🚨 NVIDIA sells you a $1,600 RTX 4090 running AI at half speed on purpose.
One Linux kernel module just removed the cap.
It's called GPU unlock. 17,000 stars. GPL-2.0.
Here is what NVIDIA does not want you to know:
Every consumer GeForce card from the RTX 20, 30, and 40 series ships with its tensor cores capped to half speed for FP16, BF16, and TF32 math with FP32 accumulation. The exact same silicon sold as an NVIDIA RTX A-series professional card runs at full rate. That's the entire difference. Different driver flag. Same chip.
The repo is a kernel module that runs at boot, before the NVIDIA driver loads. No patched driver. No firmware flash. No BIOS risk. Nothing to redo when NVIDIA pushes an update.
Here are the actual benchmarks from the repo's own compatibility reports:
→ RTX 3060 12GB: 27 TFLOPS → 51 TFLOPS BF16 (+87%) → RTX 3070: 40 TFLOPS → 72 TFLOPS BF16 (+81%) → RTX 3080: 65 TFLOPS → 113 TFLOPS BF16 (+73%) → RTX 3090: 75 TFLOPS → 125 TFLOPS BF16 (+65%) → RTX 4070 Ti: 81 TFLOPS → 150 TFLOPS BF16 (+84%) → RTX 4080: 104 TFLOPS → 193 TFLOPS BF16 (+87%) → RTX 4090: 165 TFLOPS → 329 TFLOPS BF16 (+100% peak)
Real workloads after the unlock:
→ LLM prefill and prompt processing: +25% to 55% faster → Time to first token: 25% to 30% lower → LoRA and full fine-tuning in BF16: +25% to 50% faster → SDXL and ComfyUI image generation: +30% to 55% faster → FlashAttention and SDPA kernels: +50% to 60% faster
Outputs are bit-identical before and after. Only the speed changes.
Three commands to install:
git clone https://t.co/yF2hBgnmfJ cd gpu-unlock make install
Append gpu_unlock.targets=all to your kernel command line. Reboot. Full speed.
Linux only. Windows port exists in a separate repo. Blackwell (RTX 50) not supported.
17,000 stars. 1,700 forks. GPL-2.0 License.
100% Open Source.
Repo in the first comment.
@CryptoWizardd Nice . They fucked my money up over a decade ago. I had to take accountability for the loss. Went against my gut when I removed my funds from coin-base because at the time base had less options. I was up 3x and the refused to allow me to withdraw until conveniently i lost profit