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

erek

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Nice, right?

"You can now play with NVIDIA GeForce graphics card BIOS like it's 2013! Over the last decade, NVIDIA had effectively killed video BIOS modding by introducing BIOS signature checks. With GeForce 900-series "Maxwell," the company added an on-die security processor on all its GPUs, codenamed "Falcon," which among other things, prevents the GPU from booting with unauthorized firmware. OMGVflash by Veii; and NVflashk by Kefinator (forum names), are two independently developed new tools that let you flash almost any video BIOS onto almost any NVIDIA GeForce graphics card, bypassing "unbreakable" barriers NVIDIA put in place, such as BIOS signature checks; and vendor/device checks (cross-flashing). vBIOS signature check bypass works up to RTX 20-series "Turing" based GPUs, letting you modify the BIOS the way you want, while cross-flashing (sub-vendor ID check bypass) works even on the latest RTX 4090 "Ada."

The tools bring back the glory days of video BIOS modding using utilities the likes of NiBiTor (now discontinued). The possibilities of such utilities are endless. You can, for example, flash the BIOS of a premium factory-overclocked graphics card onto your close-to-MSRP graphics card. For cards up to RTX 20-series "Turing," in addition to clock speeds, BIOS modding lets you raise power limits, which have a more profound impact on performance, as they increase boost frequency residency. BIOS modding also gives you control over the graphics card's voltages, cooling performance, and fan-curve, so you can make your card quieter, as long as your cooler can keep the GPU away from thermal limits (which you can adjust, too). With cross-flashing (without modifying the BIOS or disturbing its signature), you are now able to restore a voltage of 1.1 V on your RTX 4090 GPU, if you've got one of the newer models, which ticks at 1.07 V only. You could also flash your FE with a custom-design vBIOS with high power limit, to go beyond NVIDIA's power limits.
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OMGVflash author Veii posted a comprehensive thread on the TechPowerUp Forums, which announces the first public beta of the tool, its development history, usage instructions, and some troubleshooting support. Find the thread here. The author has expressed interest in working with TechPowerUp on publishing future versions.

NVflashk author Kefi posted a similar comprehensive thread on TechPowerUp Forums, which can be accessed here.

OMGVflash and NVflashk are independently developed of each other. We've hand-inspected the binary code of both tools and they are free of any viruses or trojans. There's only few code modifications to the original NVFlash tool, to activate the bypass. There's no additional malware payload or anything similar. The file sizes are identical to the unmodified files. VirusTotal also confirms that these patches are legit.

Tampering with the vBIOS will void your graphics card's warranty. As with all modding, graphics card BIOS modding is not without risk, and meant for power users. It is fairly easy to recover from a broken flash, as all current desktop processors come with iGPUs that you can boot from, so you could flash a working BIOS onto the bricked graphics card. Just do remember to back-up your BIOS. You can use either of these tools to extract your current BIOS, or better yet, use GPU-Z for the task.

TechPowerUp editor and author of GPU-Z, W1zzard, will be answering all your questions in the comments section of this post. He has extensive experience with vBIOS internals from his worth with GPU-Z and he has also developed a parser that decodes, processes and organizes the ROM files in our TechPowerUp GPU BIOS Database."

Source: https://www.techpowerup.com/312631/...rossflash-enabled-by-groundbreaking-new-tools
 
Will this lead to us being able to enable virtualization? I have a 16 core with 64 gigs of ram. Banishing windows to a gaming vm is a wet dream of mine.
You can use any graphics card for a Windows VM from a Linux host. You do IOMMU passthrough and directly pass the PCIe slot containing the graphics card through to the Windows host. Your motherboard has to support IOMMU, it has to be enabled in the BIOS and you can run this shell script to get an output of your groups.

This article has nothing to do with virtualization. It's about modifying the reference BIOS voltage/clocks etc....

What you're not wanting to do, but is another use case of Nvidia GPUs is called vGPU. You can share your graphics card(s) resources split across multiple places (e.g. docker containers) and it's not supported on most consumer cards. I don't think this BIOS modification would allow that. I've never really looked into it.
 
You can use any graphics card for a Windows VM from a Linux host. You do IOMMU passthrough and directly pass the PCIe slot containing the graphics card through to the Windows host. Your motherboard has to support IOMMU, it has to be enabled in the BIOS and you can run this shell script to get an output of your groups.

This article has nothing to do with virtualization. It's about modifying the reference BIOS voltage/clocks etc....

What you're not wanting to do, but is another use case of Nvidia GPUs is called vGPU. You can share your graphics card(s) resources split across multiple places (e.g. docker containers) and it's not supported on most consumer cards. I don't think this BIOS modification would allow that. I've never really looked into it.
Does Nvidia allow passthrough with consumer cards/drivers?
 
Before anybody gets excited most of the stuff you would think you want to mod is still locked.
You can flash valid bios with another valid bio from a similar model.
But most importantly it will let you rename the hardware identifiers so you could change the relevant codes on say a 1060 so that the system identifies it and posts it as a 4090.
 
I wonder if this is why 4090 FEs are such a high price on eBay? "Regular" 4090s are far cheaper.
 
Does Nvidia allow passthrough with consumer cards/drivers?
Yes it works alright, lhr cards are a pita/dont work. Consumer amd cards have been fantastic.

