If you follow us regularly you will probably know the story. In mid-February, NVIDIA launched the 347.09 and 347.29 drivers and decided unilaterally to block any possibility of overclocking in laptops with Maxwell graphics cards (specifically the 860m, 960M, 965m, 970M and 980M models), and this soon triggered the fury of all those who had acquired a high performance laptop with these cards, as there are indeed manufacturers that promote this feature.
The first official response from Nvidia indicated that overclocking in laptops was not a desired function and that it was a “bug”, and thus they had resolved such “bug” and removed the overclocking option. Naturally this explanation did little to calm the situation, actually quite the opposite, with users even filing joint petitions with the courts. In the end, on February 20, the company had to rectify and announced that they reactivated the ability to overlock.
Unfortunately this didn’t end there and several owners of notebooks with GTX900M graphics detected that the new vBIOS creeping into some new laptops with these cards blocked the overclocking feature, but this time at the BIOS level. These vBIOS integrate a bit created for drivers to disable overclocking if detected as active. Luckily the company launched after that the 347.88 drivers that jumped over that limitation and reactivated the overclock, even on laptops with these new vBIOS.
But now there’s a new chapter in this saga, as new drivers of the company (350.12 and 352.86) are blocking the overclock again if they detect that specific bit responsible for limiting the OC in these vBIOS, so, again, the users of these gaming portables who want to speed up their cards may not do so.
There have begun to emerge changes in vBIOS that disable the locking bit, so that users can overclock even with new drivers specifically released to run The Witcher 3, but loading a modified vBIOS to a graphics card always has its risks and it can cancels the warranty.
We will follow up on the developments of this issue to see how the saga ends.