AMD Prepares Beefy Ryzen Motherboard BIOS Updates With FMA3 Bug Fix And Other Optimizations
If you have an AMD Ryzen processor and complementing AM4 motherboard in your possession, optimizations are already incoming to improve your gaming performance. Just yesterday, we brought you news of an Ashes of the Singularity update which shows up to a 20 percent performance uplift for the Ryzen 7 1800X.
As developers begin optimizing their games around AMD’s new Zen architecture, we’ll hopefully see continued improvements to Ryzen gaming performance across the board. But that doesn’t mean that AMD is completely off the hook with regards to performance improvement and bug fixes.
AMD’s Generic Encapsulated Software Architecture (AGESA) microcode is responsible for initializing the processor cores and memory on AMD x86-64 systems during boot, and the company is now sending out AGESA 1.0.0.4 to its board partners to incorporate into production EFI/BIOS files. Once manufacturers add their "secret sauce" to AGESA 1.0.0.4, you’ll be able to flash your motherboards and receive the following updates:
- DRAM latency has been reduced by six nanoseconds in an effort to improve performance on “latency-sensitive” applications.
- The FMA3 bug that we highlighted last week that can cause system crashes has been addressed.
- An “overclock sleep bug” that would incorrectly report processor frequency when exiting S3 sleep has been corrected.
- The Ryzen Master Overclocking Utility will not require users to enable the High-Precision Event Timer.
According to AMD's Robert Hallock, Ryzen owners can expect to see new BIOSes with these fixes enabled in early April. Moving forward, AMD will issue AGESA 1.0.0.5 in May which will focus on enhancing performance with overclocked DDR4 memory.
