AMD RX Vega 56 Video Card Flashed with RX Vega 64 BIOS

Flashing AMD cards has become somewhat of a tradition whenever the new generation of cards come out. It is a cost-less way of getting more performance and has become relatively safer too. So with the new Radeon RX Vega 56 and 64 available, it only makes sense to try flashing the more affordable model with the more expensive model’s BIOS. That is exactly what kdtree from ChipHell did and got some surprising results.

AMD RX Vega 56 to RX Vega 64: No Hardware Unlocks but Better Performance

The new video cards get their names from the number of Compute Units. The RX Vega 64 has 64 while the RX Vega 56 has 56. The better binned chips end up as the high-end cards while the rest get some of its parts lasered off to disable. Unfortunately, these “lost” hardware parts are not redeemable with a simple BIOS update this time. The RX Vega 56 still has 3584 GPU cores, 224 TMUs and 56 CUs compared to the RX Vega 64 which has the full 4096 GPU cores, 256 TMUs and 64 CUs.

The BIOS flash however still gives the RX Vega 56 some very good performance boost on account of having higher clock speeds. With the Vega 64 BIOS, the Vega56 at stock Vega64 clocks performed very close to the Vega64 in 3DMark FireStrike Extreme. This also allowed for much higher overclocks of the Vega56. At least according to kdtree, which pushed it well beyond the reference Vega64’s 3DMark FireStrike score at 11322 vs 10479 at 1650MHz.