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Resistor hack turns a Nvidia GTX690 into a Quadro K5000 or Tesla K10

405 points by Breakthrough 14y ago

doctorpangloss 14y ago
Wonderful! While I hesitate to break a $1,100 video card, a little hack generates so much value. What other awesome hardware hacks radically improve the value of your equipment, be it electronic / analog? We're talking about the 100%+ value improvements here.
nwmcsween 14y ago
This is why you don't piss off your userbase. Also this should be mirrored as this will be taken down fast.
parad0x1 14y ago
This is simply amazing! And since it's an actual hardware mod, Nvidia can't fix this right? On the other hand, those cruel corporate brats and their money making schemes.
sargun 14y ago
I don't entirely know how I feel about this hack. I feel like this is really similar to unlocking the "Professional" version of a piece of software with a serial key generator. Although, I understand hardware is dramatically different than software, it's using the same principal -- the same reusable bits to assemble many different products, and then just using tools to mask features unless a user pays for them. Then again, why should software be any different? Why shouldn't we be able to unlock the hidden features of our software with hex editors, and serial key generators? What do you guys think?
- fosk 14y ago
  I think that if I own a piece of hardware, I am the sole owner of every single chip and screw on it, including every hardware hack that it may have. On the other side, usually you don't own the software but only a license that grants you permission to use it.
  - latimer 14y ago
    This is a good point. When you buy hardware, you are now the owner of it so they shouldn't be able to stop you from doing it, just like once you buy a phone you should be able to unlock it or install whatever software you want on it.
    - chii 14y ago
      > just like once you buy a phone you should be able to unlock it or install whatever software you want on it. unless, of course you signed an agreement to not do that, in exchange for a cheaper price on the phone and some period of contract with a particular carrier...
      - cma 14y ago
        Which is handled by contract law; it isn't clear why companies that want to do that should get a subsidy via criminal law DMCA penalties. Just like it isn't clear why white-only diners should have received free services from government thugs to throw out African American "trespassers".
    - zem 14y ago
      yes, precisely.
  - throwaway0000 14y ago
    On the contrary, most individuals purchase a tangible copy of software in a retail store without any licensing terms attached at the time of purchase. (Granted: App Stores are changing this) Shrink-wrap licenses attempt to end-run this by making the product unusable unless the user agrees to forfeit his existing property rights. The legality of these sorts of after-the-fact licenses on a traditional retail purchase is very unclear. It's for this reason that many do not object to cracking or modifying software which they have purchased. Indeed, there's no definitive argument that one shouldn't.
    - wildgift 14y ago
- parad0x1 14y ago
  You're already paying an over-inflated price, and they want you to pay an even greater inflated price. It's the manufacturer's and software developers decision to bundle another product within each other. They are already charging too much for this GPU, and they try to squeeze the most profit they can from every chip.
- seany 14y ago
  That hardware is hardware. if I buy hardware from you can can do what ever I want with it.
- drucken 14y ago
  Well, the original reason given by the modder is to unluck the same functionality available under one OS as in another - that is all.
- kyrra 14y ago
  This kind if stuff has been going on for a long time. I remember one of the Nvidia cards from 8 years ago could unlock extra lanes in the GPU just With a firmware flash. Intel had been using the same dye for multiple CPU SKUs for a long time now. Though people have figured out how to move between the various skus with ease. The one thing to keep in mind with hardware like this is that the different price points and SKUs are more than just making money. A lot of the time the SKU a card or chip is set at has to do with the yield quality of the pieces as they are manufactured. It's amazing to realize that when a new line of some cutting-edge tech comes around, they are going to have a 50% or less yield rate on their products. Sometimes they can use lower priced SKUs and take features away as the components will operate better without those features.
  - skyebook 14y ago
    There were unlocked lanes as well as the ability to use Quadro firmware with 8800GTS cards (which offered improved IQ in apps like Autodesk 3ds). As you allude to though, I'm pretty sure that the professional workstation cards are of a better binning.
- chao- 14y ago
  It feels similar to unlocking software because despite the different legal structure (ownership vs. license), the source of the difference similar, as you point out: You have been given a purposefully broken (i.e. effort was expended to reduce its usefulness) product. One would be tempted to make the argument of costing the company sale of an otherwise higher priced product, the method of fixing this would involve having entirely separate design and/or fabrication for the two tiers of components. This is far costlier than the price gap afforded to a handful of technical and risk-taking customers. Unless the ease of the transition is reduced to "Flip the big red switch from 'Fast' to 'Faster'!" then this sort of missed sale amounts to a rounding error for Nvidia, and certainly does not even match the cost that would be necessary to protect against it.
- eupharis 14y ago
  Sargun, your point was, I think, why is it that we treat software modding differently than we treat hardware modding? The chorus of "The hardware is hardware, and we can do whatever we want!" misses the point. It is a good point sargun. One I wish I had an answer for. Perhaps one explanation lies in the fact that some level of risk and skill and ingenuity and research is required to actually mod hardware. So we feel like the hardware modders deserve the fruits. But at we feel like the software "modders" don't, because most of them are thoughtlessly running some riskless script devised by someone else. I am not saying this should be our attitude. I am just saying I too have the knee-jerk reaction "the hardware is the hardware" but am far less certain when it comes to software. And I don't really understand why.
  - ISL 14y ago
    One possible future: Bits exist physically on my hardware. I get to twiddle them however I want. Furthermore, I can speak freely about having done so. This reality is at least partly responsible for the emergence of software as a service. Can't crack what you don't have.
    - cookiecaper 14y ago
      Rosetta Stone is a great example of this. After years of heavy piracy and failed client-side protections, their solution was to make the program web and subscription based. While rips of services like this are still possible, they're much more effort than cracking a client-side application.
  - cookiecaper 14y ago
    It's about the volatility and potential danger to copyright holders. If something requires a hardware hack, it's always going to take that much effort to apply. There's no easy way to instantaneously apply that hack to millions of peoples' hardware with minimal human effort. With a software hack, it's much more fearful because once it gets packaged as a crack, it's four clicks to a perceived infringement on the copyright holder's rights. A barrier to entry this low makes software mods much more frightful to rightsholders. Though the grandparent is right that these are similar practices in principle, people react differently because one is perceived as a widespread threat to the traditional mechanism of creative livelihood and the other is perceived as an advanced hack that will be done only be a couple of tinkerers. Most people are happy to provide encouragement and information to the latter group, but are more worried about the first group, as most software companies depend heavily on copyright law for their business model.
- danilocampos 14y ago
  It's not about principles, it's about economics. This is a matter of price discrimination. Nvidia wants to be sure they have a chance to sell their gear to every single person who has money to spend on graphics cards at a range of price points. Consumers have smaller wallets than professionals, but both have similar needs. So the company performs a "hack" that allows them to extract maximum revenues from each segment. Let's take this to an absurd extreme. Sennheiser did this by crippling their low-end headphones with a piece of foam to limit audio quality. Savvy audiophiles simply popped open the cans and removed the foam. No quibble with that, right? For me, companies have every right to practice price discrimination by fiddling with their hardware. And I think consumers have every right to mod that hardware. A few tinkerers are unlikely to break a meticulous price discrimination model like Nvidia's, and I think it's probably a net win for the company to have a chunk of their userbase who love them so much all they want to do is tinker in this way.
  - GhotiFish 14y ago
