News AMD Locked Radeon RX 7000 Series Power Play Tables, Limiting Overclocking

[Admin]

According to a Tweet by @Buildzoid1, AMD has locked out power play table accessibility from its RX 7000 series GPUs due to architectural changes made on RDNA3.

AMD Locked Radeon RX 7000 Series Power Play Tables, Limiting Overclocking : Read more

 

[red.deugemo]

I think it's so the aftermarkets card aren't way faster than the OEM ones.

 

[-Fran-]

I mean... AMD just got out of the gate a new way to make GPUs. It should be expected they can't expose everything from the very first design to people, or is that too stupid/unreasonable to expect nowadays?

Buildzoid's knee-jerk reaction is childish this time, I'd say. Has AMD said they won't enable finer grained control ever again? If so, then the reaction is justified, but until then, overblown.

Regards.

 

[SyCoREAPER]

Probably because they are squeezing every damn Watt out of it from the factory there isn't much overhead left.

 

[shultzyssand]

Agree w Fran. Chiplet-based; two different processes across the two chips; new registry entries, etc.

Most likely independent power ramping logic for the MCD and GCD on the board, so more stuff in the registry as well.

For a product release this important it makes perfect sense the tables are initially locked. I don't think it'll be permanent.

 

[digitalgriffin]

Fran is likely onto something.

Is it possible the power play tables aren't done yet as this is new process tech with separate chips? I can see the old ones being left behind till they finalize the new data layout. Like the prefetch, maybe it just wasn't ready in time.

 

[UWguy]

Two words: spontaneous combustion

 

[Soul_keeper]

I miss being able to flash a custom firmware on the cards.
I would write my own ADL software to overclock/undervolt and test stability, once I found the best setup i'd create a custom firmware and flash it. This is the ideal solution in my mind. Having to constantly apply settings every boot sucks. And the powerplay tables are hit or miss, the methods and control change with every new card. I still can't find offsets for 6000 series to modify the ppt. And even if I did manage to guess which offsets applied to which voltages/clocks I would still not be allowed to reflash a bios with the modified ppt.

The original GCN 7000 series were the last completely unlocked cards we had from AMD.

 

[Vanderlindemedia]

Solder on some resistors and bypass the way the logic deals with how much current the card is pulling. What kind of a hardcore overclocker are you if you need powerplay tables?

 

[Vanderlindemedia]

I miss being able to flash a custom firmware on the cards.
I would write my own ADL software to overclock/undervolt and test stability, once I found the best setup i'd create a custom firmware and flash it. This is the ideal solution in my mind. Having to constantly apply settings every boot sucks. And the powerplay tables are hit or miss, the methods and control change with every new card. I still can't find offsets for 6000 series to modify the ppt. And even if I did manage to guess which offsets applied to which voltages/clocks I would still not be allowed to reflash a bios with the modified ppt.

The original GCN 7000 series were the last completely unlocked cards we had from AMD.

Yeah but new cards are pretty much already operating to it's best possible. There is not alot of headroom if you start manually OC'ing and undervolting. Best way in my opinion is to make a working profile in AMD software, and load it upon every boot with Windows. Thats how i do it.

 

[hannibal]

Quite possible that this has similar problems as 5800x3d. Balancing the memory chiplets and main gpu can be quite complicated and free tinkering can cause a endless nest of trouble…
Based on what we have seen so far from memory chiplet desing, there are bottlenecks it causes and allready there are memory OC problems partially because bad AMD OC program (MSI program work much better) maybe partially because the separater memory controller and the fabric in between need to be balanced. We know too little so far to be sure, but new architecture, new restrictions combination definitely suggest to that.

 

[Soul_keeper]

I kinda feel the same way. The engineers know the new cards are very complicated and already dynamically overclocked to the max stock. They are very similar to ryzen cpu's in this regard. So they kinda dissuade users from having complete control. It's a shame, I miss the way things used to be. Also there is the fear of shady aftermarket resellers custom flashing and reselling cards. AMD wouldn't want this to become widespread. Most would likely be unstable and give AMD a bad reputation.

 

[Joshua Thornton]

Some misconceptions here.

Firstly, SPPT customization and modifying was never supported to begin with, nor officially "condoned" by AMD. So saying that they haven't ruled out further overclocking in the future means absolutely nothing since it was, technically, a "hack". When nvidia locked down their cards, it was for good. That's why everyone loves the 1000w bios', because it let's the cards stretch their legs.

2. These cards are absolutely not at their "maximum" out of the box. The 6900 xt came with 1.175v core voltage and 300w power (250 core I beleive) budget. Many people, including myself, have it much higher. I'm running 1.325v @ 500w max power. Core clock is solid at 2850 or so, as opposed to the 2500 or less you'd get maxed out on the stock 6900 xt. They most likely want to keep it locked down because last gen the tweaked 6900 xt was basically as fast as a 6950 xt, minus the memory bandwidth. This gen they can come out with higher voltage, higher power cards with much higher clocks providing performance you can't get from just changing a few parameters in a program or registry.

3. Cache, memory, fabric and core voltage are not the same and are controlled differently. If there was stacked cache on the Rx 7000 series, I could see that being a problem. As of now, it shouldn't be a problem.

