Hey this is my work, although the exploits etc aren't my ideas by any means.
This is just a way to wrap the whole thing up in a much less annoying package than having to patch the nvidia driver. I originally got inspired by the CMP90/50 windows unlocks that run as standalone UEFI modules that chainloads into the OS.
Yeah I hate the patched drivers too, I have a CMP170 as well I want to see if I can find a way to get fully working the same way without or minimal driver patching.
4000s is WIP, forks has already unlocked it but I'm doing some refactoring to better support different families and after that I'll port it over :-)
Can't wait, I have two 48G modded ada 4090's and 4 stock Blackwell 4000's (though I doubt those will be as easy). The 4090's alone would be an amazing thing to have boosted, they're my main workhorses and effectively any improvement there will immediately make my days more productive. If I can help out with testing, my email is in my profile.
Yes, but it's pinned to a driver version that I unfortunately can not use. That's precisely why I love your solution, it is the best way to do this.
I'm running 8 GPUs attached to a single CPU and that driver is a pretty essential part of getting this to work with P2P between as many cards as possible. The modded 4090 is a problem because the BAR1 it advertises (32G) is smaller than the VRAM so not all software is able to use it (you need two memory segments rather than a single 48G one to make this work). That driver is part of the solution for this problem.
FWIW the gpu unlock ada repo doesn't pin to a driver version, Codex for me just compiled it, and it works with my 615.xx driver even though the fork is for 610.x. I think the repo just uses the firmware from that version. My GPU is 4070ti super.
Ok, trying it. I'm using a pretty heavily modified 590.48.01 to be able to use those 48G 4090s, they work but they do require a bit of handholding. The main problem is the BAR1 just isn't large enough, it's capped at 32G.
Heh, got it working, thank you so much!!
Overall 30% reduction in wall clock time, that's pretty neat (and I'm still not running this at full power but 450 W is a bit much for that puny connector).
If they are forked from my repo whatever driver version they pin doesn't matter, the pin is just clanker stuff really.
What it's used for is just extracting the right booter firmware and loading it, but the whole booter part is reset before handing over to nvidia driver so the versions dont have to match at all.
I've looked a lot at that and it seems to be mostly related to packaging rather than performance, as far as I know there are no 'improved' 5090's for sale in any kind of volume, and the ones that they made that I know of (a 64 and a 96 G version) never made it to production for some reason. I'd love for that to happen though.
There is a lot of speculation about this but nobody seems to really have hard insight. As long as the hardware supports it it should in theory be possible to unlock it but like with those 48G 4090's that can lead to weird side effects. For instance, you would never know that these cards are modded until you start using p2p and then suddenly it all falls apart. The reason is that for p2p to work they map the memory space of one card into the memory space of another. But if the BAR1 is < than the total VRAM that trick will work only until you run past the TOP of that block and then you'll have a crash.
I suspect that modding a 5090 in such a way that you can sell it is a lot harder than doing the same with a 4090.
- you will need to run your card hotter than you might be comfortable with
- the real pay-off (on some cards, apparently, see downthread) requires increasing the maximum power to 450W
- This is well above what the stock cooler was designed for so a bit more cooling would help
What's nice is that you can stack this mod on top of (or rather, below of, this one loads first) the p2p mod that has been out for a while, they don't seem to interfere with each other.
It's quite nuanced. In a nutshell the unlock just flips the 2 bits that halves how often the core can issue the specific instructions Nvidia locks to full rate on the professional and datacenter cards.
Obviously doing more compute requires more power but what it does is shift the card down on the frequency curve to keep the wattage in check.
So you're right that at stock power limits it hits a cap where the full issuing rate isn't reached but it depends heavily on the exact workload how much juice is left.
The frequency curve also takes heat into account so in general you end up with a nice perf boost for a slightly hotter card.
I've been running this on my 2 3090s for a month now with no issues but they are also water cooled :-)
Ah, that's a twist I didn't see coming, all my GPUs are aircooled. I can see how with watercooling you'd be able to get more performance out of the GPU before hitting the limits.
There 3090 is from the era of overclocking, anything but the reference design should be fine even on air cooling (especially if you have a 3 connector model)
My EVGA came with stock firmware that started at a 420W and allowed up 500W, of course 500W did nothing for gaming
> - you will need to run your card hotter than you might be comfortable with
Can you explain this one? On my GPU I didn't have to change the power limit. Obviously the card might spend more time at max power usage, but it's still within the limit.