    Yes. That's a wonderful rhetoric, but really what it's saying is that the only people who don't deserve being screwed are the people that make it a hobby to tinker. There's many other areas of life to specialize in, not just technology/engineering side of things. I think general fair play trumps an incentive to learn and hack.
    - danilocampos 14y ago
      What makes price discrimination unfair? Nvidia needs to recover costs and earn a profit. They do so by segmenting the market. That they are able to do so in this way suggests that no one else is able to perform the R&D necessary to sell these tools at a lower cost. Who's getting screwed? The gamers who lose out on pro features many don't even need?
      - GhotiFish 14y ago
        or the pros getting massively overcharged because culture accepts the notion of sinking tens of thousands of dollars on the equipment of ones profession. The answer is both.
- TeMPOraL 14y ago
  I see it this way: were they giving the cards for free, they wouldn't ever disable features to create different models. In this magic world everyone would get to use the 100% of what the most current technology can do. The only reason they limit their cards is to extract more money out of the economic system. It feels wrong to us because brains don't reason via market economics. You can feel the waste in this solution, but it's the inefficiency inherent in the market economy. With SaaS it sometimes feels kind of different probably because we really do see it as a service (as it states in the name, btw.). and feel that the company offering us the service deserves more compensation for more things they do for us.
  - chii 14y ago
    > it's the inefficiency inherent in the market economy. i think this inefficiency exists because there is no perfect competition (i.e., anyone can start a semi-conductors company and compete in the market). We should push for a future where there _is_ perfect competition, and this problem will resolve itself. For example, 3D printing is a viable method of reaching such a future, if the printing tech keeps increasing in fidelity and durability etc.
leoh 14y ago
How do people find hacks like this? Looking at the board, that resistor is one among tons of components.
- ajross 14y ago
  Mostly like inside or semi-inside info. Obviously anyone with a schematic and datasheet at any of the dozens of OEMs will be able to figure this out. But even without docs there were probably bunches of reference boards shipped out to integrators. It's not hard to visually diff a "Quadro" from a "Tesla" version of the same board. What I'm more surprised by is the fact that this was done by external resistors at all. Almost all chip configuration like this these days is done with on-die fuses that can't be hacked.
- malloc2x 14y ago
  If you read some of the comments, essentially: a) looking for resistors that could be placed in multiple positions on the board and b) following the traces from the resistors: going to GPU? probably not what you want. Going to PCIE interface? Probably correct.
- memset 14y ago
  He actually describes it in the thread, a little farther down: "No, no schematic, what I did was look for resistors that looked like they had an alternative position, have a look at the photos and you will see what I mean. Any that I suspected of being a strap I used a meter to check if the resistor was connected to ground of 3.3V directly, and looked where the general traces were going in the area. If they went towards the GPU and connected to one of the rails it was a pretty good bet that it was a hard strap." http://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/hacking-nvidia-cards-into-their-professional-counterparts/msg203225/?PHPSESSID=f88387c520550af1e0508d8687b41928#msg203225 http://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/hacking-nvidia-cards-i...
  - pdmccormick 14y ago
    I once saw a networking IC that had a key strap-in pin multiplexed with an indicator LED, so if you wanted to change the brightness of the LED by varying the resistor value, watch out because you'll change the device behaviour! Good times...
eksith 14y ago
So this is basically a change of the PCI device ID. The capabilities are essentially the same; he just changed the device signature. A cool hack nonetheless. Edit: After looking at the screenshots closer, that seems to be the case. The device ID 0x11BA becomes 0x118F. Vendor ID remains 0x10DE on both. Memory, CPU and other important stuff are basically the same. Very cool!
- n3rdy 14y ago
  Maybe the configuration is a little different too. If the professional counterpart is actually worse for gaming, perhaps its because the resources are allocated to supporting multiple displays instead? In that case, is it reasonable to consider this crippling the device?
  - eksith 14y ago
    Professional vid cards are usually about multiple displays so saying that's crippling might be a bit harsh IMO; I'd say it's "differently allocating" resources. Is it worse for gaming only because of multiple displays (I.E. actual difference in architecture) or is it different in how the funcionality is offloaded by the software based on the device ID? Until there are benchmarks of an actual game played being played before and after, it would be pretty hard to tell.
  - makomk 14y ago
    The professional versions of NVidia cards generally tend to be more conservatively clocked than the gaming ones. Obviously that affects performance.
BoyWizard 14y ago
You'll find that adding the resistor changes the ID the card sends to the drivers, and that there is other differences in the hardware (so it doesn't change the 'model' of the card). It just so happens that it enables 3 monitors in Linux (this is already enabled in Windows).
parad0x1 14y ago
Entire post mirrored here: http://imgur.com/ZJt0VmT http://imgur.com/ZJt0VmT Save it as well.
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  Ow, my eyes. Between the microscopic font and jpeg artifacts. HTML source of the print friendly version: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/5193769 https://gist.github.com/anonymous/5193769 Or less artifacty screenshot: http://i4.minus.com/itHdo0GR7zXw1.png http://i4.minus.com/itHdo0GR7zXw1.png (Sorry to steal any thunder!) Not affiliated, but minus.com doesn't compress high-res PNGs into JPEGs like imgur does (it's only at a certain size that imgur does it, but it's annoying for screenshot threads, or in this case).
  - ars 14y ago
    Here is an optimized version of that image: http://i4.minus.com/ivpBgQ8dNf5Ge.png http://i4.minus.com/ivpBgQ8dNf5Ge.png (smaller filesize, loads quicker). Why did you save the image with transparency?
    - drivebyacct2 14y ago
      Because that's what scrot did?
jsumrall 14y ago
He's changing the resistors such that the bits which specify the identity of the board to the system now identify as something else? So if in fact there was some difference in the board design or chip design, then it could cause problems where unexpected faults occur. It's like saying you are capable of doing X, Y, Z, but really you can only handle X and Y situations. When someone asks you to do Z, you're screwed. But I don't know enough about Nvidia GPU hardware design, and I'm sure he wouldn't be publishing this hack if it didn't work well.
tedchs 14y ago
It's possible Nvidia manufactures the higher-end cards and then, if they fail the high-end testing but pass low-end testing, are marked as the lower-end card. There is precedent for this in many areas of computer hardware (CPU, RAM, hard drives). I would be wary of undoing this and expecting any level of reliability.
- hfsktr 14y ago
  That is a good point. Something I really wouldn't have even thought of before even though I knew about the hard drives part. In the post he says: "the GTX 690 and the Quadro K5000 (same GPU) and, get this... the K5000 is only single GPU and clocked some 25-30% slower then the gaming card, what a joke" so wouldn't it be downgrading the card to make it usable on linux? maybe not idk much about linux, drivers, hardware etc.
  - GhotiFish 14y ago
    no, he's only altering how the drivers perceive the card. Frankly, throwing in resistors to modify how it get's identified by the computer is really a hardware hack for a software problem. The drivers are stupid, and they're deliberately choosing to not use card features.
    - colechristensen 14y ago
      When you buy a high end card, you're buying the development time required to enable advanced features, you are not buying hardware; the silicon simply doesn't cost that much to produce. Most people do not want or need these advanced features, nor do they want to pay for them. The alternative environment has everyone paying $2000 for the same card and much fewer sales vs. premium users paying for premium features, and everyone else getting what they need at a much lower cost.
      - makomk 14y ago
        They're not just spending the development time on advanced features. NVidia appear to have intentionally crippled stuff like data transfer speeds to and from the GPU on their consumer models (but only for OpenGL/OpenCL and DirectCompute - you still get full speed when doing the exact same thing through DirectX) on the basis that it mostly only screws professional users.
memset 14y ago
