New UEFI Tool Lifts NVIDIA's Tensor Cap on RTX 20 to 40 Series Cards in Windows
Last week, modders found a way to double the tensor throughput of GeForce RTX 20, RTX 30, and RTX 40 cards, though Zagitta's original tool only ran…
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A UEFI tool called nv-uefi-unlocker now allows Windows users to double the tensor throughput on GeForce RTX 20, 30, and 40 series graphics cards. The tool removes NVIDIA's artificial limitation that restricts FP16, BF16, and TF32 tensor operations to half speed on consumer cards, while professional variants run at full capacity. The modification operates before the driver loads and requires no VBIOS modifications.
Performance gains vary by card model. An RTX 4070 Ti Super achieved 2.65 times higher FP16 performance, reaching 150.93 TFLOPS compared to the original 57.00 TFLOPS, though power consumption increased from 227 watts to nearly 292 watts. An RTX 2070 reportedly improved from 36 to approximately 60-63 TFLOPS. Not all cards have been tested, and RTX 20 series owners must enable GSP firmware mode first.
The tool requires disabling Secure Boot or enrolling a self-signed certificate and must run from a USB stick on each system restart. The unlock does not persist after power-off. RTX 50 series cards are not supported. Users should note that some games with anti-cheat systems may have compatibility issues if they require Secure Boot to be enabled.
What happened
Last week, modders found a way to double the tensor throughput of GeForce RTX 20, RTX 30, and RTX 40 cards, though Zagitta's original tool only ran on Linux. Now, Chinese modder physicsdolphin has released nv-uefi-unlocker, a UEFI tool that lifts the same limit on Windows. NVIDIA runs FP16, BF16, and TF32 tensor math with FP32 accumulation at half rate on GeForce cards, while the same silicon in professional cards runs at full speed. The tool removes that cap before the driver even loads, without any VBIOS flashing. An earlier Windows port from impacifist targeted a single RTX 3090 system, while this one covers all three generations.
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