cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/53334627

Using the same exploit that recently allowed unlocking features of Nvidia mining GPUs, an unlocker for RTX 3090 has been created. Unfortunately the card doesn’t have hidden VRAM to enable, but we can get some free floating point processing power.

The install instructions are a bit vague, but on my Fedora install I had to manually add the kernel command line arg (gpu_unlock.targets) and rebuild initramfs after running the build/install command.

I did some simple comparison using ComfyUI, and image generation became 33% faster when using fp8 and bf16 models. However, with an int8 convrot quantized model I only got around 8% speedup, which make sense since it would use the int8 tensor cores of the RTX 3090 which weren’t locked to begin with.

I didn’t write down my exact tokens/s in llama.cpp before installing the unlocker, but the numbers I got after were roughly the same as I remembered, which also makes sense since I use quantized models that afaik use integer tensor ops.

As with all hardware “hacking” you should be careful. This seemed relatively safe to me since it doesn’t permanently alter anything on the GPU so it should be easy to revert. And it shouldn’t mess with current limits or clock speeds, which could more easily damage the hardware.

The install procedure does involve changing some kernel boot parameters, so if you make a mistake it’s possible that you soft-brick your OS.