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"The GPU maker seemed confident that its restrictions couldn’t be defeated, even claiming it wasn’t just a driver holding back performance. “It’s not just a dri

• serf 6y ago
  >Funny how it turned out to just be a driver thing. sort of makes one wonder how many whizz-bang hardware features get advertised that are little more than just software, but are oversold as unique physical engineering methods/techniques.
  • bitL 6y ago
    You meant NVidia Quadro/Titan workstation performance?
  • DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
    I understand that pretty much the only difference between $3000+ "professional" GPUs that get certified for AutoCAD and other workstation systems are identical to $1000 "gaming" GPUs, just with a different on-card BIOS/firmware and e-fuses. I remember ages ago that people were able to simply re-flash their ATI Radeons into FirePro cards and that unlocked higher performance in some applications. Same thing with Cisco switches for port-unlocks and Tesla cars (EAP and FSD are just software features, assuming you have HW2+, and rear heated seats are standard, just not activated unless you pay to enable it if you didn't get the cold-weather package when you ordered it).
    • taf2 6y ago
      sorta similar to cars that can get over the air updates and suddenly accelerate from 0 60 faster then before...
      • Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
        Yeah, little known fact. The Tesla Model 3 Performance and the Model 3 LR AWD have the exact same batteries and motors. There's literally nothing stopping Tesla from offering an even higher performance boost for LR AWD owners to grant the same 0-60 as the Performance model, but they don't because it would cannibalize Performance sales.
        • konjin 6y ago
          Download more ram, but real. What a world live in.
        • TylerE 6y ago
          I wouldn't say nothing. A higher power profile will cause more wear, leading to more warranty claims. TANSTAAFL.
          • Bancakes 6y ago
            That's okay, warranties exist for a reason.
          • Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
            The warranty is likely to expire before the higher wear actually starts leading to reliability issues. I'm also unsure how much it really makes a difference in an electric motor compared to a combustion engine. Unless you're going to the track (or significantly breaking speed limits), you're only putting extra wear on the motors for 2-4 seconds at a time, which is all it takes to get to your 40-70 mph target speed.
        • rasz 6y ago
          I present you with Flir 80×40 resolution E4, one setting away from full 320×240 E8 https://hackaday.com/2013/11/04/manufacturer-crippled-flir-e4-thermal-camera-hacked-to-perform-as-high-end-model/ https://hackaday.com/2013/11/04/manufacturer-crippled-flir-e... Oscilloscopes are another product notorious for shipping same hardware with different jumpers/variables in the firmware. https://tomverbeure.github.io/2020/06/27/In-the-Lab-Tektronix-TDS420A.html https://tomverbeure.github.io/2020/06/27/In-the-Lab-Tektroni... somewhat famous DS1052E 50 to 100MHz hack https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnhXfVYWYXE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnhXfVYWYXE DS2072A 70 to 300MHz https://hackaday.io/project/8115-rigol-ds2072a-upgrade-to-ds2302a https://hackaday.io/project/8115-rigol-ds2072a-upgrade-to-ds... MSO5000 70 to 350 MHz https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/hacking-the-rigol-mso5000-series-oscilloscopes/ https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/hacking-the-rigol-mso...
    • salawat 6y ago
      Keep in mind, Nvidia does have some genuinely good process mastery around handling encryption intended to keep users from utilizing hardware in ways they don't intend, and creating trusted computing platforms where safety critical systems are concerned. https://docs.nvidia.com/drive/drive_os_5.1.6.1L/nvvib_docs/index.html#page/DRIVE_OS_Linux_SDK_Development_Guide/Windows%20Systems/security_fskp.html https://docs.nvidia.com/drive/drive_os_5.1.6.1L/nvvib_docs/i... They've moved from keeping that sort of thing in EEPROM's to burnable fuses from what I understand, and I'm pretty sure what I'm aware of is pretty far behind state of the art. If they've managed to set up the key management as well as they have and keep things hush-hushed enough to keep the nouveau folks obstructed, this seems either like an uncharacteristically careless mistake, or some seriously well executed malicious compliance from somebody. Either way. I still find it irritating to the extreme that this type of thing only seems to happen to the detriment of users. Nvidia wins either way. Miners or gamers will buy out their cards.