Lastly, I'm sure some people will say "people pushing 1.3v or more" are part of the reason because it let's people kill their cards. It's easy to tell when a die is fried. It's been easy to tell for as long as I can remember. Secondly, someone might bring it that 500w is over-spec for the 2x8pin cables, etc. 188w per 8pin or 6+2pin is the minimum spec. Any high end, or decent really, PSU will use a gauge that can provide far in excess of that. Amps, not Watts.

I'm not saying this to be condescending, if it comes off as that I apologize. There are just factors at play here I think some people don't realize. I'm sure there are many factors I don't understand either.

 

[The Historical Fidelity]

I miss being able to flash a custom firmware on the cards.
I would write my own ADL software to overclock/undervolt and test stability, once I found the best setup i'd create a custom firmware and flash it. This is the ideal solution in my mind. Having to constantly apply settings every boot sucks. And the powerplay tables are hit or miss, the methods and control change with every new card. I still can't find offsets for 6000 series to modify the ppt. And even if I did manage to guess which offsets applied to which voltages/clocks I would still not be allowed to reflash a bios with the modified ppt.

The original GCN 7000 series were the last completely unlocked cards we had from AMD.

I created a custom bios for my 6900 xt and ppt editing is super easy with Igor’s Lab More Power Tool. I have my 289 watt stock power target on my 6900 xt set at 335 watts (I tried up to 500 watts and unfortunately at that point I hit my maximum stable frequency at 2967mhz but unlike with lower power targets where the frequency is dyanamic, my card stayed at that frequency 24/7 while in game.)
To make and write a custom bios for your 6900 xt, just follow these steps.

1. use gpu-z to copy the cards bios onto your desktop.

2. open More Power Tool, import your card’s bios copy, and alter the power target, core & memory voltages, the watt man frequency tuning ranges, etc. then click save (if you only want a higher power target then just alter the power target and hit “write SPPT” then restart. Upon logging into windows your 6900 xt will adhere to your custom power target during boost without the risk of potentially bricking your card’s bios with a failed bios flash)

3. Open Red Navi Bios Editor and load the saved SPPT file you saved from step 2 and import your card’s bios copy then it will build your card’s new custom bios.

4. use the atibiosflash utility to flash your custom bios onto your card. (Do at your own risk, if the flash fails then you have an expensive paperweight on your hands. If your card has dual bios’s then it is generally safer but I will not be responsible for failed bios flashes or ridiculous bios altering.)

I made my 6900 xt into a 6950 xt by copying the SPPT voltage/frequency/power target values by using this method.

 

[jp7189]

I miss being able to flash a custom firmware on the cards.
I would write my own ADL software to overclock/undervolt and test stability, once I found the best setup i'd create a custom firmware and flash it. This is the ideal solution in my mind. Having to constantly apply settings every boot sucks. And the powerplay tables are hit or miss, the methods and control change with every new card. I still can't find offsets for 6000 series to modify the ppt. And even if I did manage to guess which offsets applied to which voltages/clocks I would still not be allowed to reflash a bios with the modified ppt.

The original GCN 7000 series were the last completely unlocked cards we had from AMD.

I agree. I miss the days of custom bios, but then some clever hackers figured out how to get some persistent, malicious code in to the vbios, which is really hard to detect by tools running in a standard os environment. Now we have cryptographically signed and verified bios.

 

[jp7189]

I created a custom bios for my 6900 xt and ppt editing is super easy with Igor’s Lab More Power Tool. I have my 289 watt stock power target on my 6900 xt set at 335 watts (I tried up to 500 watts and unfortunately at that point I hit my maximum stable frequency at 2967mhz but unlike with lower power targets where the frequency is dyanamic, my card stayed at that frequency 24/7 while in game.)
To make and write a custom bios for your 6900 xt, just follow these steps.

1. use gpu-z to copy the cards bios onto your desktop.

2. open More Power Tool, import your card’s bios copy, and alter the power target, core & memory voltages, the watt man frequency tuning ranges, etc. then click save (if you only want a higher power target then just alter the power target and hit “write SPPT” then restart. Upon logging into windows your 6900 xt will adhere to your custom power target during boost without the risk of potentially bricking your card’s bios with a failed bios flash)

3. Open Red Navi Bios Editor and load the saved SPPT file you saved from step 2 and import your card’s bios copy then it will build your card’s new custom bios.

4. use the atibiosflash utility to flash your custom bios onto your card. (Do at your own risk, if the flash fails then you have an expensive paperweight on your hands. If your card has dual bios’s then it is generally safer but I will not be responsible for failed bios flashes or ridiculous bios altering.)

I made my 6900 xt into a 6950 xt by copying the SPPT voltage/frequency/power target values by using this method.

Thanks for the information. I did not know this about AMD cards.

 

[The Historical Fidelity]

Thanks for the information. I did not know this about AMD cards.

Here is where you get all the programs besides gpu-z

RED BIOS EDITOR and MorePowerTool for Polaris, Navi and Big Navi | igor´sLAB

New curve options have been added. Of course we would be very happy about a feedback in the forum about the use of this new function! The More PowerTool (MPT) has been also revised once again for the…

www.igorslab.de