Nvidia compute unlock boosts RTX 3080 20GB prefill by up to 29%, decode unchanged
No-Refrigerator-1672 · reddit · 2026-10-24
A Reddit user tested Zagitta's GPU unlock — which removes Nvidia's cap on consumer-card compute instructions needed for AI — on 2x Chinese-market RTX 3080 20GB cards running vLLM 0.32.0 with tensor parallelism. Results: prefill throughput up 20.8%–28.6% (longest 261.9k-token prompt dropped from 466s to 362s), TTFT down 17–22%, decode steps/s unchanged within ±1%. Cards thermally throttle at 240W (1750MHz vs 1950MHz cold), so better cooling could add 10%; raising the power limit to 320W changed speeds less than 2%. Tested with Swift-1.5-Qwen3.8-27B-AWQ-INT4, fp8 KV cache and MTP; full vLLM launch config included. A free upgrade for Ampere owners.
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