A new open-source tool, nv-uefi-unlocker, boots from a USB stick and removes the cap Nvidia places on tensor-unit rate in GeForce RTX 20, 30 and 40-series cards, on desktops and laptops, Tom's Hardware reports. According to the developer, their laptop RTX 4060 reached 65% higher FP16 math performance.
The tool runs at the firmware stage, before the operating system loads Nvidia's driver, so there is no need to flash the card's BIOS or modify the driver. It uses a community payload called V67 with read-back verification, getting Nvidia's signed Booter firmware to open the write lock on two speed-selector registers. Until now the hack worked mainly through manually installed Linux modules, with Windows support only experimental.
The unlock does not persist through power loss, so the tool has to run on every boot. The system must boot in UEFI mode with Secure Boot off or set to trust a self-signed file, so according to the project team it cannot work with games whose anti-cheat requires Secure Boot. The release ships no Nvidia firmware; a script downloads Nvidia's public driver packages and rebuilds the files locally. The report does not include a response from Nvidia.