      • caspper69 6y ago
        It is my understanding Nvidia allowed cryptominers to pull up semis and load them up with GPUs in exchange for about a billion dollars. My guess is this was accidentally on purpose (see also the recent shareholder lawsuit; Nvidia did win that one btw).
        • paulmd 6y ago
          > It is my understanding Nvidia allowed cryptominers to pull up semis and load them up with GPUs in exchange for about a billion dollars. Source? Never heard such a thing. Partners (MSI, ASUS, etc): absolutely. NVIDIA, I've never heard any evidence they sold directly to miners. > My guess is this was accidentally on purpose (see also the recent shareholder lawsuit; Nvidia did win that one btw). I think it's incredibly likely that we see this re-introduced on 3080 Ti or 3080 Super or whatever they call it which is about to be released, as well as with future generations of cards, which strongly argues against this being an "accidentally-on-purpose" thing. People love to make up conspiracies about NVIDIA but all it takes is someone building a beta driver from a feature branch based on an old build that didn't have the mining brake yet, it's quite probable that this is just an accident. But it's NVIDIA and they're the only company people love to hate more than Apple. People hate NVIDIA for releasing drivers that broke the mining brake, and they'll hate NVIDIA for reinstating the mining brake in the future. People get mad no matter what NVIDIA does.
    • kitsunesoba 6y ago
      > I understand that pretty much the only difference between $3000+ "professional" GPUs that get certified for AutoCAD and other workstation systems are identical to $1000 "gaming" GPUs, just with a different on-card BIOS/firmware and e-fuses. I remember ages ago that people were able to simply re-flash their ATI Radeons into FirePro cards and that unlocked higher performance in some applications. Yep. I have an old laptop with an Nvidia Quadro FX770M GPU that (hackintoshed) macOS sees as a Geforce 9600M GT and runs the included Geforce drivers quite happily on because the FX 770M so close kin with its consumer counterpart. In fact, in a twist of irony for years the supposedly-more-stable Quadro Windows drivers had a power state bug with this card that would cause the laptop to bluescreen if the GPU tried to ramp down to an idle state. The only solution was to prevent the GPU from idling or to run a different OS with more generic drivers.
    • hoppla 6y ago
      I’m not sure if I got tricked or not, it sounds ridiculous but apparently you have to pay extra to get heated backseats in Teslas. It’s a software thing, so it’s not like you need to install new seats. It works similar to miners - consume electricity and generate heat
      • francisduvivier 6y ago
        Who knows, maybe the seat "is" actually using mining to heat the seats. That would be quite the April fools joke.
        • TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
          Every resistive heating device, be it hot water system; space heater; kettle; oven; stove; heat lamp; etc, could just be a proof-of-work IoT device that generates (very little) income.
          • paulmd 6y ago
            If everything did that, the profit from doing it would be almost nothing, as difficulty increased. It would also be wildly more expensive than just a simple piece of nichrome wire, and you also now have to have a cellular module and a significant amount of continuous data traffic over it.
            • sneak 6y ago
              Yes, but people would make money in the gradient in between when nothing does it, and when everything does it.
    • jcpham2 6y ago
      Flashing Radeon 6950 cards with 6970 firmware was commonplace in the 2012 era
      • paulmd 6y ago
        That was before the era of VBIOS-signing. You straight-up can't boot any VBIOS image that's not signed anymore. It was also before the era when PROM fuses were used to permanently disable hardware at the factory. So like, nowadays when you do something like flash Vega 56 with Vega 64 firmware, or flash 5700 with 5700XT firmware, it doesn't actually turn on any cores anymore, they're permanently disabled now. What changes is things like memory speed (Vega) or power limits (5700) that are used to artificially gimp the cards and increase the performance difference beyond the actual core count, as just disabling cores often doesn't give enough difference anymore to be marketable (Vega especially was very bottlenecked by other parts of the card other than the cores).
