Need for Speed Unbound (NFS Unbound), the latest entry to the popular genre-defining race sim by EA that launched today, unearthed a problem with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 "Ada" graphics card that cannot be fixed by simply updating the drivers or the game. This is a world-first—never before has a game required a VBIOS update to work around problems.

According to EA, the title exhibits a display flashing/blinking issue on machines powered by the RTX 4090, which requires a firmware update (i.e. video BIOS update). Luckily, this doesn't involve putting your RTX 4090 through a nerve-racking NVFlash manual BIOS update process (not that there's any risk with most RTX 4090 cards shipping with dual-BIOS). NVIDIA has released a fully-automated Firmware Update Tool that can be run from within Windows, which easily updates the video BIOS of the RTX 4090. We confirmed that it is in fact the video BIOS that is being updated (by comparing the VBIOS dumps before and after using the tool).Update Dec 3rd: EA Support has just updated their support recommendation from graphics card VBIOS update to a motherboard BIOS update. "After testing, we've found a solution is to upgrade the motherboard BIOS. Please refer to your motherboard manufacturer's support page to obtain the latest system BIOS," the updated recommendation reads.

While working on GPU-Z support for NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX Super cards, I noticed something curious. Each of the RTX 2060 Super and RTX 2070 Super is listed with three independent device IDs in the driver: 1F06, 1F42, 1F47 for the former and 1E84, 1EC2, 1EC7 for the latter. GeForce RTX 2080 Super on the other hand, like nearly every other NVIDIA SKU, uses only a single device ID (1E81). The PCI device ID uniquely identifies every GPU model, so the OS and driver can figure out what kind of device it is, what driver to use, and how to talk to it. I reached out to NVIDIA, for clarification, and never heard back from them besides an "interesting, I'll check internally" comment.

With no official word, I took a closer look at the actual values and remembered our NVIDIA segregates Turing GPUs article, that was part of the launch coverage for the initial GeForce RTX unveil. In that article, we revealed that NVIDIA is creating two models for each GPU, that are identical in every regard, except for name and price. If board partners want to build a factory-overclocked card, they have to buy the -A variant of the GPU, because only that is allowed to be used with an out of the box overclock. Manual overclocking by the users works exactly the same on both units.

GIGABYTE today released an updated graphics card BIOS for its GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Gaming OC / WindForce OC (GV-N208TWF3OC-11GC) graphics card, with significantly increased power limits. The card originally ships with a power-limit adjustment headroom of up to of 290 Watts. The new BIOS increases that all the way up to 366 W. The default power limit for both BIOSes is 260 W, so you'll have to use GIGABYTE's Aorus Engine utility to increase the power limit manually to 366 W instead of 290 W.

The increased power limit helps the card sustain its GPU Boost frequencies better, since there is more electrical headroom. The new BIOS, however, don't tinker with temperature limits. 84°C is still the temperature at which the GPU will begin to lower clock speeds to bring down temperatures, and 88°C is the temperature limit. GPU Boost uses a combination of factors such as utilization, power limit, and temperature to increase GPU clock speeds, to increase performance. You can find both the new BIOS, and the original BIOS for this card below. You use the BIOS at your own risk.DOWNLOAD: GIGABYTE High Power Limit RTX 2080 Ti BIOS | GIGABYTE RTX 2080 Ti Gaming OC Original BIOS

BIOS modder Vipeax has released a special patched version of NVFlash (version 5.527.0), the utility that allows you to extract and flash the video BIOS of your NVIDIA GeForce graphics card. This special version lets you to bypass NVIDIA restrictions and flash GeForce RTX 20-series Founders Edition (FE) graphics cards with BIOS ROMs of custom-design graphics cards. The official versions of NVFlash that support "Turing" GPUs report a "board ID mismatch" error when trying to do this, and an additional CLI parameter that made it ignore this warning, was removed by NVIDIA, effectively walling off Founders Edition cards from BIOS cross-flashing. You still can't flash the card with a BIOS you modified, because of NVIDIA's digital-signature restriction that has been in place since "Pascal," however, this new change could come handy if you want to flash your FE card with the BIOS of a custom-design card that is largely based on NVIDIA's reference-design PCB.

PC enthusiasts look to flash their Founders Edition cards with BIOS ROMs of custom-design graphics cards by other NVIDIA add-in card partners, mainly to increase power limits that allow the GPU to sustain boost frequencies better, and increase overclocking headroom. As an obligatory word of caution, use of NVFlash isn't covered by product warranties, and you use it at your own risk, especially when cross-flashing between cards that might have subtle differences. We manually checked the modified executable (not just Virustotal) and it doesn't contain any malware.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA NVFlash with Board ID Mismatch Disabled