Day-One VBIOS Updates Available for AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT
Dramatic BIOS Performance Increases Overshadow Product Launch
The Radeon RX 5600 XT is here, and along with it comes the joy of a manual VBIOS update to reach the performance you’ll read about online. ASRock, PowerColor, Sapphire, and XFX have downloads available as the card officially launches this morning, with more to come.
AMD’s decision to significantly clock up both the GPU core and memory raises the 5600 XT far closer to an RX 5700 than the company may have originally planned, but making this BIOS change so close to launch has resulted in initial GPU shipments that don’t offer the performance AMD now intends.
Statements like this one from ASRock alert buyers of today’s public VBIOS update
Right on cue, PCGamesN published a nice roundup of the various VBIOS updates with manufacturer links, available here. Of course asking users to update their brand new cards – as the initial shipments have the specs announced at CES – is not exactly ideal, but as long as nothing goes wrong during the flashing process it’s an easy way to get a GPU that suddenly trades blows with an NVIDIA RTX 2060.
It really is about time AMD got their GPU division in line. I get that just a few years ago they were under a ton of pressure to just hang on and had to spend their limited resources wisely which resulted in Zen so you can’t effectively argue that they didn’t do just that but some of these missteps by the GPU team seam self inflicted and frankly baffling,
Vega 7 never should have existed as a consumer part. It made no sense as a gaming card and I doubt AMD made any money at all trying to shove it into a market it had no place being. Limited release as a pro-sumer card aka a Titian competitor would have made much more sense and would have been far less embarrassing than the cluster that Vega 7 was as a gaming card.
5700 joke of a reference cooler. Barely adequate cooling performance, along with next level noise? Somebody is failing at their job in regards to the reference designs. At least it looks cool, even the little kink in the top on the XT so whoever is in charge of the ID is decent. Seriously though the RTX cards have been out long enough that AMD knew well what the base line is in terms of the competition and the 5700 reference was way way off the mark. To make matters worse many of the partner cards were also complete and unmitigated disasters, literally hot garbage. Does AMD even work with their board partners before cards go to market? Sounds like a dumb question but some of the cards looked to be just that bad and you never really see this from the green team.
And now this? Changing actual design parameters this late in the game, how do you get a product launch this wrong? Asking customers to flash the BIOS on a video card is not ok. Understand the market segment you are targeting and design your product accordingly and then release it. Not after, once the product ships design time is over.
Long winded rant I know but it seems like AMD has some decent silicon to work with in terms of graphics but the management and marketing teams are not doing the engineers any favors.