The corresponding reddit thread is quite insightful: "It is far cheaper to make one very good chip for the highest market, and modify it slightly for lower end markets... Now, this is the part you hate: this is the only viable alternative. There's no point demanding different designs for different market segments as that would significantly increase the cost you, the consumer, pays. You can demand chips be sold at lowest prices without being fused down, but then the company eats its own market, becomes unprofitable, and goes out of business at worst - or, at best, doesn't make enough money to fund further r&d as much as they want, which again hurts you, the consumer." http://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1aj3n3/not_cool_nvidia/ http://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1aj3n3/not_coo...
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  Exactly, binning is good for the business AND for the consumer.
  - wtallis 14y ago
    When "binning" refers to the practice of putting premium prices on parts that test as being capable of operating at higher clock speeds or lower voltages, that's good for the consumer. When it refers to die harvesting - selling the chip with a defective section disabled - that's also good for the consumer. When it refers to crippling a chip that has already passed QA, it's a symptom of insufficient competitive pressure. The best example of this is when Intel offered a $50 software upgrade that would enable HyperThreading and more CPU cache. What NVidia is doing here probably isn't as bad - the premium associated with Tesla and Quadro parts goes toward driver features and QA that is irrelevant to the consumer market.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - scotty79 14y ago
      > it's a symptom of insufficient competitive pressure Exactly. That's as if fast food chain just before serving food to customer added ingredient that would made food taste worse (and or be less healthy) in order to be able to sell you same food without this ingredient at premium price. We don't see such behavior because in fast food industry we have heavy competition. Not so much in GPU market where two companies have most of the market and entry barriers are high.
asveikau 14y ago
Wouldn't it be easier (and less risky to your hardware) to make the kernel lie about the device ID? Or modify the nvidia kernel blob to compare against another ID?
- wonginator1221 14y ago
  I suspect it might be possible by modifying the device field in the pci_dev struct [1] in include/linux/pci.h when the device is initialized. [1] http://www.makelinux.net/ldd3/chp-14-sect-6 http://www.makelinux.net/ldd3/chp-14-sect-6
- wladimir 14y ago
  I'm sure they tried that. It is likely that the driver uses another "proprietary" way to read the ID as well and uses that as definitive answer. Having said that, distinguishing in software would mean that open source drivers such as Nouveau won't see any difference between the cards and can advertise all the features always.
ohazi 14y ago
Keep in mind that one of the finer points of making money in the semiconductor industry is yield management, especially when you're cutting larger dies. These days you don't just toss a chip when it fails a test - you design the tests to exercise different physical regions of the chip to identify the location of a defect. You also design the chip in a way that allows you to power down different regions and behave like a lower priced part. So a defective quad-core CPU might be sold as a dual-core part, or as a variant with a smaller cache. You have slightly finer grain control on a GPU, and very fine grain control on RAM or flash.
habosa 14y ago
This was compared to software that ships with all the features but requires a serial number to unlock the good ones. However I think this is different, and I think modifying hardware in this way is considerably more moral than using keygens to unlock software. It's hard to exactly state why I feel that this hardware mod is entirely moral behavior while software piracy is not but it's hard to put my finger on the right words. I think it's possibly something to do with Locke's notion of property rights and how one has an ownership claim to that which he created by his own labor. Am I the only one that feels this way? Sorry to ramble.
- damian2000 14y ago
  Agreed - you've spent your dollars on an actual physical device. Then find out you've paid for the same components as a professional model, but can't use it. An article here on Wired is on the same subject ... http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/03/you-dont-own-your-cellphones-or-your-cars http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/03/you-dont-own-your-cellp...
- Amadou 14y ago
  If this hack well and truly only modifies the PCI ID, then it follows that all of the performance difference is in the drivers - maybe with different firmware downloads on initialization, or maybe just the API exposed to applications. How would you feel about a binary patch that modified the driver to treat a card with the low-end PCI ID as if it were a high-end card?
  - habosa 14y ago
    I think although the effect is the same, it's not as justified. For one, you can distribute a patch to people who do not have to do any "labor" to get the same effect as the hardware mod. You can't distribute a hardware mod to others. Also, with software I feel there is an implicit trust agreement. Photoshop is just a different series of 1s and 0s than GIMP and both are just a different sequence of 1s and 0s than what exists on the empty, fragmented parts of your hard drive. However as a society we have agreed to pay for our copy of these binary sequences and this is the entire software market. We've also, mostly, agreed not to give the software we buy away to everyone else just because it's technologically possible. However I don't think the same social contract exists for hardware. It might be part of the hacker spirit but hardware modifications are encouraged and often celebrated. People who make their BMWs drive faster than they should or make Blu Ray lasers into lightsabers are applauded in a much different way than software pirates. Again, I can't really explain the cultural distinction but I'm very aware of its existence and that's why I can't see any objection to this Nvidia hack.
n3rdy 14y ago
For the past few months my GeForce 450 drivers have been acting up, and my computer was actually unusable until I disabled just about all hardware accelleration for the card. Is it possible that the new drivers for this card are so unstable just because nVidia is trying to thwart this type of hack? If that's the case, totally unacceptable to cripple my machine just because they want to prevent other people from altering their cards (which I will immediately begin to look into how to do myself now).
- eksith 14y ago
  That's a very bold assertion. I don't think they would push a driver out that recklessly just to stop one hardware hack. Besides, this was posted within a few days of him posting on the nVidia forums and you said yourself, the issues you had with the card are a few months in. Even if they knew about it before hand, it's not like a critical vulnerability or something; just an interesting modification to hardware (rarely how intrusions happen) that very few people know to implement correctly and fewer still who would want to do to their cards.
  - n3rdy 14y ago
    After reading a little more its clear that my original post was incorrect. Even the original tone of "crippling" hardware seems a little far fetched to me now, it seems like these cards are just optimized differently for specific tasks (gaming, or workstation). Still would be nice if they could get their drivers working better under windows 7.
hkmurakami 14y ago
>The tight asses have decided that if you want this feature under Linux you have to get a Quadro which has Mosaic support :palm:. So naturally I decided to look at how mod the card... I just absolutely loved reading this line. I had been away from 'hacker culture' for nearly two decades (probably ever since I became serious about my studies back in middle school and I stopped 'having fun' with my studies and interests) and finally seem to be growing back into the mindset. This kind of tinkering, exploring attitude is so wonderful, even just as an observer to this story it makes me feel like I'm regaining my childhood innocence again.
- Orva 14y ago
  This made me smile. Also reminded me of http://prog21.dadgum.com/169.html http://prog21.dadgum.com/169.html
syassami 14y ago
Kind of reminds me back in the day where you could flash your Ati X800 card (12 pipelines) to upgrade it to 16 pipelines of the X800 XT model. (http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/overclocking/vidcard/100 http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/overclocking/vidcard/100). This decision corresponds with the quote in the top comment."It is far cheaper to make one very good chip for the highest market, and modify it slightly for lower end markets..."
scotty79 14y ago
That's funny how we feel about things: FastFood monopolist adding too much salt to its cheapest food products so it can sell less salty versions of same products at premium prices ... seems severely pathological. Hardware monopolist crippling cheapest products so it can sell non-crippled ones at premium prices ... sort of ambiguous. Legit market strategy or conning customers? Graphic design software make selling crippled versions of their software cheaper so it can sell fully featured version at premium price. Totally legit. What's the difference?
