 980TI. Can't wait to see what this unlocks

 

[MarsM4N]

@eidairaman1 Get ready

My first thought. The forums will be flooded with cry babies who bricked their cards. Nvidia's warranty center will also have to ramp up staff.

Conspiracy theory: the mod tools where "leaked" by Nvidia on purpose to increase (replacement) sales for broken cards.

 

[rio]

Finally, I can up the power limit on this titan v without having to shunt mod it lmao

 

[Dr. Dro]

Great news for flashing but what i really want is a GUI tool, to modify any 20/30/40 series BIOS file (v/f curve, voltage, limits etc) and then flash it to the card.

If i understand thing correctly then no such GUI tool currently exists but it is possible to flash different manufacturer made BIOS'es to cards they were not meant for?

I already have 380W KFA2 BIOS on my Gainward GS 2080Ti ~300W card. I could try 450W bioses and there's even crazier Galaxy HOF OC LAB WC Edition with effectively unlimited 2000W and higher v/f curve but im not brave enough to try that even tho my card is cooled by Morpheus II and two high static pressure 120mm fans. Essentially 4,5 slot air cooling.

Im more interested in somehow unlocking ReBAR on 20 series. Nvidia never bothered making new BIOS'es to unlock this so i wonder if it requires unlocking or does it require new code in BIOS? Im asking because ReBAR has been PCIe feature for a long time and so it's possible that it has been included in some very old cards but never enabled?

AMD enabled it for 5000 series Navi 1 and if i remember correctly people have enabled it on older GCN cards too.

EDIT: Thanks kefi. Looking forward to it.

I wouldn't play with >500W BIOSes on anything short of a full cover waterblock. Killed my original GTX Titan that way, flashed the unlimited ES BIOS that leaked many years ago and used it with an Accelero Xtreme IV.

It's not the core you'll end up damaging, it's the VRM.

 

[pexxie]

Just tested both briefly, simply saving my GPU BIOS file (--save). This card: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/palit-rtx-4060-ti-jetstream-oc-16-gb.b11330

Veii's one gives trouble:

Adapter not accessible or supported EEPROM not found, skipping
 Nvflash CPU side error Code:2Error Message: Falcon In HALT or STOP state, abort uCode command issuing process.

Kefi's one works:

Reading EEPROM (this operation may take up to 30 seconds)

Build GUID            : E7C321C21D454934BD3410C4E56D5202
Build Number          : 32849521
IFR Subsystem ID      : 1569-F314
Subsystem Vendor ID   : 0x1569
Subsystem ID          : 0xF314
Version               : 95.06.25.00.A8
Image Hash            : N/A
Hierarchy ID          : Normal Board
Build Date            : 05/14/23
Modification Date     : 06/27/23
UEFI Version          : 0x7000F ( x64 )
UEFI Variant ID       : 0x000000000000000B ( Unknown )
UEFI Signer(s)        : Microsoft Corporation UEFI CA 2011
                      : Microsoft Time-Stamp PCA 2010
XUSB-FW Version ID    : N/A
XUSB-FW Build Time    : N/A
InfoROM Version       : G002.0000.00.03
InfoROM Backup        : Present
License Placeholder   : Present
GPU Mode              : N/A
CEC OTA-signed Blob   : Not Present

 

[kefi]

Just tested both briefly, simply saving my GPU BIOS file (--save). This card: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/palit-rtx-4060-ti-jetstream-oc-16-gb.b11330

Veii's one gives trouble:

Adapter not accessible or supported EEPROM not found, skipping
Nvflash CPU side error Code:2Error Message: Falcon In HALT or STOP state, abort uCode command issuing process.

Kefi's one works:

Reading EEPROM (this operation may take up to 30 seconds)

Build GUID            : E7C321C21D454934BD3410C4E56D5202
Build Number          : 32849521
IFR Subsystem ID      : 1569-F314
Subsystem Vendor ID   : 0x1569
Subsystem ID          : 0xF314
Version               : 95.06.25.00.A8
Image Hash            : N/A
Hierarchy ID          : Normal Board
Build Date            : 05/14/23
Modification Date     : 06/27/23
UEFI Version          : 0x7000F ( x64 )
UEFI Variant ID       : 0x000000000000000B ( Unknown )
UEFI Signer(s)        : Microsoft Corporation UEFI CA 2011
                      : Microsoft Time-Stamp PCA 2010
XUSB-FW Version ID    : N/A
XUSB-FW Build Time    : N/A
InfoROM Version       : G002.0000.00.03
InfoROM Backup        : Present
License Placeholder   : Present
GPU Mode              : N/A
CEC OTA-signed Blob   : Not Present

Well that's interesting. What about normal nvflash? I didn't think any bypass was necessary to *save* a BIOS.