If you increase the power limit on the card you will be able to get much more mileage out of this modification. At 450W the difference is much, much larger but that is not something I'm comfortable with doing for longer runs. Note that the stock settings are already pretty extreme for that cooler, and that ambient temp and free airflow are going to be impacting the resulting GPU temp in a very direct way. I have my 3090's in an external box (with its own separate PCIe backplane) so they can talk p2p and have 'fresh air' rather than in the enclosure.
I put it together myself. It was a lot of work and I learned a lot of nasty lessons along the way. The short version of the recipe:
- get the largest PSU you can find (1500W at a minimum, more is better)
- get the ADT PLX Quad PCIe backplane. Run 4 thin (single slot) GPUs inside your main enclosure, stick the ADT interface board in between two of the thin boards (don't stack them close to each other or they won't be able to breathe).
- ensure you have as much or more RAM as you do VRAM
- Ensure your CPU has enough PCIe lanes to run at least five boards in x16 (four for the GPUs in the main enclosure, another for the PLX PCIe switch)
- In the BIOS set BAR1 to 'resizable' and > 4G decoding should be enabled.
- ditch the cables that come with the ADT board, they may work but there are much better ones out there and they're not expensive, this will save you days of troubleshooting
- Build your own enclosure rather than trying to adapt a standard one, it won't work anyway (the board pitch is wrong, as is the placement of the mounting holes).
- Put another four double or triple boards on the backplane.
- Add another 3x 140 mm fan to the front of the case so you get good airflow without the feeling of being next to a Harrier at take-off
- I used 3D printed parts to mount the PSU and the board as well as the fans (see below).
- Make sure the board is properly grounded to the enclosure
Yes, but you can get up to a 40-50% increase in some workloads even with the same power limit, and some cards have it locked anyway. I just felt like it was a litle misleading for you to mention the power in your original post, since the unlock works regardless of that.
Interesting, I have 7 3090's here of different plumage and they all require a power increase to get > 25% gain with this modification, would you mind sharing the type of card you have and how it is cooled?
Obviously, if there are 3090's out there that respond differently then I will be happy to retract that.
This is about the 30' series in principle, I don't have a 4070 here to test with (I do have a couple of modded 4090's) but I suspect that at 240W you are not getting the maximum out of that card. At the same time: that is probably pretty close to optimal in terms of tokens/W.
> Unfortunately for Nvidia the booter is vulnerable to a classic buffer overflow that writes straight into the stack which gives us the ability to execute code via Return Oriented Programming (ROP).
Uh, no. This headline is wrong. It's FP32 unlocked from being halved, not 16 bit ops. And to be clear, over the last week I've looked many places and I've not seen any reports of this unlock being applied to any 3xxx card except the 3090/3090ti series. Even if it might apply more generally in theory.
And also it does work on most 3000 series cards as they all run the same GA102 booter that's vulnerable :-)
There are some reports of cards with weird vbios layouts having issues but i'll try to get that fixed
Hey this is my work, although the exploits etc aren't my ideas by any means. This is just a way to wrap the whole thing up in a much less annoying package than having to patch the nvidia driver. I originally got inspired by the CMP90/50 windows unlocks that run as standalone UEFI modules that chainloads into the OS.
Happy to answer questions!
Thanks so much. 27b is a favourite model and last night my dev ran some benchmarks to achieve 133tks about 3.2x which changes the economics.
great to hear, which quant + KV quant + KV size are you on? is it llama.cpp?
Super well done, I wished all mods took your approach. Patched drivers are a nuisance, especially if you have more than one kind of card. Thank you.
edit: now do the 4090 ;)
Yeah I hate the patched drivers too, I have a CMP170 as well I want to see if I can find a way to get fully working the same way without or minimal driver patching.
4000s is WIP, forks has already unlocked it but I'm doing some refactoring to better support different families and after that I'll port it over :-)
Can't wait, I have two 48G modded ada 4090's and 4 stock Blackwell 4000's (though I doubt those will be as easy). The 4090's alone would be an amazing thing to have boosted, they're my main workhorses and effectively any improvement there will immediately make my days more productive. If I can help out with testing, my email is in my profile.
Blackwell and hopper have a whole new boot process so those are unlikely to fall over anytime soon from what I've seen.
If you can't wait for 4090 someone has a fork with a seemingly working unlock :D
Yes, but it's pinned to a driver version that I unfortunately can not use. That's precisely why I love your solution, it is the best way to do this.