- auctiontheory 14y ago
  You keep using that word "monopolist." I do not think it means what you think it means.
  - scotty79 14y ago
    I know it's bit inappropriate here. I mean provider or clique of providers entrenched in the market and large enough to shape the market.
    - tomrod 14y ago
      Ah, so an oligopolist.
    - ffk 14y ago
      The term you may be looking for is oligopoly - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopoly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopoly
  - wtallis 14y ago
    NVidia may not qualify for all that they're the stronger partner in a duopoly, but Intel's done this and much worse with impunity.
- darkarmani 14y ago
  > Hardware monopolist crippling cheapest products so it can sell non-crippled ones at premium prices ... sort of ambiguous. Legit market strategy or conning customers? How is anyone conned if the specs are honest?
sneak 14y ago
Why not patch the driver in software instead?
- varjag 14y ago
  1. This is way easier. 2. You are unlikely breaking any bizarre U.S. reverse engineering law by doing it.
kalleboo 14y ago
I thought the common knowledge on why the "workstation" cards were more expensive than the gaming cards was that you're paying for the driver development for the pro cards (extra stability testing, CAD software compatibility or whatever). What this guy is doing here is just changing what driver the card tells the computer to use. So really, this is equivalent to software piracy/unlocking software with a product key. He's not changing the actual capabilities of the hardware, just what driver software it unlocks.
BuddhaSource 14y ago
I wonder if this can be done for Intel CPUs? I am sure one has to open the metal cover and change the resistors, since the device id comes with the complete package. Off topic Its sad that GPUs are very bulky and dissipates heat, discourages me to buy one to play games once in a while. And expensive too.
kayoone 14y ago
Strange, i have seen another developer use 3 displays on Ubuntu with just a 660 GTX Ti. He said he plugged it in and it worked.
rangibaby 14y ago
It was possible to flash certain ATI 6950 cards "into" 6970s too: http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/overclocking/vidcard/159 http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/overclocking/vidcard/159
eaurouge 14y ago
Some people are comparing what NVIDIA has done to its hardware to crippled software. It's a bit different though. They didn't just cripple their hardware, they segmented their markets and crippled hardware and software as needed to make it almost impossible to use the same card for more than one application. Geforce cards are crippled in software so you wouldn't want to use them for CAD work. Quadro cards are crippled in hardware and software so you wouldn't want to use them for gaming or computation, respectively. Although Teslas are also stress tested for data reliability so perhaps it's unfair to say the Quadro cards are unsuitable for computation because they're crippled intentionally.
DoubleMalt 14y ago
I am astonished there is no law to put you away for 10 years for posting such disrupting stuff ;)
- wladimir 14y ago
  Please don't joke about this. Perception of ownership has changed so much over the last ~20 years, that I wouldn't be surprised if someone actually tried to jail people for improving hardware they bought, by claiming that you only 'license' the device instead of having bought it, or some other contorted reasoning (give it to the IP maximalists to come up with twisted lines of thought and sad analogy stories). Luckily NVidia isn't that sue-happy, but still... Edit: see also this, currently on the frontpage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5394928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5394928
  - DoubleMalt 14y ago
    Laughing is a coping mechanism. I am well aware of the seriousness of the assault on our freedoms on behalf of the corporate overlords. And I would rather be chided for being ridiculous writing this comment than rewarded with an uneasy laugh of the people that recognize how close to home it hits.
ck2 14y ago
I repeat, this does NOT make your GTX 6XX card faster, nor does it make it slower. So what is the difference then?
- SODaniel 14y ago
  As the article clearly states the function of the hack is to allow the card to run with alternative drivers, providing lacking functionality under Linux.
brudgers 14y ago
"the K5000 is only single GPU and clocked some 25-30% slower then the gaming card" Makes sense. Quadro cards are used for life critical visualizations, e.g. finite element analysis of a bridge. That's what justifies their expense. Rendering speed only needs to be "fast enough." The premium is on accuracy and reliability.
- Keyframe 14y ago
  I thought the premium in quadros these days is in double operations speed. Since I need floats, not doubles I opted for two GTX 680s. They are screaming compared to Q6000, but I could always use more.
  - brudgers 14y ago
    If an application uses floats in lieu of doubles might that be evidence that accuracy is not at a premium?
    - Keyframe 14y ago
      Indeed, 53 significant bits (doubles) vs 24 significant bits (floats). In my case float performance was what I needed. There are always other options, depending on your (precision) needs and needs in general, such as binary coded decimals, fixed point arithmetic...
confluence 14y ago
Not too surprising - classic example of price discrimination: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination. Think of any product you see out in the world - and I guarantee you that there is some level of price discrimination going on. It really is very expensive to develop completely different lines of products - any rational company would just slap on a few restrictions and a different brand name and bam! whole new market being served, with the existing one remaining in play. It's actually quite elegant.
nannasin28 14y ago
o I don't think your comparison is fair here. http://www.hqew.net http://www.hqew.net
wildgift 14y ago
Is this caused by the fact there are only a few companies making graphics chips?
derda 14y ago
I would not be surprised, if he runs into stability issues. Silicon manufacturers have long used the approach, to just manufacture the top of the line chip and then after testing, deactivate certain parts of the chip, to sell as a lower product. It was famous with AMD processors, where you were able to unlock more cores. The thing is, often those cores were disabled for a reason. I would not be surprised if a similar sheme would apply here, too.
- Aissen 14y ago
  It works under windows, with NVIDIA provided drivers. Just not under Linux.
WatchDog 14y ago
Does this improve gpgpu performance? I believe the GFX range were crippled in this regard, has anyone tried bitcoin mining?
xradionut 14y ago
I see no problem with either side, Nvida or the hardware hacker. As someone who spent nearly a decade in the semiconductor industry, testing wafers and packaged die, the economics of binning and market segment are understandable. As a electronics and RF geek, I've done plenty of mods and customization that voiding plenty of warranties. The only issue would be if a third party did this mod in volume and repackaged the card as something it was not originally.
Quequau 14y ago
I can't wait for someone to work out how to make the single GPU version of this work in a MacPro.
admford 14y ago
Oh this is a classic move by Nvidia. I had a gaming PC with two GeForce 8800 GTX cards in it. I used a softmod to get them to be recognised as Quadro 4600's so I could work better in Solidworks. NVidia makes decent video cards and such, but they're almost all based off a single reference design. It saves money on component costs and production time for third parties. Why make three different boards, using three different GPUs, when all you need to do is determine how much RAM you want to stick on it and choose the component layout for the specific product.
rbanffy 14y ago
I guess this is why GPU makers hates open source drivers so much - they prevent artificial segmentation and they would drive prices down if they were competitive with proprietary ones.
druidsbane 14y ago
I don't understand why he can't just modify the driver if he's going to go through all that trouble. Also, NVidia does support 3 monitors under Linux which was the point of this hack so this is confusing on many levels!
- bd_at_rivenhill 14y ago
  This probably explains why Nvidia doesn't release open source versions of their drivers.
uribs 14y ago
If they only need to fool the drivers, you could patch the drivers themselves in software.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
crawdog 14y ago
When dies are produced from the fab they are broken into different lots based on results from testing. This is based on the error performance. While one lot may not work as the top of the line model, it may meet the requirements for a lower power unit. Buyer beware. While you can possibly overclock your video card, you certainly run the risk of a higher number of issues.
smallhands 14y ago
off point comment ahead i am wondering is bing <strong>smarter </strong>than google i search for "how is 0x11BA equal to 20k resistor" and got nothing in google but bing return at least some useful pages!!!!!!!

