At this point, any restriction that NVIDIA places on its products will not last very long. The hash restriction on the GeForce RTX 3060 has been cracked in various ways on many occasions. The last limitation that needs to be cracked is the closed GPU virtualization on GeForce cards. The simple mod ‘vgpu_unlock’ enabled GPU virtualization on consumer cards.
NVIDIA GeForce cards can enable GPU virtualization with a simple mode that changes the device ID to a supported GPU
GPU virtualization is a way to distribute graphics processing capabilities to multiple users, which primarily enables multiple users to use a single GPU. This feature is something that distinguishes the data center GPUs from consumer GPUs. This technology has many uses, including scientific research done by several people on a single GPU, but the most notable is GeForce NOW which uses GRID GPUs to power the virtual gaming experience.
Source: VMware
The silicon was never the problem with vGPU on consumer cards, it was the software that excluded the user. Previously, to use vGPU, users had to pay a hefty price for an NVIDIA Tesla or Quadro card. vGPU also requires a lot of software to work well and validate with ISVs. NVIDIA’s current vGPU software does not support consumer cards, but may be subject to change as the GPU Pass, the software that provides a single VM access to a GPU, was added to GeForce cards via a driver update is.
The mod to make vGPU work is pretty simple. It replaces the device ID of an NVIDIA graphics card with a device ID of an officially supported GPU. It works on GP102, GP104, TU102, TU104 and GA102 GPUs for Linux and KVM VM software. It’s hard to think of the use case for consumers who need GPU virtualization, since this mod does not even work with Windows or VMware.
The code for this mod is available on GitHub and was originally spotted by Tom’s Hardware. It’s unfortunate that it does not work on Windows, because we could possibly see consumers doing a little crypto-exploitation while playing.