I'm running 8 GPUs attached to a single CPU and that driver is a pretty essential part of getting this to work with P2P between as many cards as possible. The modded 4090 is a problem because the BAR1 it advertises (32G) is smaller than the VRAM so not all software is able to use it (you need two memory segments rather than a single 48G one to make this work). That driver is part of the solution for this problem.
FWIW the gpu unlock ada repo doesn't pin to a driver version, Codex for me just compiled it, and it works with my 615.xx driver even though the fork is for 610.x. I think the repo just uses the firmware from that version. My GPU is 4070ti super.
Ok, trying it. I'm using a pretty heavily modified 590.48.01 to be able to use those 48G 4090s, they work but they do require a bit of handholding. The main problem is the BAR1 just isn't large enough, it's capped at 32G.
Heh, got it working, thank you so much!!
Overall 30% reduction in wall clock time, that's pretty neat (and I'm still not running this at full power but 450 W is a bit much for that puny connector).
If they are forked from my repo whatever driver version they pin doesn't matter, the pin is just clanker stuff really. What it's used for is just extracting the right booter firmware and loading it, but the whole booter part is reset before handing over to nvidia driver so the versions dont have to match at all.
Apparently they were, it compiles and installs but I don't see any improvement just yet. I'll keep plugging away at it.
What about the 5090?
Hopper and blackwell have a very different security chain so those are out of scope for this approach at least.
But I would suspect China has figured something out given the reports of them buying 5090s in droves and seemingly modifying them.
I've looked a lot at that and it seems to be mostly related to packaging rather than performance, as far as I know there are no 'improved' 5090's for sale in any kind of volume, and the ones that they made that I know of (a 64 and a 96 G version) never made it to production for some reason. I'd love for that to happen though.
Maybe they got hold of the vbios for those higher vram versions similar to the 48gb 4090s?
There is a lot of speculation about this but nobody seems to really have hard insight. As long as the hardware supports it it should in theory be possible to unlock it but like with those 48G 4090's that can lead to weird side effects. For instance, you would never know that these cards are modded until you start using p2p and then suddenly it all falls apart. The reason is that for p2p to work they map the memory space of one card into the memory space of another. But if the BAR1 is < than the total VRAM that trick will work only until you run past the TOP of that block and then you'll have a crash.
I suspect that modding a 5090 in such a way that you can sell it is a lot harder than doing the same with a 4090.
This one is real, but there are some caveats:
- you will need to run your card hotter than you might be comfortable with
- the real pay-off (on some cards, apparently, see downthread) requires increasing the maximum power to 450W
- This is well above what the stock cooler was designed for so a bit more cooling would help
What's nice is that you can stack this mod on top of (or rather, below of, this one loads first) the p2p mod that has been out for a while, they don't seem to interfere with each other.
It's quite nuanced. In a nutshell the unlock just flips the 2 bits that halves how often the core can issue the specific instructions Nvidia locks to full rate on the professional and datacenter cards.
Obviously doing more compute requires more power but what it does is shift the card down on the frequency curve to keep the wattage in check. So you're right that at stock power limits it hits a cap where the full issuing rate isn't reached but it depends heavily on the exact workload how much juice is left.
The frequency curve also takes heat into account so in general you end up with a nice perf boost for a slightly hotter card.
I've been running this on my 2 3090s for a month now with no issues but they are also water cooled :-)
Ah, that's a twist I didn't see coming, all my GPUs are aircooled. I can see how with watercooling you'd be able to get more performance out of the GPU before hitting the limits.
There 3090 is from the era of overclocking, anything but the reference design should be fine even on air cooling (especially if you have a 3 connector model)
My EVGA came with stock firmware that started at a 420W and allowed up 500W, of course 500W did nothing for gaming
> - you will need to run your card hotter than you might be comfortable with
Can you explain this one? On my GPU I didn't have to change the power limit. Obviously the card might spend more time at max power usage, but it's still within the limit.
If you increase the power limit on the card you will be able to get much more mileage out of this modification. At 450W the difference is much, much larger but that is not something I'm comfortable with doing for longer runs. Note that the stock settings are already pretty extreme for that cooler, and that ambient temp and free airflow are going to be impacting the resulting GPU temp in a very direct way. I have my 3090's in an external box (with its own separate PCIe backplane) so they can talk p2p and have 'fresh air' rather than in the enclosure.