405 points by Breakthrough 14y ago

Wonderful! While I hesitate to break a $1,100 video card, a little hack generates so much value. What other awesome hardware hacks radically improve the value of your equipment, be it electronic / analog? We're talking about the 100%+ value improvements here.

nwmcsween 14y ago

This is why you don't piss off your userbase. Also this should be mirrored as this will be taken down fast.

parad0x1 14y ago

This is simply amazing! And since it's an actual hardware mod, Nvidia can't fix this right? On the other hand, those cruel corporate brats and their money making schemes.

sargun 14y ago

I don't entirely know how I feel about this hack. I feel like this is really similar to unlocking the "Professional" version of a piece of software with a serial key generator. Although, I understand hardware is dramatically different than software, it's using the same principal -- the same reusable bits to assemble many different products, and then just using tools to mask features unless a user pays for them. Then again, why should software be any different? Why shouldn't we be able to unlock the hidden features of our software with hex editors, and serial key generators? What do you guys think?

fosk 14y ago
I think that if I own a piece of hardware, I am the sole owner of every single chip and screw on it, including every hardware hack that it may have. On the other side, usually you don't own the software but only a license that grants you permission to use it.
- latimer 14y ago
  This is a good point. When you buy hardware, you are now the owner of it so they shouldn't be able to stop you from doing it, just like once you buy a phone you should be able to unlock it or install whatever software you want on it.
  - chii 14y ago
    > just like once you buy a phone you should be able to unlock it or install whatever software you want on it. unless, of course you signed an agreement to not do that, in exchange for a cheaper price on the phone and some period of contract with a particular carrier...
    - cma 14y ago
      Which is handled by contract law; it isn't clear why companies that want to do that should get a subsidy via criminal law DMCA penalties. Just like it isn't clear why white-only diners should have received free services from government thugs to throw out African American "trespassers".
  - zem 14y ago
    yes, precisely.
- throwaway0000 14y ago
  On the contrary, most individuals purchase a tangible copy of software in a retail store without any licensing terms attached at the time of purchase. (Granted: App Stores are changing this) Shrink-wrap licenses attempt to end-run this by making the product unusable unless the user agrees to forfeit his existing property rights. The legality of these sorts of after-the-fact licenses on a traditional retail purchase is very unclear. It's for this reason that many do not object to cracking or modifying software which they have purchased. Indeed, there's no definitive argument that one shouldn't.
  - wildgift 14y ago
parad0x1 14y ago
You're already paying an over-inflated price, and they want you to pay an even greater inflated price. It's the manufacturer's and software developers decision to bundle another product within each other. They are already charging too much for this GPU, and they try to squeeze the most profit they can from every chip.
seany 14y ago
That hardware is hardware. if I buy hardware from you can can do what ever I want with it.
drucken 14y ago
Well, the original reason given by the modder is to unluck the same functionality available under one OS as in another - that is all.
kyrra 14y ago
This kind if stuff has been going on for a long time. I remember one of the Nvidia cards from 8 years ago could unlock extra lanes in the GPU just With a firmware flash. Intel had been using the same dye for multiple CPU SKUs for a long time now. Though people have figured out how to move between the various skus with ease. The one thing to keep in mind with hardware like this is that the different price points and SKUs are more than just making money. A lot of the time the SKU a card or chip is set at has to do with the yield quality of the pieces as they are manufactured. It's amazing to realize that when a new line of some cutting-edge tech comes around, they are going to have a 50% or less yield rate on their products. Sometimes they can use lower priced SKUs and take features away as the components will operate better without those features.
- skyebook 14y ago
  There were unlocked lanes as well as the ability to use Quadro firmware with 8800GTS cards (which offered improved IQ in apps like Autodesk 3ds). As you allude to though, I'm pretty sure that the professional workstation cards are of a better binning.
chao- 14y ago
It feels similar to unlocking software because despite the different legal structure (ownership vs. license), the source of the difference similar, as you point out: You have been given a purposefully broken (i.e. effort was expended to reduce its usefulness) product. One would be tempted to make the argument of costing the company sale of an otherwise higher priced product, the method of fixing this would involve having entirely separate design and/or fabrication for the two tiers of components. This is far costlier than the price gap afforded to a handful of technical and risk-taking customers. Unless the ease of the transition is reduced to "Flip the big red switch from 'Fast' to 'Faster'!" then this sort of missed sale amounts to a rounding error for Nvidia, and certainly does not even match the cost that would be necessary to protect against it.
eupharis 14y ago
Sargun, your point was, I think, why is it that we treat software modding differently than we treat hardware modding? The chorus of "The hardware is hardware, and we can do whatever we want!" misses the point. It is a good point sargun. One I wish I had an answer for. Perhaps one explanation lies in the fact that some level of risk and skill and ingenuity and research is required to actually mod hardware. So we feel like the hardware modders deserve the fruits. But at we feel like the software "modders" don't, because most of them are thoughtlessly running some riskless script devised by someone else. I am not saying this should be our attitude. I am just saying I too have the knee-jerk reaction "the hardware is the hardware" but am far less certain when it comes to software. And I don't really understand why.
- ISL 14y ago
  One possible future: Bits exist physically on my hardware. I get to twiddle them however I want. Furthermore, I can speak freely about having done so. This reality is at least partly responsible for the emergence of software as a service. Can't crack what you don't have.
  - cookiecaper 14y ago
    Rosetta Stone is a great example of this. After years of heavy piracy and failed client-side protections, their solution was to make the program web and subscription based. While rips of services like this are still possible, they're much more effort than cracking a client-side application.
- cookiecaper 14y ago
  It's about the volatility and potential danger to copyright holders. If something requires a hardware hack, it's always going to take that much effort to apply. There's no easy way to instantaneously apply that hack to millions of peoples' hardware with minimal human effort. With a software hack, it's much more fearful because once it gets packaged as a crack, it's four clicks to a perceived infringement on the copyright holder's rights. A barrier to entry this low makes software mods much more frightful to rightsholders. Though the grandparent is right that these are similar practices in principle, people react differently because one is perceived as a widespread threat to the traditional mechanism of creative livelihood and the other is perceived as an advanced hack that will be done only be a couple of tinkerers. Most people are happy to provide encouragement and information to the latter group, but are more worried about the first group, as most software companies depend heavily on copyright law for their business model.
danilocampos 14y ago
It's not about principles, it's about economics. This is a matter of price discrimination. Nvidia wants to be sure they have a chance to sell their gear to every single person who has money to spend on graphics cards at a range of price points. Consumers have smaller wallets than professionals, but both have similar needs. So the company performs a "hack" that allows them to extract maximum revenues from each segment. Let's take this to an absurd extreme. Sennheiser did this by crippling their low-end headphones with a piece of foam to limit audio quality. Savvy audiophiles simply popped open the cans and removed the foam. No quibble with that, right? For me, companies have every right to practice price discrimination by fiddling with their hardware. And I think consumers have every right to mod that hardware. A few tinkerers are unlikely to break a meticulous price discrimination model like Nvidia's, and I think it's probably a net win for the company to have a chunk of their userbase who love them so much all they want to do is tinker in this way.
- GhotiFish 14y ago
  Yes. That's a wonderful rhetoric, but really what it's saying is that the only people who don't deserve being screwed are the people that make it a hobby to tinker. There's many other areas of life to specialize in, not just technology/engineering side of things. I think general fair play trumps an incentive to learn and hack.
  - danilocampos 14y ago
    What makes price discrimination unfair? Nvidia needs to recover costs and earn a profit. They do so by segmenting the market. That they are able to do so in this way suggests that no one else is able to perform the R&D necessary to sell these tools at a lower cost. Who's getting screwed? The gamers who lose out on pro features many don't even need?
    - GhotiFish 14y ago
      or the pros getting massively overcharged because culture accepts the notion of sinking tens of thousands of dollars on the equipment of ones profession. The answer is both.
TeMPOraL 14y ago
I see it this way: were they giving the cards for free, they wouldn't ever disable features to create different models. In this magic world everyone would get to use the 100% of what the most current technology can do. The only reason they limit their cards is to extract more money out of the economic system. It feels wrong to us because brains don't reason via market economics. You can feel the waste in this solution, but it's the inefficiency inherent in the market economy. With SaaS it sometimes feels kind of different probably because we really do see it as a service (as it states in the name, btw.). and feel that the company offering us the service deserves more compensation for more things they do for us.
- chii 14y ago
  > it's the inefficiency inherent in the market economy. i think this inefficiency exists because there is no perfect competition (i.e., anyone can start a semi-conductors company and compete in the market). We should push for a future where there _is_ perfect competition, and this problem will resolve itself. For example, 3D printing is a viable method of reaching such a future, if the printing tech keeps increasing in fidelity and durability etc.

