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.”
No security is unbreakable. This will hopefully enable a lot of unlocking and safe performance boosts for artificially stunted cards.
HEH, this reminds me of the 70s Dynomutt cartoon series.
No this is not Nvidia signing broken. This does not allow loading unsigned firmware and have it work. What is broken is validation that the signed firmware is the correct firmware for the card. All the same generation of Nvidia cards use the same signing key.
Its really simple to miss that nouveau the open source driver on Linux and other non Windows and Mac platform before Nvidia introduced signing use to write their own Nvidia card firmware.
The BIOS signature checks is still in place that happen when the card attempts to start up the firmware. At max what this does is remove the firmware update tool checking if the firmware is correct and so letting the firmware update tool shove what ever into the firmware flash.
“I don’t believe this tool will allow you to flash uncertified/modified BIOSes yet, but I will check on that and work on it.”
nvflashk wrote this.
Sorry BIOS modding is not back. BIOS swapping were you can use a different vendors signed firmware is back.
Signing broken would be a big thing but that is not the case. Signing broken would allow nouveau developers back to writing their own Nvidia firmwares again and another set of cards claiming to be something completely different to what they really are.
Yes Nvidia does not on firmware start up check if the firmware is for the correct model card instead just checks that is valid checksum and signed with the right key and if those fail firmware is not going to work. Yes modify the firmware itself those are going to fail. This is the signature lock the bit that was not broken. The signature lock is way less restrictive than the firmware update tool lock that been bipassed.