Friday, October 24th 2008
AMD Responds to TechPowerUp Investigation, Issues Remedy
Earlier this week, when evaluating samples of the new Radeon HD 4830 GPU-based graphics card, W1zzard, who also authors the GPU-Z diagnostic utility, had found an anomaly with the stream processor (SP) counts on samples sent by AMD. The GPU could access only 560 out of its 640 SPs available. This affected the card's performance significantly, and TechPowerUp's findings were validated by several other reviewers with similar samples.
AMD on its part quickly followed up the issue with its engineering department, and released a video BIOS update that fixes the issue and makes available all the 640 SPs. AMD will be circulating this BIOS to all its press contacts and add-in-board (AIB) partners, to make sure the issue is isolated and fixed. The updated BIOS file can be downloaded from here. AMD also asserts that the issue isn't hardware related, and that updating the BIOS resolves the issue completely.
AMD on its part quickly followed up the issue with its engineering department, and released a video BIOS update that fixes the issue and makes available all the 640 SPs. AMD will be circulating this BIOS to all its press contacts and add-in-board (AIB) partners, to make sure the issue is isolated and fixed. The updated BIOS file can be downloaded from here. AMD also asserts that the issue isn't hardware related, and that updating the BIOS resolves the issue completely.
45 Comments on AMD Responds to TechPowerUp Investigation, Issues Remedy
glad to see we got this going.
It's called accountability!!! AMD tried to pull an nvidia and got caught. If it were never found out do you think that they would have fixed it? "The fix would have been a new 4835 with 700 SPs" with 640 actual!!!
Ponder :toast:
worshipping aside does this mean we could mod the bios of these 4830's and turn them into 4870's?
if its only soft modded to disable the cores/pipes w/e its gotta be doable right?
W1z great job for helping AMD/ATI solve an issue that could have gotten a lot worse!
If ATi was trying to pull a fast one, I would think they would have at least sent out real cards to the reviewers so they reported good performance.
But OT, that's a bummer, Oh well, im sure the 640sp will be plenty to fill the gap!
@eidairaman1: I don't really see any reason to re-review the amd card any further than verifying the number of SP's enabled and maybe running a couple quick benches, since the other card had the full 640 SP's enabled and we have the performance results from that.
Could somebody try this out, please? Maybe this could be a new strategy for 4850/70 energy savings/Powerplay? Another interesting way would be to try rivatuner shader block bit masking.What's the real difference in the old and new amd bios?