leoh 14y ago

How do people find hacks like this? Looking at the board, that resistor is one among tons of components.

ajross 14y ago
Mostly like inside or semi-inside info. Obviously anyone with a schematic and datasheet at any of the dozens of OEMs will be able to figure this out. But even without docs there were probably bunches of reference boards shipped out to integrators. It's not hard to visually diff a "Quadro" from a "Tesla" version of the same board. What I'm more surprised by is the fact that this was done by external resistors at all. Almost all chip configuration like this these days is done with on-die fuses that can't be hacked.
malloc2x 14y ago
If you read some of the comments, essentially: a) looking for resistors that could be placed in multiple positions on the board and b) following the traces from the resistors: going to GPU? probably not what you want. Going to PCIE interface? Probably correct.
memset 14y ago
He actually describes it in the thread, a little farther down: "No, no schematic, what I did was look for resistors that looked like they had an alternative position, have a look at the photos and you will see what I mean. Any that I suspected of being a strap I used a meter to check if the resistor was connected to ground of 3.3V directly, and looked where the general traces were going in the area. If they went towards the GPU and connected to one of the rails it was a pretty good bet that it was a hard strap." http://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/hacking-nvidia-cards-into-their-professional-counterparts/msg203225/?PHPSESSID=f88387c520550af1e0508d8687b41928#msg203225 http://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/hacking-nvidia-cards-i...
- pdmccormick 14y ago
  I once saw a networking IC that had a key strap-in pin multiplexed with an indicator LED, so if you wanted to change the brightness of the LED by varying the resistor value, watch out because you'll change the device behaviour! Good times...

eksith 14y ago

So this is basically a change of the PCI device ID. The capabilities are essentially the same; he just changed the device signature. A cool hack nonetheless. Edit: After looking at the screenshots closer, that seems to be the case. The device ID 0x11BA becomes 0x118F. Vendor ID remains 0x10DE on both. Memory, CPU and other important stuff are basically the same. Very cool!

n3rdy 14y ago
Maybe the configuration is a little different too. If the professional counterpart is actually worse for gaming, perhaps its because the resources are allocated to supporting multiple displays instead? In that case, is it reasonable to consider this crippling the device?
- eksith 14y ago
  Professional vid cards are usually about multiple displays so saying that's crippling might be a bit harsh IMO; I'd say it's "differently allocating" resources. Is it worse for gaming only because of multiple displays (I.E. actual difference in architecture) or is it different in how the funcionality is offloaded by the software based on the device ID? Until there are benchmarks of an actual game played being played before and after, it would be pretty hard to tell.
- makomk 14y ago
  The professional versions of NVidia cards generally tend to be more conservatively clocked than the gaming ones. Obviously that affects performance.

BoyWizard 14y ago

You'll find that adding the resistor changes the ID the card sends to the drivers, and that there is other differences in the hardware (so it doesn't change the 'model' of the card). It just so happens that it enables 3 monitors in Linux (this is already enabled in Windows).

parad0x1 14y ago

Entire post mirrored here: http://imgur.com/ZJt0VmT http://imgur.com/ZJt0VmT Save it as well.

drivebyacct2 14y ago
Ow, my eyes. Between the microscopic font and jpeg artifacts. HTML source of the print friendly version: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/5193769 https://gist.github.com/anonymous/5193769 Or less artifacty screenshot: http://i4.minus.com/itHdo0GR7zXw1.png http://i4.minus.com/itHdo0GR7zXw1.png (Sorry to steal any thunder!) Not affiliated, but minus.com doesn't compress high-res PNGs into JPEGs like imgur does (it's only at a certain size that imgur does it, but it's annoying for screenshot threads, or in this case).
- ars 14y ago
  Here is an optimized version of that image: http://i4.minus.com/ivpBgQ8dNf5Ge.png http://i4.minus.com/ivpBgQ8dNf5Ge.png (smaller filesize, loads quicker). Why did you save the image with transparency?
  - drivebyacct2 14y ago
    Because that's what scrot did?

jsumrall 14y ago

He's changing the resistors such that the bits which specify the identity of the board to the system now identify as something else? So if in fact there was some difference in the board design or chip design, then it could cause problems where unexpected faults occur. It's like saying you are capable of doing X, Y, Z, but really you can only handle X and Y situations. When someone asks you to do Z, you're screwed. But I don't know enough about Nvidia GPU hardware design, and I'm sure he wouldn't be publishing this hack if it didn't work well.

tedchs 14y ago

It's possible Nvidia manufactures the higher-end cards and then, if they fail the high-end testing but pass low-end testing, are marked as the lower-end card. There is precedent for this in many areas of computer hardware (CPU, RAM, hard drives). I would be wary of undoing this and expecting any level of reliability.

hfsktr 14y ago
That is a good point. Something I really wouldn't have even thought of before even though I knew about the hard drives part. In the post he says: "the GTX 690 and the Quadro K5000 (same GPU) and, get this... the K5000 is only single GPU and clocked some 25-30% slower then the gaming card, what a joke" so wouldn't it be downgrading the card to make it usable on linux? maybe not idk much about linux, drivers, hardware etc.
- GhotiFish 14y ago
  no, he's only altering how the drivers perceive the card. Frankly, throwing in resistors to modify how it get's identified by the computer is really a hardware hack for a software problem. The drivers are stupid, and they're deliberately choosing to not use card features.
  - colechristensen 14y ago
    When you buy a high end card, you're buying the development time required to enable advanced features, you are not buying hardware; the silicon simply doesn't cost that much to produce. Most people do not want or need these advanced features, nor do they want to pay for them. The alternative environment has everyone paying $2000 for the same card and much fewer sales vs. premium users paying for premium features, and everyone else getting what they need at a much lower cost.
    - makomk 14y ago
      They're not just spending the development time on advanced features. NVidia appear to have intentionally crippled stuff like data transfer speeds to and from the GPU on their consumer models (but only for OpenGL/OpenCL and DirectCompute - you still get full speed when doing the exact same thing through DirectX) on the basis that it mostly only screws professional users.

