Flashing your RX 480 GPU to an RX 580 BIOS is a really bad idea
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Every time AMD or Nvidia launches a new GPU family, there’s a scramble to see whether certain features can be unlocked for other GPUs, or if cards can be updated to support higher clocks and voltages. In the old days, it was occasionally possible to buy a midrange card and unlock the additional GPU cores that had been reserved for the top-end models. Even today, there are sometimes performance gains to be had when swapping between BIOSes for different card models. Exactly how well this works and which BIOSes you can swap varies from company to company and card to card.
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Think Twice Before Getting Excited for Nintendo’s Upcoming SNES
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In July 2016, we first covered the Mini Classic NES, later officially called the NES Classic Edition. It was a tiny Nintendo with original controllers, 30 preloaded games, and an original controller. As information leaked out, it became clear this thing was really going to be something special, with excellent game reproduction and multiple graphics modes, plus some saved game options that didn’t exist when the NES first launched.
My significant other is a fan of classic Nintendo and I never got to play most of the games from the NES generation, since my family didn’t think that was an appropriate use of time when I was growing up. So when Nintendo announced the platform, I planned to snap one up immediately. Once the Classic NES launched, I parked myself on websites like BrickSeek and NowInStock, visited local stores, and promised to get a console in time for Christmas. Once it became clear that wasn’t going to happen, I promised to snag one after the holiday, when I was certain demand would fall.
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AMD’s New Radeon Pro Duo is Slower, Cheaper Than Its Predecessor
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When AMD launched its Radeon Pro Duo a year ago, it was clearly an attempt to simultaneously drive VR development and carve out a niche for a high-end Radeon solution that could drive each eye from a separate GPU. At the same time, however, the $1,500 price tag and limited VRAM (just 4GB per GPU) were less than ideal for a four-digit development board.
AMD has announced a new Radeon Pro Duo this week, and despite wearing the same name, it’s a very different GPU under the hood. This Pro Duo is based on Polaris with 32GB of RAM in total (16GB per GPU), 2,304 stream processors, a 1243MHz engine clock, and 224GB/s of memory bandwidth per GPU. This suggests that AMD had to slightly lower the total memory clock, since the standard RX 480 offers 256GB/s of memory bandwidth per GPU.
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Specs on the new Radeon Pro Duo
This GPU is derived from the Radeon Pro WX 7100, which means it has just 128 texture units instead of Polaris’ 144 TMUs. Total board power is down dramatically, to just 250W total, compared with 350W for last years’ dual Nano solution. There’s no way the new Radeon Pro Duo would outperform last year’s model — the dual Nano solution offered nearly double the cores, twice the ROPs, and twice the texturing performance — but none of that matters if you don’t have enough VRAM on-board to handle workloads. You aren’t going to see performance improvements no matter how powerful the rest of the GPU is.
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SK Hynix Will Launch GDDR6 in 2018, But What About HBM2?
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SK Hynix has announced the introduction of the world’s first GDDR6 modules, with a data rate of up to 16Gbps and a theoretical bandwidth of 768GB/s of bandwidth if paired with a 384-bit I/O bus. SK Hynix’ own press release suggests such a product is coming within the next 12 months, in fact, when it states “SK Hynix has been planning to mass produce the product for a client to release high-end graphics card by early 2018 equipped with high performance GDDR6 DRAMs.”
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One Modder’s Quest: Recreate Parts of Fallout New Vegas Inside Fallout 4
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Fallout New Vegas is arguably the best of the three modern Fallout games. The plot of the game takes inspiration from the original, Black Isle version of Fallout 3 (codenamed Van Buren), and it builds on elements of the in-game universe that were introduced back in Fallout 2. At the same time, there’s no denying that New Vegas is beginning to show its age. The game launched in 2010, but the Gamebryo engine it is built on is even older, and there’s only so much mods can do to improve a title (Gamebryo also gets a little grumpy if you try to keep stuffing visual improvements and improved textures into FO3 / FNV). The Fallout 4 engine may not have been the clean leap from Gamebryo that we hoped it would be, but it does offer much-improved visuals, and one modder is already working on implementing Fallout New Vegas within Fallout 4.
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Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Is a Phenomenal Performer on the Switch
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If you’re on the fence about the Nintendo Switch, you might just change your mind by the time the weekend rolls around. On April 28th, an updated version of Mario Kart 8 is being released on Nintendo’s new hybrid console, and it’s getting rave reviews.
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AMD Updates Ryzen’s Windows Power Plan, Boosts Performance With New Chipset Driver
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When AMD launched Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 5 earlier this year, it recommended that reviewers test with Windows 10’s power plan set to “High Performance,” as opposed to the “Balanced” configuration we typically prefer for testing and that Windows uses by default. Now, the company has released a new chipset driver that will add and automatically activate a power profile that gives Ryzen more control over its own power states.
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New Graphics Comps Highlight Project Scorpio’s 1080p, 4K Prowess
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Microsoft is working to build buzz behind the scenes for its upcoming Project Scorpio and what that console can do in 4K. The company has a heavy lift in front of it — Scorpio is more powerful than Sony’s PS4 Pro, but Sony has a 12-month first mover advantage and approximately double the Xbox One’s install base. That discrepancy is having real impacts on Microsoft’s ability to land exclusive titles for its console, and exclusives are still an important part of how consoles differentiate from one another, even if they aren’t as important as they used to be.
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Nintendo Switch Sales Boom, Could Surpass Wii U in Just Over a Year
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When Nintendo announced the Switch, many weren’t quite sure what to make of it, or how much of an opportunity it represented. The platform’s hybrid living room / portable mode was something new and the launch lineup was frankly anemic. Fortunately for Nintendo, all of these issues have proven minor hiccups rather than show-stopping problems. The Switch ($299.99 at Amazon) is reported to have sold 2.74 million units in March, with Nintendo claiming it now expects to ship up to 10 million Switches this year. The Wii U, for comparison’s sake, sold 13 million consoles throughout its entire run.
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Nintendo Announces New 2DS XL, Returns to Clamshell Design
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A few years back, Nintendo launched a low-cost follow-up to its 3DS. The 2DS was a slate instead of a clamshell, and it dropped the 3D capabilities Nintendo built into the 3DS, all while selling for a lower price ($129 at launch compared with $170 for the 3DS at the time). Now, Nintendo has released a new budget-oriented version of its 3DS XL, the New 2DS XL.
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The New 2DS XL drops the slate form factor that the 2DS favored and returns to a clamshell design. As the name implies, the “2DS” still can’t handle the stereoscopic 3D effects that the 3DS uses — though these were generally limited to eye candy and minimal changes, unless you consider high battery life consumption to be a feature. Otherwise, the hardware between the New 3DS XL and New 2DS XL is identical, though not always laid out in the same fashion.
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