 

[mb194dc]

Probably little benefit anyway from this for all but a few use cases. Nvidia never locked clocks as AMD did on the 5600xt to my knowledge and chips are laser cut so you can't enable extra hardware like on the old 6800 vanilla.

Still interesting to have a play around I guess.

 

[pexxie]

Well that's interesting. What about normal nvflash? I didn't think any bypass was necessary to *save* a BIOS.

Yes, normal nvflash v5.814 reads and saves fine. I think Veii's one is struggling because it's a bit older; v5.780. Just guessing.

EDIT: Yep, normal/original v5.780 fails as well. Something different about this newer card.

 

[Canned Noodles]

I see people saying that 3000/4000 cards aren‘t picky about how many power connectors or display outputs the VBIOS has. Does the number of fans matter?

 

[AusWolf]

This is not gonna ruin the used GPU market at all!

 

[Macro Device]

Light mode, too, for those who love burning eyeballs!
View attachment 310070

Thank you very much, kind sir. Bright modes look dope if you got a proper display and forget to shut your curtains.

 

[TheDeeGee]

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

I currently run Afterburner with the "-profile1 -q" command line via task scheduler, that starts Afterburner (silent), applies profile 1 and instantly quits the app.

The fans are DC regulated?

They're all PWM.

 

[80251]

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.

After flashing the Asus XOC VBIOS I could pump up to 1.2V on my 1080ti using afterburner. It took that, liquid metal TIM and 127mm fans to get my 1080ti to 2164Mhz. core clocks

 

[Hifihedgehog]

Putting aside for a moment that GPU mining is not so profitable anymore, would vBIOS modding make it possible to circumvent hardware-based measures that as of now reduce mining performance?

 

[80251]

The last time I was able to mod my vBIOS was on my 980TI. Can't wait to see what this unlocks

I never got much out of modding the vBIOS on my Zotac GeForce 980Ti AMP Extreme, but at least I didn't need afterburner anymore, the vBIOS did all the overclocking for me (after I tested the overclocks).

I remember on the 980ti there seemed to be three or four time/frequency domains, core, memory, cache, and something else (system clock?).

 

[R-T-B]

This is not gonna ruin the used GPU market at all!

Not any more than it already was with shunt modding, no.

Putting aside for a moment that GPU mining is not so profitable anymore, would vBIOS modding make it possible to circumvent hardware-based measures that as of now reduce mining performance?

Probably. But thats been possible for awhile now anyways.

 

[d0x360]

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.

One problem... you can technically use reshade to get the same data without much performance difference since most of the optical flow! It's already being output by the engine so you just need to translate the engines data into the data from the DLSS sdk.

PureDark made a mod that replaces FSR2 with DLSS 2 on cards but on the 4000 series it does frame gen. I played Jedi survivor at 4k120 maxed out and it ran like a dream. He has a few mods and I offered to help and didn't want credit but he doesn't want help which sadly means it's limited to games he likes which is like 6.

I did fork a repo so I'm gonna try to figure it out but there are people more qualified than I who should take a look because it's the real deal.

 

[AnonymousGuy767]

I see people saying that 3000/4000 cards aren‘t picky about how many power connectors or display outputs the VBIOS has. Does the number of fans matter?

Yes and yes. I've personally experienced fan misbehavior or display outputs stop working if a bios from a different card is flashed. Strix bios on MSI? You're losing a displayport output.

 

[squee666]

Curious will this work on 4xxx mobile.
Saw a guy shunt mod his 4090 mobile lul for a decent uplift.

 

[Fluffmeister]

Talk is cheap, get flashing. I want to see results.

I for one don't give a shit about your bricked cards.

Go!