Regarding vbios flashing this is good news. It allows for some fun mods and makes overclocking less dependent on software/os. For example you could flash a OC vbios and keep the overclock as you pass the GPU to different vms
 
You can use any graphics card for a Windows VM from a Linux host. You do IOMMU passthrough and directly pass the PCIe slot containing the graphics card through to the Windows host. Your motherboard has to support IOMMU, it has to be enabled in the BIOS and you can run this shell script to get an output of your groups.

This article has nothing to do with virtualization. It's about modifying the reference BIOS voltage/clocks etc....

What you're not wanting to do, but is another use case of Nvidia GPUs is called vGPU. You can share your graphics card(s) resources split across multiple places (e.g. docker containers) and it's not supported on most consumer cards. I don't think this BIOS modification would allow that. I've never really looked into it.

I am actually wanting to do vGPU. I want to share the gpu with a vm so that I don't have to use the IGPU for the host. Long ago you could hack the bios to allow it, but since they have been locked down it has been impossible.
 
I am actually wanting to do vGPU. I want to share the gpu with a vm so that I don't have to use the IGPU for the host. Long ago you could hack the bios to allow it, but since they have been locked down it has been impossible.
Yes, you're both right.

There's the VMware ESXi route where you virtualize the entire server (which could have the GPU in it) and share it out. That Dopamin3 method applies there. Pure hardware virtualization with VMware as the only software. I was able to do this back in 2021 with mining stuff (just for fun, I know it's stupid).

Sounds like equinox654 you want to run Windows or Linux and then VMware Workstation (or something) on top of the OS layer of Windows or Linux. That, I believe, is limited to only workstation-class cards, so this, indeed could be promising there!
 
1000W vBIOS for the 4090 incoming?
wolf-of-wall-street-rookie-numbers.gif
 
Can I unlock more simultaneous encoder streams or other features locked to quadro?
 
I am actually wanting to do vGPU. I want to share the gpu with a vm so that I don't have to use the IGPU for the host. Long ago you could hack the bios to allow it, but since they have been locked down it has been impossible.
You could hack it but it always ran poorly, there are software suites you can run that will subdivide your GPU down at a software level and you can then present that to your VM host console, and they work about as well as you can expect for that sort of thing.
But neither Nvidia nor AMD's drivers are particularly happy with it and you can get some weird interactions.
 
I kinda want to do a test and turn my 2080 into a 3 series card to see if dlss 3 works... lol.
 
I kinda want to do a test and turn my 2080 into a 3 series card to see if dlss 3 works... lol.
DLSS 3 works on your 2080, you just can't use frame gen. Frame gen is reliant on the optical flow accelerator on Lovelace, which you can't just add through a BIOS update. The OFA is a physical chip on the card.
 
Can I unlock more simultaneous encoder streams or other features locked to quadro?
By default now they do up to 5, you could remove the limit if you wanted to but I am not sure it would get the results you are looking for.
 
I know we have a lot of PC nerds here, need advice (not like it feels or in theory it should work fine thing) if I should flash my EVGA RTX 3070 Ti XC Ultra to EVGA RTX 3070 Ti FTW bios. Anyone has actually done this or did a similar thing?

Yes, BIOS flashing can brick your card if not done correctly. I've flashed motherboard bios several times already (if that experience does count). Never manually flashed nvidia gpu bios card before other than once on an old Tahiti HD7970 many years ago.

The XC ultra card has two PCIE power input while FTW has three. My assumption is that if I set the MSIAB to apply power limit during Windows startup, will this protect the card from overheating?

Reason for doing this: I want to adjust the voltage lower in MSIAB as the XC Ultra limits me to 0.82V. I assume FTW bios is more flexible?
 
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I know we have a lot of PC nerds here, need advice (not like it feels or in theory it should work fine thing) if I should flash my EVGA RTX 3070 Ti XC Ultra to EVGA RTX 3070 Ti FTW bios. Anyone has actually done this or did a similar thing?

Yes, BIOS flashing can brick your card if not done correctly. I've flashed motherboard bios several times already (if that experience does count). Never manually flashed nvidia gpu bios card before other than once on an old Tahiti HD7970 many years ago.

The XC ultra card has two PCIE power input while FTW has three. My assumption is that if I set the MSIAB to apply power limit during Windows startup, will this protect the card from overheating?

Reason for doing this: I want to adjust the voltage lower in MSIAB as the XC Ultra limits me to 0.82V. I assume FTW bios is more flexible?
I know with the EVGA 3090 they had some hardware in place that limited things so simply changing the bios out there between the FTW3 and the XOC was not enough, had to do with power balancing and pulling juice from the PCIe slot, but that was for ramping up power not tuning it down.
EVGA did some strange things with the 3000 series and their binning cards...
I am pretty sure 0.82v is the floor for a reason, the FTW bios may let you go higher but I am not sure about lower.
 
Trying to modify the EVGA 3070 Ti XC Ultra BIOS using NiBiTor 6.06. Just trying it out but no dice since this is program appears to be unsupported for a long time. Anyone here know a program to do ampere card bios editing? TIA.

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If you really really wanna give it a go...
Best of luck

https://github.com/notfromstatefarm/nvflashk
Thanks for the link. Seems like no mention about bios editing (esp the gpu voltage) other than flashing existing bios to another compatible one. There is a suggestion to recover bios if something goes wrong (maybe I'll consider FTW bios flasing) but first need to check with other if FTW bios can go below 0.82V. My EVGA 3060Ti can adjust to as low as 0.750V in MSIAB.
 
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