Radeon RX 9070 With XT BIOS Mod Enables Faster Clocks For Big Gains

It used to be pretty commonplace, once upon a time; we could flash a different or modified firmware to our graphics cards in search of higher performance than was possible with the stock code. GPU companies started encrypting their firmware, though, and that mostly put the kibosh on that. Not entirely though, it seems, as an enthusiast from Germany has managed to flash a Radeon RX 9070 XT BIOS to his "non-XT" card, with impressive results.

Posting over on the PCGamesHardware forums, user "Gurdi" has been exploring possible overclocks of the Radeon RX 9070. The specific model that he's working with is the ASUS Prime RX 9070 XT OC, but the card is still limited by the lower 220-watt power limit of the Radeon RX 9070. By flashing the BIOS from the ASUS Prime Radeon RX 9070 XT OC, he's able to unlock the power limit up to that card's 304-watts, and thus increase clock rates, too.


From there, he can do some manual overclocking and end up with performance results that are shockingly similar to those achieved by the real Radeon RX 9070 XT. That's despite the fact that his Radeon RX 9070 is missing some core components that a real RX 9070 XT would have: namely, eight compute units comprising 512 shaders, 32 texture units, eight ray accelerators, and 16 AI accelerators.

Crucially, though, the RX 9070 has the exact same number of render output units (ROPs), the same memory bandwidth (640 GB/sec), and the same 64MB of infinity cache compared to the "XT" version. This means that in games which aren't bound by texture performance, shader compute, or ray-tracing capability, the biggest difference in the two cards is the clock rate. Matching up the clock rates results in similar performance.


Unsurprisingly, Gurdi's modified Radeon card is putting up superior performance to basically every other Radeon RX 9070, at least in 3DMark, with the app describing his scores as "Legendary"—or "Legendär", since it's the German version of the app. Not that's relevant to his outstanding performance, of course. His score in the "Port Royal" ray-tracing test is better than the best GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER results, and sits pretty among many RTX 4080 scores. Not bad for a $549 MSRP AMD GPU.

If you're keen to try the mod yourself, you may want to hold off for a bit because Gurdi is still suffering some stability problems—not in games, but while idle on the desktop. That's likely due to the card applying RX 9070 XT power management values to the RX 9070 GPU, which is slightly different in terms of hardware. The community over there is working to get this figured out; if you'd like to help, or simply track their progress, head over to PCGamesHardware and check out the thread. You'll need to bring a translator if you don't read German, though.