Is your external box something you put together or is it a product you purchased?
I put it together myself. It was a lot of work and I learned a lot of nasty lessons along the way. The short version of the recipe:
- get the largest PSU you can find (1500W at a minimum, more is better)
- get the ADT PLX Quad PCIe backplane. Run 4 thin (single slot) GPUs inside your main enclosure, stick the ADT interface board in between two of the thin boards (don't stack them close to each other or they won't be able to breathe).
- ensure you have as much or more RAM as you do VRAM
- Ensure your CPU has enough PCIe lanes to run at least five boards in x16 (four for the GPUs in the main enclosure, another for the PLX PCIe switch)
- In the BIOS set BAR1 to 'resizable' and > 4G decoding should be enabled.
- ditch the cables that come with the ADT board, they may work but there are much better ones out there and they're not expensive, this will save you days of troubleshooting
- Build your own enclosure rather than trying to adapt a standard one, it won't work anyway (the board pitch is wrong, as is the placement of the mounting holes).
- Put another four double or triple boards on the backplane.
- Add another 3x 140 mm fan to the front of the case so you get good airflow without the feeling of being next to a Harrier at take-off
- I used 3D printed parts to mount the PSU and the board as well as the fans (see below).
- Make sure the board is properly grounded to the enclosure
- If you're running 3090's or other cards that are P2P capable that were hobbled by NV then look at this https://github.com/aikitoria/open-gpu-kernel-modules driver module.
- Power on the ADT board, wait three seconds then power on the main machine. Enjoy your VRAM :)
If you have more questions please email me and I'll be happy to help out.
Yes, but you can get up to a 40-50% increase in some workloads even with the same power limit, and some cards have it locked anyway. I just felt like it was a litle misleading for you to mention the power in your original post, since the unlock works regardless of that.
Interesting, I have 7 3090's here of different plumage and they all require a power increase to get > 25% gain with this modification, would you mind sharing the type of card you have and how it is cooled?
Obviously, if there are 3090's out there that respond differently then I will be happy to retract that.
These number claim 240W locked power draw on 4070:
https://github.com/JustAResearcher/gpu-unlock-ada/releases/t...
This is about the 30' series in principle, I don't have a 4070 here to test with (I do have a couple of modded 4090's) but I suspect that at 240W you are not getting the maximum out of that card. At the same time: that is probably pretty close to optimal in terms of tokens/W.
I've tested myself and the results are legit, this is incredible, even if a little risky (it relies on exploiting firmware): https://github.com/Zagitta/gpu-unlock/blob/main/docs/How%20A...
> Unfortunately for Nvidia the booter is vulnerable to a classic buffer overflow that writes straight into the stack which gives us the ability to execute code via Return Oriented Programming (ROP).
Repo for RTX 4090 and 4070 Ti Super: https://github.com/JustAResearcher/gpu-unlock-ada
Those work but don't play nice with other such mods, in contrast to TFA. They require a pinned version of the driver.
Really interesting.
On the other hand, this only applies to a limited set of workloads (training is often memory bandwidth bound for example).
I also wonder how this affects power consumption.
Training is compute bound.
If its memory bandwidth bound you need to raise your batch sizes to leverage more parallelism.
It's also useful for prefill in inference, VLLM sees up to 30% boost depending on the exact kernels and prefill size
cool
Uh, no. This headline is wrong. It's FP32 unlocked from being halved, not 16 bit ops. And to be clear, over the last week I've looked many places and I've not seen any reports of this unlock being applied to any 3xxx card except the 3090/3090ti series. Even if it might apply more generally in theory.
It's the FP/BF16 FMA to FP32 instructions.
And also it does work on most 3000 series cards as they all run the same GA102 booter that's vulnerable :-) There are some reports of cards with weird vbios layouts having issues but i'll try to get that fixed
The repo has fp16 numbers.
Also this one for 4070s shows that its for fp8 as well:
https://github.com/JustAResearcher/gpu-unlock-ada/releases/t...
it's the widening (for example: fp16 * fp16 = fp32) instructions, which are useful on some loads.
The tensor core accumulator is default fp32 on all NVIDIA cards, even for nvfp4 formats, so it would only make sense to refer to the operand dtypes.
The repo has a lot of reports of people applying it to other 3xxx card, see https://github.com/Zagitta/gpu-unlock/issues
There's at least 3080 Ti, 3070 Ti, 3070, 3060