AMD Announces Driver Addressing Radeon RX 480 PCI-e Consumption
AMD says it will release a driver update for the RX 480 within 48 hours, which should ensure that the video card draws less power from the PCI-e slot. Radeon Software 16.7.1 also includes performance improvements, which should yield a gain of up to 3 percent with Polaris GPUs.
In a statement, AMD said it is confident that the amount of power the Radeon RX 480 draws from the PCI-e slot poses no risk of damaging the motherboard or other components. Nevertheless, the manufacturer comes up with a solution to allay users’ concerns.
AMD says it is putting in “a change” in the driver, which will address the distribution of the RX 480’s power consumption. The change should result in less consumption via the PCI-e slot. Presumably AMD modifies the driver so that the video card can draw more power from the six-pin power puller. Although the specification of 75W will probably also be exceeded, this is not a problem in practice.
There will also be a second option in the Radeon software that reduces the overall consumption of the card, with minimal performance loss, according to AMD. This setting will be named ‘compatibility’ and will be found in the Global Settings menu of Radeon Settings. By default, this feature is disabled. AMD does not yet provide precise details about what this function does, but it is possible that the speed of the gpu will be adjusted at this setting so that the consumption never exceeds the specified 150W.
Radeon Software 16.7.1 will be available within 48 hours, indicating a release on Friday. The new driver also implements general performance improvements for video cards with the Polaris architecture. In some games, that should result in a win of up to three percent.
The upcoming driver update is a response from AMD to the consumption of the RX 480. In some reviews it was discovered that the video card requires more than 75W from the pci-e slot on the motherboard. AMD responded last weekend and promised to come up with an update on Tuesday US time. The manufacturer has now fulfilled that promise with the announcement of Radeon Software 16.7.1.