Is AMD hurting the performance of enthusiasts and over clockers?
I have been a satisfied AMD user since 2004. I have owned AMD CPUs dating back to the Athlon 64 days and I have owned their GPUs since HD5xxx.
I ask this because I have been a pretty happy owner of a Vega 64 for a little while. I have it under a full cover waterblock in a custom loop. So I have removed pretty much any and all thermal limitations that might exist with this GPU.
So I decided to try my hand at overclocking this beast. I quickly learnt that AMD had locked us out of any voltage adjustments. I was angered by this but quickly learnt that the Liquid Vega 64 BIOS supplies more voltage to the core and HBM. So I was happy. I flashed the card and have been happy ever since. Well that was until AMD dropped the Radeon VII and the 19.2 and newer drivers. As myself and many other Vega enthusiasts using the LC bios learned to their dismay was that the newer drivers were throttling their LC flashed cards HARD. Causing massive stutters. OK cool they screwed up a driver. No problem. Maybe it will be fixed with the next update? Well here we are with 19.10 drivers and our cards are still falling on their faces. And there are no signs that this will get fixed. And I think it's an effort to block owners who have upgraded their 56s and 64s cooling, and are using beefed up LC bios to overclock their cards. They are blocking them because they want them to move on to their next product quicker. Why would I say that?
Well this isn't the first time a driver update that has hurt the performance on an AMD ex-flagship. I owned 2x Furys. I unlocked them to 60CUs each and for 3 and a bit years they served me well. I ran them at 1150MHz core and 545HBM. Eventually with tinkering I got them to run 600MHz HBM. BUT lo and behold launch day for Vega and pretty soon a new driver comes around and it blocked HBM overclocking on Fiji based cards. AMD claimed there was a significant change to their drivers with wattman coming into the picture etc, that it rendered previous ways of overclocking obsolete and unusable. Fair enough. We ended up being beta testers for HBM anyway. I think those of us buying Fury probably knew they weren't going to get much out of a 4GB card but we somehow bought we in anyway. So OK. Old cards. Using old methods of overclocking. With Vega we had this new boost clock system and stuff and I can see how that MIGHT render OC on Fiji unworkable? But whatever. Move on to Vega. And a lot of enthusiastic owners were upgrading their Vegas with better cooling. Morpheous, AIOs and custom water blocks. We knew that we could get more performance from this cooling by using the LC bios. Now that Radeon VII has come around and it has broken that for us guys using the LC bios on their ex flagship Cards. Now once you can call it an error or fluke. BUT Twice now that the performance of a flagship has been hurt after the release of a new flagship. This cant be a coincidence?
AMD claims to love enthusiasts and over clockers. They claim to love the people who push their hardware to the limits of performance and stability. But here we are. With a driver that prevents Vega owners from unleashing the true potential of their cards. Cards they forked out loads of cash for. I'm really not feeling the love. I feel at this point the are pulling an nvidia / apple and damaging the performance of their previous flagships with updates to get you to move on quicker. And it's succeeded (just not in the way they hoped) because now I am looking for a used V64 LC edition so that I can go back to overclocking and tweaking without throttling.
There are a lot of threads that describe this issue. Has ANYONE found a solution? Because on OCN I have not been able to find any help with this. And alot of people have not either?
I attached 2 pictures of AB graphs. One is an air bios showing very stable clocks during timespy GT1. The other the LC bios on 19.9.2 showing excessive fluctuations. Thermals are good. 45-50C core. Hot spot in the 70s. HBM clocks right down to 500 in some cases