memset 14y ago

The corresponding reddit thread is quite insightful: "It is far cheaper to make one very good chip for the highest market, and modify it slightly for lower end markets... Now, this is the part you hate: this is the only viable alternative. There's no point demanding different designs for different market segments as that would significantly increase the cost you, the consumer, pays. You can demand chips be sold at lowest prices without being fused down, but then the company eats its own market, becomes unprofitable, and goes out of business at worst - or, at best, doesn't make enough money to fund further r&d as much as they want, which again hurts you, the consumer." http://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1aj3n3/not_cool_nvidia/ http://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1aj3n3/not_coo...

sliverstorm 14y ago
Exactly, binning is good for the business AND for the consumer.
- wtallis 14y ago
  When "binning" refers to the practice of putting premium prices on parts that test as being capable of operating at higher clock speeds or lower voltages, that's good for the consumer. When it refers to die harvesting - selling the chip with a defective section disabled - that's also good for the consumer. When it refers to crippling a chip that has already passed QA, it's a symptom of insufficient competitive pressure. The best example of this is when Intel offered a $50 software upgrade that would enable HyperThreading and more CPU cache. What NVidia is doing here probably isn't as bad - the premium associated with Tesla and Quadro parts goes toward driver features and QA that is irrelevant to the consumer market.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - scotty79 14y ago
    > it's a symptom of insufficient competitive pressure Exactly. That's as if fast food chain just before serving food to customer added ingredient that would made food taste worse (and or be less healthy) in order to be able to sell you same food without this ingredient at premium price. We don't see such behavior because in fast food industry we have heavy competition. Not so much in GPU market where two companies have most of the market and entry barriers are high.

asveikau 14y ago

Wouldn't it be easier (and less risky to your hardware) to make the kernel lie about the device ID? Or modify the nvidia kernel blob to compare against another ID?

wonginator1221 14y ago
I suspect it might be possible by modifying the device field in the pci_dev struct [1] in include/linux/pci.h when the device is initialized. [1] http://www.makelinux.net/ldd3/chp-14-sect-6 http://www.makelinux.net/ldd3/chp-14-sect-6
wladimir 14y ago
I'm sure they tried that. It is likely that the driver uses another "proprietary" way to read the ID as well and uses that as definitive answer. Having said that, distinguishing in software would mean that open source drivers such as Nouveau won't see any difference between the cards and can advertise all the features always.

ohazi 14y ago

Keep in mind that one of the finer points of making money in the semiconductor industry is yield management, especially when you're cutting larger dies. These days you don't just toss a chip when it fails a test - you design the tests to exercise different physical regions of the chip to identify the location of a defect. You also design the chip in a way that allows you to power down different regions and behave like a lower priced part. So a defective quad-core CPU might be sold as a dual-core part, or as a variant with a smaller cache. You have slightly finer grain control on a GPU, and very fine grain control on RAM or flash.

habosa 14y ago

This was compared to software that ships with all the features but requires a serial number to unlock the good ones. However I think this is different, and I think modifying hardware in this way is considerably more moral than using keygens to unlock software. It's hard to exactly state why I feel that this hardware mod is entirely moral behavior while software piracy is not but it's hard to put my finger on the right words. I think it's possibly something to do with Locke's notion of property rights and how one has an ownership claim to that which he created by his own labor. Am I the only one that feels this way? Sorry to ramble.

damian2000 14y ago
Agreed - you've spent your dollars on an actual physical device. Then find out you've paid for the same components as a professional model, but can't use it. An article here on Wired is on the same subject ... http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/03/you-dont-own-your-cellphones-or-your-cars http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/03/you-dont-own-your-cellp...
Amadou 14y ago
If this hack well and truly only modifies the PCI ID, then it follows that all of the performance difference is in the drivers - maybe with different firmware downloads on initialization, or maybe just the API exposed to applications. How would you feel about a binary patch that modified the driver to treat a card with the low-end PCI ID as if it were a high-end card?
- habosa 14y ago
  I think although the effect is the same, it's not as justified. For one, you can distribute a patch to people who do not have to do any "labor" to get the same effect as the hardware mod. You can't distribute a hardware mod to others. Also, with software I feel there is an implicit trust agreement. Photoshop is just a different series of 1s and 0s than GIMP and both are just a different sequence of 1s and 0s than what exists on the empty, fragmented parts of your hard drive. However as a society we have agreed to pay for our copy of these binary sequences and this is the entire software market. We've also, mostly, agreed not to give the software we buy away to everyone else just because it's technologically possible. However I don't think the same social contract exists for hardware. It might be part of the hacker spirit but hardware modifications are encouraged and often celebrated. People who make their BMWs drive faster than they should or make Blu Ray lasers into lightsabers are applauded in a much different way than software pirates. Again, I can't really explain the cultural distinction but I'm very aware of its existence and that's why I can't see any objection to this Nvidia hack.

n3rdy 14y ago

For the past few months my GeForce 450 drivers have been acting up, and my computer was actually unusable until I disabled just about all hardware accelleration for the card. Is it possible that the new drivers for this card are so unstable just because nVidia is trying to thwart this type of hack? If that's the case, totally unacceptable to cripple my machine just because they want to prevent other people from altering their cards (which I will immediately begin to look into how to do myself now).

eksith 14y ago
That's a very bold assertion. I don't think they would push a driver out that recklessly just to stop one hardware hack. Besides, this was posted within a few days of him posting on the nVidia forums and you said yourself, the issues you had with the card are a few months in. Even if they knew about it before hand, it's not like a critical vulnerability or something; just an interesting modification to hardware (rarely how intrusions happen) that very few people know to implement correctly and fewer still who would want to do to their cards.
- n3rdy 14y ago
  After reading a little more its clear that my original post was incorrect. Even the original tone of "crippling" hardware seems a little far fetched to me now, it seems like these cards are just optimized differently for specific tasks (gaming, or workstation). Still would be nice if they could get their drivers working better under windows 7.

hkmurakami 14y ago

>The tight asses have decided that if you want this feature under Linux you have to get a Quadro which has Mosaic support :palm:. So naturally I decided to look at how mod the card... I just absolutely loved reading this line. I had been away from 'hacker culture' for nearly two decades (probably ever since I became serious about my studies back in middle school and I stopped 'having fun' with my studies and interests) and finally seem to be growing back into the mindset. This kind of tinkering, exploring attitude is so wonderful, even just as an observer to this story it makes me feel like I'm regaining my childhood innocence again.

