A Driver Update Hotfix Inbound
Over the course of days after the AMD Radeon RX 480 has been launched, a small number of reviewers found out that the card exhibits an additional power draw over what the PCI-E standard could provide. In addition to this issue, several reviewers also pointed out up and down power draw spikes of the card. These issues are still under the public’s scrutiny, with some suggesting to sue AMD over the whole thing, and some expecting a BIOS / firmware update from AMD as a solution.
Now AMD took the reins of the wagon after swiftly looking into the matter in moments time, stating that they’ve found a solution via a driver update:
As you know, we continuously tune our GPUs in order to maximize their performance within their given power envelopes and the speed of the memory interface, which in this case is an unprecedented 8Gbps for GDDR5. Recently, we identified select scenarios where the tuning of some RX 480 boards was not optimal. Fortunately, we can adjust the GPU’s tuning via software in order to resolve this issue. We are already testing a driver that implements a fix, and we will provide an update to the community on our progress on Tuesday (July 5, 2016).
The driver is already being tested, and is expected to be released this Tuesday, July 5th 2016 for the current AMD Radeon RX 480 owners. Now the details on how the fix the issue hasn’t been exactly pointed out, but it could be something about the power limit / target of the card. If that is so, recent reviews released by various websites could be nullified, and will require a second look.
