How many times people have told me to update the BIOS or the UEFI firmware of motherboards or the graphics card to make sure that you have the best support for the hardware. But sometimes after you have updated the firmware to a new version, it starts to show some problems and then you may want to downgrade the firmware to an earlier version. This is why you should always make a backup of your original firmware before performing an update. And as far as the graphics cards are considered, you can use the well known tool GPU-Z to create a backup of your graphics card’s BIOS or UEFI.
First of all you have to download the GPU-Z tool which is free and can be used on any version of Windows. As you launch this tool, it will ask you whether you wish to install it or run it in a portable mode. No matter which option you choose, you will see the familiar GPU-Z window displaying you all the features and properties of your graphics card.
You have to click on the small shortcut icon shown under the logo of your graphics card manufacturer like Intel, AMD or NVidia. After this you can choose the option to Save to file. This will launch a small tool that reads the BIOS/UEFI and saves it in the same folder where the GPU-Z program is located.
GPU-Z uses a command line utility to perform this operation. For example, in the case of NVidia graphics cards it uses the command nvflash.exe -b bios.rom to pull the BIOS/UEFI from the graphics card. For other cards manufactured by other corporations, it uses other similar utilities. But these utilities do not support all the cards or all the manufacturers and perhaps they might fail to work on your system.
You can download GPU-Z from https://www.techpowerup.com/download/gpu-z/.
How would you then restore the GPU BIOS/UEFI if you had to?
Depending on the GPU model and manufacturer there are different tools and methods available to flash the BIOS. You can find them on the TechPowerUp website.