Radeon RX 9070 Flashed With XT BIOS Scores A 25% Performance Boost

A Radeon subreddit user revealed that their PowerColor Reaper Radeon RX 9070 had been flashed with the RX 9070 XT vBIOS, which boosted performance by up to 25% in some synthetic benchmarks. In Cyberpunk 2077 with "a mix of ray-tracing-settings enabled", gains were limited to just 8-12% over the stock RX 9070. These gains are still quite impressive, though, putting practical performance improvements well in line with the more expensive RX 9070 XT. Since the two cards are so closely-specced, with the 9070 XT only having 12.5% more graphics cores, these are superb numbers for an RX 9070 without any hardware modification. These numbers are also in line with prior examples of non-XT AMD cards being flashed with the corresponding XT vBIOS, providing results similar to overclocking with less hassle and more reliability.


So, what does this mean for the AMD Radeon RX 9070 and those looking to buy one, or owners who want to try this out? Owners of RX 9070 GPUs are only advised to tryout BIOS flashing if their cards include some kind of vBIOS switch, or if you have another spare GPU available to recover from a failed or incompatible flash. Reddit user u/noVa_realiZe notes in his original post that he took a risk by performing this software modification on a GPU without a vBIOS switch, but it did pay off with higher performance and, of course, higher power consumption as well. Fortunately, this version of the mod does seem to be in a more stable form than the version we covered back in April, now provided by Benik3 on Overclock.net. That said, we also claim no responsibility for a potentially bricked GPU if you do attempt this for yourself.

For those who perform it and succeed, though, rejoice! You're now in the same club as RX Vega 56 users who did the very same trick with a Vega 64 vBIOS, RX 5600 users who did it with 5600 XT, and so on.