I would like to ask a question about a strange incident that occurred as a result of using the StableDiffusion tool AUTOMATIC1111 (https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/).
Here's what happened: I used the mentioned tool several times to create images. Suddenly, my graphics card started causing system crashes. There was a black screen, a complete system freeze, and the graphics card fans went to 100% performance. Furthermore, it seemed that the firmware of the motherboard was somehow damaged. I realized this because the firmware suddenly reverted to an outdated version. The motherboard's manual describes this behavior as a fallback mechanism if the firmware is damaged.
I still considered it possible that it was a mere coincidence and simply a hardware fault with the graphics card. I then completely reinstalled my system and bought a new graphics card. Everything worked flawlessly. Game titles were completely smooth, in short, everything was perfect. Later, I reinstalled AUTOMATIC1111 (including everything needed for it, but I only used safetensor files!) and generated a few images. When I wanted to play games again, which had previously run super well, I noticed problems like significant stuttering, Vsync issues, performance degradation, etc. Other than the installation of AUTOMATIC1111, nothing had changed in the system at that time. I then did a fresh installation of the entire system again (including a firmware update of the motherboard) to check if the previous performance would return. It did not.
From here on, I had a very uneasy feeling. On the one hand, the defect of the first graphics card and now sudden inexplicable changes to the new graphics card that ran perfectly without AUTOMATIC1111. Since I'm not an expert in these matters, I would like to ask here whether you think it is conceivable that the mentioned software somehow attacked the firmware of hardware components and caused all these changes? If anyone thinks this is possible, could he or she tell me what I can do to check if my system is infected with firmware malware and how I can potentially remove it?
Additional note: I even once extracted the firmware of the new GPU and did a file size comparison with a firmware from https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/264881/gigabyte-rtx4080super-16384-231206-1. The files were identically sized. Is this a good sign and does it make a change to the GPU firmware less likely? Thank you very much to everyone who can help me with my questions!
.pthfiles are serialized PyTorch models which have nothing to do with the GPU firmware. It’s definitely imaginable that there’s an exploit that attacks your local user account – deserialization is notoriously risky and can lead to code execution vulnerabilities. But this doesn’t affect your GPU.