AMD RX 460 Unlocked to Increase Stream Processors!

The RX 460 is AMD’s most affordable option in the Polaris range and primarily designed for eSports gaming. Even though it’s not particularly powerful, the RX 460 is a solid option and good alternative to the GTX 1050. From a technical perspective, the GPU has 896 Stream Processors, 14 Compute Units. 56 Texture Units, a less than 75W typical TDP and 2-4GB GDDR5 memory based on a 128-bit interface. Recently, the author of overclocking.guide detailed the process to enhance the RX 460’s shaders using an updated firmware. As you can see, the firmware unlocks the additional shaders and brings the total to 1024 stream processors. The only Polaris 11 graphics card thus far theoretically has 1024 stream processors via 16 compute units. However, AMD disabled 2 compute units to improve the card’s efficiency rating.

Once the firmware has been applied, you can expect a performance gain around 10-12%. When comparing the performance results, it’s clear unlocking the extra stream processors has a dramatic effect in both games and 3D synthetic applications:

Please note, flashing the BIOS can cause problems if done incorrectly or something unexpected happens which breaks the graphics card. Saying that, it’s unlikely and Overclocking.Guide didn’t encounter any issues on the ASUS STRIX RX 460 OC and Sapphire RX 460 Nitro OC. To enable to the new firmware, simply follow these instructions:

“First backup the original BIOS file in case you want to flash the card back at a certain point (run “backup bios.bat”). You can also save the BIOS with the latest version of TechPowerUp’s GPU-Z.

Afterwards run “flash unlocked bios.bat” to flash the bios. It will take about 15 seconds and should look like in the picture below.”

The ease in which you can enable this decent performance boost is surprising and I’m not entirely sure why AMD opted for the lower specification in the first place. Whatever the case, it’s great news for RX 460 owners wanting to push their GPU even further.