Published Oct 26, 2026, 12:57 PM EDT

Sara Heritage is a tech and gaming journalist, who's currently making her way up to Master Ball rank in Pokemon Champions. Bylines in IGN, GAMINGbible, The Gamer and more. You can usually find her tinkering with tech, or restoring old consoles, always with one of her 3 cats nearby. Come and talk with her over on Twitter @SHeritageJourno.

Summary

Modders unlocked firmware limits, nearly doubling ML/AI tensor throughput on RTX 20/30/40 on Linux.

No gaming benefit; gains only affect FP16/BF16 AI math - helps local LLMs, upscalers, and ML workloads.

Linux-only, manual boot setup, and warranty void; could spike secondary market demand and prices.

Independent modders have released a series of firmware-level utilities that effectively circumvent the artificial limits NVIDIA places on its consumer cards. The result is a near doubling of the machine learning and AI compute performance of the RTX 20, 30, and 40 series hardware on Linux systems.…