All those users who chose to install an AMD RX 460 graphics card in their computer are in luck, not only because of the new drivers, but because from the overclocking.guide environment and more specifically its author, der8auer, has managed to unlock the RX 460 , offering a performance improvement in a free way for users.
The AMD RX 460 is the only graphics card that is based on the Polaris 11 GPU architecture. This graphics card has 896 Stream Processors that allow a theoretical performance close to 2TFLOPS. This graphics card is clocked at 1090MHz and clocked at 1200MHz in Boost mode, with a total of 2GB of GDDR5 VRAM memory. This graphics card also has a variant with 4GB GDDR5.
The process only requires a small firmware update that offers us a performance improvement of 12.5%. This graphics card, through this update, becomes a great option regarding quality / price. Thanks to the update, we will get an extra 8TMU compared to the 56TMU of the graphics card in its current configuration and it has 128 more Stream Processors.
CAUTION: Not all AMD RX460 graphics cards may be able to receive this update and be unlocked. It is also possible that something goes wrong in the BIOS during the firmware update process. If you do, it is at your own risk and expense.
Table of Contents
Update
The list of graphics cards has been updated, with the confirmation of support in the Sapphire RX 460 2GB and the XFX RX 460 Passive Edition 4GB, also we have the HIS RX 460 iCooler OC 2GB, which has not been tested. We will keep updating.
Unlocking process
Unlocking it is a fairly simple task. The reason why this possibility exists or why it does not arrive unlocked as standard is unknown. There are two explanations, which are either not powerful enough as AMD expected or AMD would not have enough chips to make all the RX 460s that would be needed.
Here we bring you only the BIOS update for the Sapphire Nitro 4G graphics card and for the ASUS STRIX O4G. In the media where they have published it, they say that they are working on more tests with more graphics cards and if it works, they will publish the modified BIOS versions. All six tested graphics cards support unlocking.
The first thing to do before starting the unlocking process, we must make a backup copy of the original BIOS, in case something goes wrong. This process can be done using the latest version of the GPU-Z. Once we have the backup made, we will execute the file to unlock the BIOS. This takes a few seconds.
Performance improvement
They have carried out some tests using 3DMark Fire Strike and The Witcher 3. We see in the results that the ASUS STRIX offers a performance increase of around 10% in Witcher 3, while the Nitro improves considerably in the 3DMark Fire Strike, which increases over The 9%.
Conclusion
This improvement sounds interesting, especially since at the level of quality / price the RX 460 is far ahead of the NVIDIA GTX 1050. We do not know if the data is before the driver update or later. If it were before the AMD driver update, the improvement could be brutal, hovering around 20% approximately, if later, it would stay the same, with approximately 9% in general. We will be attentive to bring news about it.