Orva 14y ago
This made me smile. Also reminded me of http://prog21.dadgum.com/169.html http://prog21.dadgum.com/169.html

syassami 14y ago

Kind of reminds me back in the day where you could flash your Ati X800 card (12 pipelines) to upgrade it to 16 pipelines of the X800 XT model. (http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/overclocking/vidcard/100 http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/overclocking/vidcard/100). This decision corresponds with the quote in the top comment."It is far cheaper to make one very good chip for the highest market, and modify it slightly for lower end markets..."

scotty79 14y ago

That's funny how we feel about things: FastFood monopolist adding too much salt to its cheapest food products so it can sell less salty versions of same products at premium prices ... seems severely pathological. Hardware monopolist crippling cheapest products so it can sell non-crippled ones at premium prices ... sort of ambiguous. Legit market strategy or conning customers? Graphic design software make selling crippled versions of their software cheaper so it can sell fully featured version at premium price. Totally legit. What's the difference?

auctiontheory 14y ago
You keep using that word "monopolist." I do not think it means what you think it means.
- scotty79 14y ago
  I know it's bit inappropriate here. I mean provider or clique of providers entrenched in the market and large enough to shape the market.
  - tomrod 14y ago
    Ah, so an oligopolist.
  - ffk 14y ago
    The term you may be looking for is oligopoly - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopoly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopoly
- wtallis 14y ago
  NVidia may not qualify for all that they're the stronger partner in a duopoly, but Intel's done this and much worse with impunity.
darkarmani 14y ago
> Hardware monopolist crippling cheapest products so it can sell non-crippled ones at premium prices ... sort of ambiguous. Legit market strategy or conning customers? How is anyone conned if the specs are honest?

sneak 14y ago

Why not patch the driver in software instead?

varjag 14y ago
1. This is way easier. 2. You are unlikely breaking any bizarre U.S. reverse engineering law by doing it.

kalleboo 14y ago

I thought the common knowledge on why the "workstation" cards were more expensive than the gaming cards was that you're paying for the driver development for the pro cards (extra stability testing, CAD software compatibility or whatever). What this guy is doing here is just changing what driver the card tells the computer to use. So really, this is equivalent to software piracy/unlocking software with a product key. He's not changing the actual capabilities of the hardware, just what driver software it unlocks.

BuddhaSource 14y ago

I wonder if this can be done for Intel CPUs? I am sure one has to open the metal cover and change the resistors, since the device id comes with the complete package. Off topic Its sad that GPUs are very bulky and dissipates heat, discourages me to buy one to play games once in a while. And expensive too.

kayoone 14y ago

Strange, i have seen another developer use 3 displays on Ubuntu with just a 660 GTX Ti. He said he plugged it in and it worked.

rangibaby 14y ago

It was possible to flash certain ATI 6950 cards "into" 6970s too: http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/overclocking/vidcard/159 http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/overclocking/vidcard/159

eaurouge 14y ago

Some people are comparing what NVIDIA has done to its hardware to crippled software. It's a bit different though. They didn't just cripple their hardware, they segmented their markets and crippled hardware and software as needed to make it almost impossible to use the same card for more than one application. Geforce cards are crippled in software so you wouldn't want to use them for CAD work. Quadro cards are crippled in hardware and software so you wouldn't want to use them for gaming or computation, respectively. Although Teslas are also stress tested for data reliability so perhaps it's unfair to say the Quadro cards are unsuitable for computation because they're crippled intentionally.

DoubleMalt 14y ago

I am astonished there is no law to put you away for 10 years for posting such disrupting stuff ;)

wladimir 14y ago
Please don't joke about this. Perception of ownership has changed so much over the last ~20 years, that I wouldn't be surprised if someone actually tried to jail people for improving hardware they bought, by claiming that you only 'license' the device instead of having bought it, or some other contorted reasoning (give it to the IP maximalists to come up with twisted lines of thought and sad analogy stories). Luckily NVidia isn't that sue-happy, but still... Edit: see also this, currently on the frontpage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5394928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5394928
- DoubleMalt 14y ago
  Laughing is a coping mechanism. I am well aware of the seriousness of the assault on our freedoms on behalf of the corporate overlords. And I would rather be chided for being ridiculous writing this comment than rewarded with an uneasy laugh of the people that recognize how close to home it hits.

ck2 14y ago

I repeat, this does NOT make your GTX 6XX card faster, nor does it make it slower. So what is the difference then?

SODaniel 14y ago
As the article clearly states the function of the hack is to allow the card to run with alternative drivers, providing lacking functionality under Linux.

brudgers 14y ago

"the K5000 is only single GPU and clocked some 25-30% slower then the gaming card" Makes sense. Quadro cards are used for life critical visualizations, e.g. finite element analysis of a bridge. That's what justifies their expense. Rendering speed only needs to be "fast enough." The premium is on accuracy and reliability.

Keyframe 14y ago
I thought the premium in quadros these days is in double operations speed. Since I need floats, not doubles I opted for two GTX 680s. They are screaming compared to Q6000, but I could always use more.
- brudgers 14y ago
  If an application uses floats in lieu of doubles might that be evidence that accuracy is not at a premium?
  - Keyframe 14y ago
    Indeed, 53 significant bits (doubles) vs 24 significant bits (floats). In my case float performance was what I needed. There are always other options, depending on your (precision) needs and needs in general, such as binary coded decimals, fixed point arithmetic...

confluence 14y ago

Not too surprising - classic example of price discrimination: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination. Think of any product you see out in the world - and I guarantee you that there is some level of price discrimination going on. It really is very expensive to develop completely different lines of products - any rational company would just slap on a few restrictions and a different brand name and bam! whole new market being served, with the existing one remaining in play. It's actually quite elegant.

nannasin28 14y ago

o I don't think your comparison is fair here. http://www.hqew.net http://www.hqew.net

wildgift 14y ago

Is this caused by the fact there are only a few companies making graphics chips?

derda 14y ago

I would not be surprised, if he runs into stability issues. Silicon manufacturers have long used the approach, to just manufacture the top of the line chip and then after testing, deactivate certain parts of the chip, to sell as a lower product. It was famous with AMD processors, where you were able to unlock more cores. The thing is, often those cores were disabled for a reason. I would not be surprised if a similar sheme would apply here, too.

Aissen 14y ago
It works under windows, with NVIDIA provided drivers. Just not under Linux.

WatchDog 14y ago

Does this improve gpgpu performance? I believe the GFX range were crippled in this regard, has anyone tried bitcoin mining?

xradionut 14y ago

I see no problem with either side, Nvida or the hardware hacker. As someone who spent nearly a decade in the semiconductor industry, testing wafers and packaged die, the economics of binning and market segment are understandable. As a electronics and RF geek, I've done plenty of mods and customization that voiding plenty of warranties. The only issue would be if a third party did this mod in volume and repackaged the card as something it was not originally.

Quequau 14y ago

I can't wait for someone to work out how to make the single GPU version of this work in a MacPro.

admford 14y ago

Oh this is a classic move by Nvidia. I had a gaming PC with two GeForce 8800 GTX cards in it. I used a softmod to get them to be recognised as Quadro 4600's so I could work better in Solidworks. NVidia makes decent video cards and such, but they're almost all based off a single reference design. It saves money on component costs and production time for third parties. Why make three different boards, using three different GPUs, when all you need to do is determine how much RAM you want to stick on it and choose the component layout for the specific product.

rbanffy 14y ago

I guess this is why GPU makers hates open source drivers so much - they prevent artificial segmentation and they would drive prices down if they were competitive with proprietary ones.

druidsbane 14y ago

I don't understand why he can't just modify the driver if he's going to go through all that trouble. Also, NVidia does support 3 monitors under Linux which was the point of this hack so this is confusing on many levels!

bd_at_rivenhill 14y ago
This probably explains why Nvidia doesn't release open source versions of their drivers.

uribs 14y ago

If they only need to fool the drivers, you could patch the drivers themselves in software.

deleted 14y ago

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crawdog 14y ago

When dies are produced from the fab they are broken into different lots based on results from testing. This is based on the error performance. While one lot may not work as the top of the line model, it may meet the requirements for a lower power unit. Buyer beware. While you can possibly overclock your video card, you certainly run the risk of a higher number of issues.

smallhands 14y ago

off point comment ahead i am wondering is bing <strong>smarter </strong>than google i search for "how is 0x11BA equal to 20k resistor" and got nothing in google but bing return at least some useful pages!!!!!!!