Nvidia RTX 20, 30, and 40-series GPUs hacked to remove a half-speed AI throttle

Modders have discovered a way to remove imposed half-speed AI performance limits on Nvidia RTX 20, 30, and 40-series GPUs with a firmware exploit, VideoCardz reports. Without the limitation, the RTX 4090 can achieve double its peak tensor rate, and matrix math can improve by up to 80% for the RTX 3090 Ti, with gains on other cards varying. Real workloads gain significantly less than the RTX 4090’s doubled peak would imply, and chatbot token speeds remain about the same, as that performance is dependent on memory bandwidth.

For all impacted GeForce generations, Nvidia imposed a limit that, per its own published specs, runs FP32-accumulate math at half each card’s FP16-accumulate rate. That does not apply to its Turing and Ampere pro cards. The unlock returns native matrix-math throughput to owners of the cards, which can speed up prompt processing and image generation.

Three separate projects offer generation unlocks, each with its own unofficial Linux module, while experimental Windows builds …