      • rasz 6y ago
        2012 :-) how about 1999 3Dfx Velocity 1000 TMU unlock to Voodoo3 2000? https://www.anandtech.com/show/401/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/401/3 then there was 2003 Radeon 128MB 9500 to 9700 mod https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/turn-your-radeon-9500-into-radeon-9700-in-no-time.2808/ https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/turn-your-radeon-9500-int...
    • TylerE 6y ago
      That's not really true anymore. One of the big differences is RAM.. the A6000 has 48GB, a 3090 only 24 (And the 3080 12). Also, the RAM in the A6000 is ECC, and of course in the consumer cards it isn't. The A6000 also has ~10% more CUDA and Tensor cores. So, no, it isn't just a different firmware.
      • AlphaSite 6y ago
        10% cores sounds like softlocked or lasered off cores, rather than a physically different card (unless it’s a single gpu with 10% more cores than a dual GPU).
      • wtallis 6y ago
        The differences you're listing off are all matters of how the same underlying silicon is configured during the final stages of manufacturing. The workstation cards that support ECC RAM are using the same RAM chips as the consumer cards, and the memory controller is just configured to use a portion of the memory for ECC instead of as additional capacity. Having one, two or four DRAM dies per memory channel doesn't have any direct connection to whether it's a workstation/server GPU or a consumer GPU, and the consumer GPUs could just as easily be equipped with the same 48GB instead of 12GB or 24GB, if there were sufficient demand. When you look at the workstation cards that aren't top of the line, it's clear that they are nearly identical hardware to more mainstream consumer gaming GPUs, and the most significant hardware differences are usually smaller coolers on the workstation cards leading to lower clock speeds.
        • foota 6y ago
          Note: it's less about demand and more about price discrimination. Prosumers realize a higher benefit from their graphics cards and therefore have a higher willingness to pay, but they have higher RAM requirements than do others. This allows nvidia to segment their customer base by restricting the RAM on their gaming cards. If they didn't restrict the RAM on their gaming cards then they couldn't segment them. That doesn't mean there's not consumer demand for cards with higher RAM and marginally higher prices.
        • cma 6y ago
    • _trampeltier 6y ago
      Or Infrared cameras, they have the same image sensor, but cost much much more if you by one with a higher resolution (enabled) https://www.eevblog.com/forum/thermal-imaging/flir-e4-thermal-imaging-camera-teardown/ https://www.eevblog.com/forum/thermal-imaging/flir-e4-therma...
  • Impossible 6y ago
    Raytracing (RTX) is largely a software thing, although real hardware got added to improve ray-triangle and ray-AABB intersection performance.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • outworlder 6y ago
      > real hardware got added to improve ray-triangle and ray-AABB intersection performance. Isn't that the whole point? I was doing raytracing in the CPU in 2002 for a university project. Doesn't mean I could use it in a game.
    • Bayart 6y ago
      Everything is a software thing until it's accelerated by fixed function hardware like, you know, GPUs.
  • deaddodo 6y ago
    Reminds me of how every modern silicon has a "cutting edge, future technology" neural network built into. Then you notice the asterisk and realize it's just an accelerator (usually just a few instructions with some dedicated logic) and all the NN is still in software.
    • elcomet 6y ago
      And you notice the NN software doesn't even use the accelerator half of the time
  • Lorin 6y ago
    Oh, like RTX Voice - which 'requires' a 20-series GPU as a minimum requirement. Of course after editing the installer it works just fine on pretty much any GPU with cuda cores.
    • gorkish 6y ago
      I’m 100% sure RTX Voice could run happily on a cpu. Might be a fun target for one of the groups working on CPU back ends. It’s a really good NR though; I’ll give it that.
