Will Your Old 7970 Take A GHz Edition Firmware?
Back in the day of the Radeon HD 6900-series cards, extracting more performance was as simple as taking your Radeon HD 6950 and flashing the 6970’s firmware over the top of it. Since much of what we've already seen from the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition already seems like a simple BIOS update, we wanted to see if the original 7970 would take this new card's firmware. Because the cards use different subsystem IDs (SSIDs), our first attempt involved forcing the update tool to overwrite the original BIOS.
Our system booted into Windows without incident after this little bit of cosmetic surgery. However, the driver wouldn't recognize a supported card, as witnessed in the following GPU-Z screenshot:
Clearly, something's not right. Just look at the memory capacity. Then there's the GPU clock rate and missing support for OpenCL/DirectCompute. In the end, we’re forced to concede that upgrading an old board to the new BIOS just isn't as easy as it was in the past.
now if only you could bold it :lol:
with Winzip that does not use GPU, VCE that slows down video encoding and a card that gives lower min FPS..... EPIC FAIL.
or before releasing your products, try to ensure S/W compatibility.
the issue is them rethinking their future designs scares me... Nvidia has started a HORRIBLE trend in the business that I hope to dear god AMD does not follow suite. True, Nvidia is able to produce more gaming performance for less, but this is pushing anyone who wants GPU compute to get an overpriced professional card. now before you say "well if you're making a living out of it, fork out the cash and go Quadro", let me remind you that a lot of innovators in various fields actually do use GPU compute to ultimately make progress (especially in academic sciences) to ultimately bring us better tech AND new directions in tech development... and I for one know a lot of government funded labs that can't afford to buy a stack of quadro cards
And for the gamers: take a look at the new UT4 engine! Without excellent GPGPU performace this will be a disaster for each graphics card. See you, Nvidia.
Excellent tip. Told you I'd look into it!