After reports first surfaced regarding the lack of UEFI support from the new Radeon VII graphics card (with an ASRock BIOS update the first to address the issue), AMD has announced the release of a new BIOS update for AIB partners to add this UEFI GOP support to the card.
The statement from AMD, via TechPowerUp:
"AMD has released a BIOS for the Radeon VII with UEFI GOP included for our AIB partners. We will also make a one click installable BIOS available to end users via AMD.com. We do not expect gaming performance differences between the non UEFI BIOS and the UEFI GOP included BIOS, although the non UEFI BIOS may experience slower boot times from cold boot."
AMD specifically mentions that performance will not be impacted with the new BIOS, though boot times should improve slightly with the card no longer causing CSM to be enabled, which also broke the secure boot process. The one-click updater for owners of any Radeon VII will be available directly from AMD, and I will update our review sample when that becomes available.
In other Radeon VII news, the launch of the latest Radeon Pro driver (Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 19.Q1 WHQL) includes some limited support for consumer Radeon cards – including Radeon VII, though not available at launch as reported by AnandTech this morning:
Image via AnandTech
"Under the program, certain Radeon consumer cards, including R5 300, R7, and RX series products will be able to install the Radeon Pro drivers. These products, in turn will be able to access certain professional features of the Radeon Pro drivers, but lack the all-critical certifications and optimizations that typically set the Pro drivers apart."
The lack of workstation optimizations make this less attractive for owners of Radeon VII, though it makes sense as otherwise there would be even less differentiation between the latest Radeon flagship and its workstation counterpart (Radeon Instinct MI50).
What the actual heck…..
CSM
What the actual heck…..
CSM is supposed to be deprecated and no longer available on new boards. How can they seriously launch a non-uefi card in 2019? Absolutely ridiculous. Some boards these days won’t even boot non-uefi hardware. As they obviously already found out. You’d think this would be a Windows hardware requirement at this point and required for certification.
The big question for Radeon
The big question for Radeon VII is SR-IOV support and also someone needs to ask AMD their rough timeline for any Vega 20 Based Radeon Pro WX(Formally branded as FirePro) GPU SKUs release.
Currently the only Vega 20 based products are the Radeon Instinct MI50/MI60(AI/compute SKUs) and the Radeon VII consumer variant. I’d exepect that any Vega 20 based Radeon Pro WX Professional Graphicis workstation oriented SKUs will have all the features listed checkmarked while being a bit more affordabble than the Radeon Instinct MI60/MI50 pricing. Maybe the Radeon Pro “WX” Branded Pro Graphics Workstation SKUs will have less 64 bit DP FP enabled to offer more affordable Professional/Workstation Graphics Only oriented solutions because the Radeon Instinct MI50/MI60 AI/Compute SKUs are a bit too close to Nvidia’s pricing for my wallet.
AMD has done a terrible job in designing and providing for its web accessable CPU/GPU Data-Sheet specifcations and technical product documantation and that really needs to change before AMD will be taken more seriously.
AMD’s relevent xGMI per Vega 20 based product explicit support[Yes or No or pending] needs to be one of the Feature Sets added to that table listed above along with SR-IOV/other support [Yes or No or pending] for all Vega 20 based GPU SKUs consumer or professional! AMD really needs to up its whitepaper output and also keep the links to any current/older whitepapers from becoming lost on its website.
That one Vega 15 page whitepaper’s link has become lost and just deadends to AMD’s general Radeon website and not the actual PDF. But Thanks to wikichip that PDF is mirrored but it took some searching to find in Google what with most of the search hits leading to that original dead end link.
AMD you really need to have a more professional techncal related website that’s kept apart from that marketing oriented abomination that currently exists in such a failed state for anyone needing the full and complete technical information that is necessary to making an informed purchasing decision.