      • thesandlord 6y ago
        https://krisp.ai/ https://krisp.ai/ is basically that, but I've found RTX voice running on the GPU (1660ti) doesn't slow down my laptop while Krisp does a bit.
    • SilverRed 6y ago
      Marketing needs features to sell the higher end products on. Its easier to bullshit it and artificially limit than to come up with things that physically can only work on the high end sku.
    • fphhotchips 6y ago
      Did anyone ever really try to pitch that RTX Voice actually needed 20 series hardware to work as opposed to being something Nvidia were gating to try to sell more cards? I thought it was pretty transparent myself but maybe I just assumed.
  • anonymouse008 6y ago
    It’s hardware if it’s embedded with C! Never forget that - With love, USPTO
  • yellowapple 6y ago
    I'm pretty sure this is exactly the reason why Nvidia is entirely unwilling to cooperate on FOSS drivers, and why neither Nvidia nor AMD are willing to support FOSS device firmware. Which is a shame, because a GPU with FOSS firmware and comparable specs to the AMD/Nvidia hotness could use that software-driven flexibility to its advantage.
• ur-whale 6y ago
  > Funny how it turned out to just be a driver thing. Marketing dude lies through his teeth, news at 8.
• lupire 6y ago
  > "There is a secure handshake between the driver, the RTX 3060 silicon, and the BIOS" What does this person think "driver" means?
  • whalesalad 6y ago
    Right? That’s exactly what a driver is lol.
• viraptor 6y ago
  I don't think the comment was wrong. The driver is limiting the rate and the card validates you're using a signed driver. It's still the whole protection system, not just the driver. I.e. you couldn't update the driver yourself. That relevant "hack" seems to be the official beta/development driver without the restriction. (The other solutions don't modify anything)
  • optimiz3 6y ago
    How would the card validate you're using a signed driver? The card only sees what the driver sends it, so presumably the input could be spoofed. Also the card is not the root on the system's TPM. Usually it's the reverse - normally drivers validate that the card's firmware is signed. As an example, people would hack AMD Polaris card firmware memory timings for better mining performance. To do so you needed to disable the firmware signature check in the AMD driver, and to do this you needed to disable the driver signature check in Windows.
    • viraptor 6y ago
      I did rely on the assumption that some check exists. Of course it could be spoofed, but that could be hard enough to require reverse engineering the whole driver to figure out. Or the limit could rely on the identification done on the card itself and sent back. Either way - my point is, we don't have enough details to say the original description from nvidia was wrong.
      • salawat 6y ago
        The way it most likely works is there is a Falcon microprocessor with a cryptographic coprocessor built into everything post-Maxwell. Nvidia burns in keys during manufacture that the cryptographic coprocessor will use to calculate a signature of the firmware loaded in by the driver against. Since Nvidia/the manufacturer have that key, they can sign firmware that can access the most important, impactful API calls on the card. Likely, the hashrate limiter was intended to be implemented in the firmware. This is the same thing that has thwarted Nouveau all these years, and if you don't screw up your driver releaselike they did, it is quite effective. You could write your own firmware and load it onto the card, but you can't access the Hi-Security API's like power management, reclocking. There's no network connection, so if the OEM's key was ever leaked, there's nothing they could do prevent anyone from writing whatever firmware they wished. Just as they can't take back the driver they done goofed releasing.
• glsdfgkjsklfj 6y ago
  oh, i guarantee you it is not just a driver thing. In a few months, when games start to get awful performance on those cards, they will claim they can't fix it because it is in the silicon and can't be patched. But this is on everyone hoping graphic card driver authors would know anything about anything. heh.
• juskrey 6y ago
  Probably the same as many fancy copy protections turned off by patching single jnz/jz command
• ehsankia 6y ago
  Doesn't the post say that this partially removes the rate limit, still not 100%? So clearly something is still working no?