Nvidia GeForce RTX 40x0 rumors and speculation

[homerdog]

Bios was not optimized ...

BIOS Update for Enhanced Performance MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER Series Graphics Cards​

Hmm I wonder what they changed.

 

[DegustatoR]

Doesn't have to be as the 16GB 4060ti also shows, but the reality of Nvidia's product segmentation indicates that widening the bus was the only way you were going to get more than 12GB in this price class currently. The only other way would be to go clamshell and bump it up to 24gb, which was obviously never in the cards as that would throw the whole stack in disarray.

Making a wider bus is even more expensive than just putting twice the chips in a "clamshell" way. So all in all this shouldn't be a "preferred solution".

Thankfully G7 will kinda solve this finally by providing 1.5x memory chip density steps.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Hmm I wonder what they changed.

It's actually a good question. I'm actually not certain what is contained in a videocard bios that would affect performance. I would guess all of the voltage to frequency curve stored in bios? Should have I would guess all of the VRAM timings, frequency, voltage etc are. Is there other firmware on a gpu, or is most stuff contained within the driver? All of the software to drive the front-end should be in the driver, no? BIOS would have more general stuff like identifiers and interfaces for the drivers, no?

 

[homerdog]

It's actually a good question. I'm actually not certain what is contained in a videocard bios that would affect performance. I would guess all of the voltage to frequency curve stored in bios? Should have I would guess all of the VRAM timings, frequency, voltage etc are. Is there other firmware on a gpu, or is most stuff contained within the driver? All of the software to drive the front-end should be in the driver, no? BIOS would have more general stuff like identifiers and interfaces for the drivers, no?

Some speculation was that it was power related but tests I saw showed it running 285W like normal. Not sure about clockspeeds but IIRC they weren't out of spec.

 

[DavidGraham]

It's actually a good question. I'm actually not certain what is contained in a videocard bios that would affect performance.

Several years ago, we had a similar situation with the RX 5600XT, but it was quite different, as the release BIOS for the card had lower memory clocks (12Gbps) which was lower than what AMD specified, AMD then rectified the situation with a new BIOS to up the clocks to 14Gbps.

This time, it seems the MSI 4070TiS boards were experiencing a power problem that reduced the GPU boost clocks, according to TPU.

Interestingly, between BIOS updates, MSI never changes the rated boost clock (always 2610 MHz), the power limit wasn't increased either (always 285 W)

"Still the GPU frequency increased. I did some quick testing and it seems that something else on the PCB was drawing excess power, which left less power for the GPU, which meant it ran into the power limit earlier and couldn't boost higher.

MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super Ventus 3X Review

The MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super Ventus 3X comes a triple-slot, triple-fan cooler that achieves excellent noise levels. Unfortunately the card required two BIOS updates to bring it closer to expected performance, and the story might not be over yet.

www.techpowerup.com