Introduction

AMD's Radeon HD 7950 was introduced in January 2012. The GPU was the second design using the company's Graphics Core Next shader architecture and was, also, one of the first with the 28 nanometer production process.

Now AMD has released a BIOS update that will improve the clock speeds of the card to provide a performance advantage against NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce GTX 660 Ti.

AMD's new PowerTune "boost" is an improvement to their existing power limiting algorithm which promises higher clocks/performance without exceeding the board's power limit.



The new specifications see the GPU core-frequency increased to 850 MHz (from 800 MHz), and introduces PowerTune with Boost, which sends the GPU clock speed up to 925 MHz when applications demand it. The memory frequency stays unchanged, at 1250 MHz, as do the physical specifications of the GPU such as stream processor, TMU, and ROP counts.

All newly manufactured HD 7950 graphics cards will feature the updated specifications - prices will remain unchanged.

If you have a reference design HD 7950 (compare the PCB design using our original review), you can flash your card to use these improvements with the BIOS located here.