Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. News

As promised, AMD fixes Radeon RX 480 power issues with new drivers

Kevin Parrish
By

AMD RADEON RX 480
Bill Roberson/Digital Trends
As promised, AMD released on Thursday new drivers that address the Radeon RX 480’s excessive power draw over the motherboard PCIe slot. Launched as Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.7.1, this new suite also injects a “compatibility mode” toggle into the Global Settings menu to reduce the card’s overall power draw if customers experience any further issues. Set to “off” by default, this feature will have a minimal impact on performance if switched “on,” the company said.

As previously reported, the Radeon RX 480 cards were drawing more power from the PCI Express bus than what’s allowed by the official specifications served up by the PCI-SIG collective. Graphics cards can pull 75 watts directly from the PCI Express slot, and another 75 watts from the separate six-pin PCI Express power connector. The Radeon RX 480 was caught yanking up to 95 watts from the PCI Express slot alone.

Recommended Videos

According to the driver release notes, PCI Express bandwidth is now “at the correct speed” on the Radeon RX 480. The company said it has also applied performance improvements for the Polaris architecture in the new driver set that will generate up to 3-percent better performance in popular PC games. This should help offset the performance loss when the “compatibility mode” toggle is activated.

Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming
Check your inbox!
Privacy Policy

So does this new driver set fix the Radeon RX 480’s power problem? PC Perspective took them for a spin and saw that the Radeon RX 480 power draw was finally back to normal levels. The six-pin power connector now provides more of the power the card needs than the +12V rails on the PCI Express slot.

As for the compatibility mode setting, the site ran Metro: Last Light on the Radeon RX 480 card set at a 3,840 x 2,160 resolution. The average frame rate without the toggle disabled was higher using the new 16.7.1 driver when compared to using the older 16.6.2 driver, pointing to the Polaris performance tweaks AMD said it made with the new software. Even more, with the toggle switched on, the frame rates seemed unchanged when comparing the results of the two drivers.

In a second, this time of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt running at a 1,920 x 1,080 resolution, benchmarking revealed that there was a slight performance increase with the new drivers and the toggle switched off. Once that toggle was switched on, performance was indistinguishable between the new and older drivers. That’s great news for customers with a sparkly new Radeon RX 480 card worried about a performance impact related to the power draw “fix.”

Although the power issue is unfortunate for a company wanting to address the mass market with an affordable solution capable of high-quality VR experiences, AMD certainly didn’t hesitate to address the issue. The company saw the testing results, acknowledged the problem, publicly addressed the issue, and then immediately followed up with a promised fix. Simply awesome, AMD.

That said, customers can now grab the 32-bit version here and the 64-bit version here.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Kevin Parrish
Kevin Parrish
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Kevin started taking PCs apart in the 90s when Quake was on the way and his PC lacked the required components. Since then…
The new AMD Radeon Pro GPUs look perfect for a powerful Mac Pro update
AMD Radeon PRO

AMD launched its new range of Radeon Pro cards on Tuesday. The Radeon Pro W6800, W6600, and, on laptops, W6600M use the RDNA 2 architecture inside AMD's consumer RX 6000 range. The W6800 is already available and the W6600 is coming later this year as a PC add-in card, but it's not clear if Apple will support these updated cards in the Mac Pro.

Apple has a long history with AMD, and it uses Radeon graphics cards exclusively in the Mac Pro. Right now, the Mac Pro supports one or two W5000 or Vega II GPUs. Before AMD's announcement, these were the best professional Radeon cards available. That said, they're based on the older RDNA and Vega architectures, respectively, while the new W6000 cards are based on RDNA 2.

Read more
AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT sets new world record at 3.2GHz
amd radeon rx 6900 xt new world record clock speed

Overclocker Der8auer set a new world record with the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT. In a YouTube video released Wednesday, the German overclocking legend used a liquid nitrogen cooling rig to push AMD's flagship Big Navi GPU to 3.2GHz, setting a new world record for graphics card speed. The 6900 XT is already an absurdly fast graphics card with a boost clock of 2.25GHz, but Der8auer was able to take the card 1GHz beyond even its fastest speed.

The clock speed goes beyond the artificial clock limit of 3.0GHz on the 6900 XT. That's because Der8auer was using a PowerColor LiquidDevil Ultimate card, which has a clock limit of 4GHz. It uses the updated XTXH variant of the Navi 21 processor inside the 6900 XT, upping the previous version's frequency limit.

Read more
AMD’s Radeon RX 6700 XT is rumored to launch in March with 12GB of memory
An AMD RX 6000 graphics card with the Radeon branding.

Gamers eager for AMD to release more affordable graphics cards from the Radeon RX 6000 series won't have too much longer to wait. The Radeon RX 6900 XT and Radeon RX 6800 XT only debuted late last year, but rumors of a March launch for the Radeon RX 6700 XT may actually prove to be accurate. This could give gamers an alternative to Nvidia's more budget-oriented GeForce RTX 3060 and RTX 3060 Ti cards.

According to a listing on the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC) spotted by Komachi_Ensaka, partner Gigabyte has registered six Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics cards. This suggests that a launch may be imminent, though the listing did not give any specific timing for when that could occur. The cards are listed with 12GB of GDDR6 memory, down from the 16GB available on AMD's Radeon RX6800 XT. The reduced memory is to be expected, given that the 6700 XT is a more affordable model in the 6000 series lineup.

Read more