Unleash the full strength of HD 6970M CrossfireX - Hybrid VBIOS to unlock the virtual cores - a new milestone?

You really think with just a tweak of the bios that they can draw out a 25% performance increase with new tech and AMD just what? Ignored their own tech?

No, it's a hoax, as bad as someone advertising an M18X for $300.

 

super excited for this...

edit:but it does sound to good to be true

 

is 6970m BIOS compressed or encrypted?

If not, you can do a simple hex comparison between the stock build of that same ROM and the modified one, when for example the clock speeds are changed there are only a few bits different (if I recall, clock speeds are stored by multiplying by 100, and stored big endian), i.e. 750mhz is stored as 75000 (dec) -> 124F8 (hex little endian) -> F8 24 01 (hex big endian) in the BIOS. If that's the only difference then you know it's hokum

 

Look ! they didn't just modified the bios..
They changed something in the catalyst too
and i dont see anything below OpenGL in my catalyst.
noticed how the texture fillrate boost up along with the shaders ?
(4x = 3840 shaders + 141GTexels/s)



and the latest vbios they used in this screenshot is hybrid A03...

p.s : some1 here already hit P7932 3dmark2011 (with 2720QM CPU + Xfire 6970m) .. so P8496 with 2920XM is even possible without this hybrid bios o__o

 

a bit more interested in what the gpu score for dx11 was..

 

mmm i bet it is a hoax.

HT has nothing to do with the GPU's. Actually i believe that also the OS and the software used must be designed so to take advantage of HT (?)

And last i don't really think that AMD would not have thinked about it in the first place if it was a possibility.

 

I am a little skeptical too but it took time to publish this for the moment all I can say is, until I see it with my own eyes is not true
but it would not surprise me if true

 

You do know that GPU-z simply calculates those values based off the numbers provided right? It is not performance testing the GPU every time you launch it.....

 

also....it didn't seem to fool furmark in the least bit. 23 fps?

 

@scook9 : that's what i was afraid of..
sry i was trying to pointed out the different in the modified catalyst.

his highest benchmark p8496 still can't beat Johnksss ... P8527

 

yea but is he doing it on 6970s ????

 

How do u OC 3.0 or u just mean Turbo Boost ?

 

doesn't matter if it's 6970 or 6990 at this point. dx11 can be tricked so the best trickster wins...lol but with stuff like vantage or furmark...they can not be tricked by system settings or disabling tessellation. hell..everyone loves vantage!

 

This is a hoax. The gpu cannot physically perform twice as fast, its not possible.

 

i'm hoping it's not because that would be one hell of a find, but if it only works on certain things...that would really suck though.

 

I just got the files from Wesley-Alex , anyone wants to flash it? (Use at your own risk , pm me if you need the file. its A01 Ver. not A03 Ver.)

Spoiler

 

will it work on a 6990m?
ill flash the slave with it.
you must have flashed it already...so run vantage.

 

I got that yesterday A01 but if you try to open the .bin with Radeon bios editor it gives error opening I am not going to flash something may brick my cards lol

 

send away. let me have a looksee.

 

Yup , works with 6990 & 6970 , will run some mark later.

Attached files. will remove the attachment in hour. Enjoy~

 

last file http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...-virtual-cores-new-milestone.html#post7872483

 

Didn't expect someone uploaded it on a site , poor Alex.

 

You must put all the files in C drive , and click start.bat

All the chinese words will pop out.

click "y" and enter , do the same 3 times. Glad I know Chinese & Japanese

 

so what about A03 hybrid don't that has better results?

 

yeah i saw that but I was trying to check the bin before I do something but i guess since is an hybrid bios there is no way we can check it

 

from view of gpuz , A03 is better , Improvement of Shaders & Textures.

 

so you flashed this and didn't run not one test to see if it worked?

 

can you show us a screenshoot of the CCC gaming settings and gpuz looks like the guy move the slider to 4x and he got more virtual shaders all this thing is confusing or what

 

no one with 6970m has ran this yet?

 

Anxious to see anyone's result, highly skeptical though

The shader count shown after modding in the first 2 screenshots is sensical, Hyper Threading essentially doubles the amount of computing units exposed to the OS (in this case, it would be double the amount of stream processors exposed to the driver) - 1920 jives with being double the 960 of the 6970.. but then they show in a screenshot 4x the amount of shaders, you wouldn't ever want to do this as the associated overhead involved would more than negate any gains over 2x.

Aside from that, "Stream Processors" are AMD's fancy jargon name for "ALU"s, or " Arithmetic Logic Unit" - one of the main components of a CPU or a GPU.

As I mentioned before, the reason Hyper Threading works is because due to Intel's unusually long (compared to other CPU designs) pipeline, the CPU is at times starved for calculations. To keep the CPU busy at nearer to 100% of the time, a longer pipeline is used so there are always instructions in the queue. Single threads may not generate enough instructions to fill the pipeline entirely, so the processor adds additional logic to treat 2 threads as a single one, stuffing the pipeline.

AMD hasn't had the need to implement HT in it's CPUs due to a much smaller pipeline (see here for a good comparison/explanation: PC Architecture. A book by Michael B. Karbo)

I find it pretty tough to believe that with the level of parallelism in a modern GPU, HT could be a successful approach to attaining higher efficiency, given AMDs history of designing parts specifically so that they don't run into this problem. I should also add that latency is a great concern in GPU calculations, almost certainly the more "real-time" the performance, the better. This especially lends itself towards designing with as short a pipeline as possible.

I could see this being more likely with nVidia's design, featuring a smaller number of "CUDA Processors" which are fewer in number and more powerful, probably featuring a larger pipeline. AMDs design really seems geared towards optimizing out the need for this technology.

I think though, if you look at a game that is heavily reliant on shaders, and completely GPU limited, you would see the GPU utilization at or near 100%, only below 100% in cases where the game is CPU-starved, in which case this "HT-like" technology wouldn't help.. of course, we don't know how the GPU utilization is really measured (do we?), so it could be measured in a way that wouldn't show this deficiency.

I wish the greatest of luck to anyone wanting to try this

 

I was busy , out for lunch and working.

but here you go.

no overclock cpu/gpu.

CC setting all off.

AMD Radeon HD 6970M video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-2920XM Processor,Alienware M18xR1 score: P7221 3DMarks

PS : will try runs again and update 11.8 tonight.

 

Update , Blue Screen while using 11.8 , I think I fried my GPU. lol :S

 

Well, if you get a BSOD after reverting the vBIOS, maybe.. but for now i'd say don't panic

Seemingly underwhelming benchmarks for such a performance boast, i think? What does it compare to your tests before hand? Hopefully you did a test with stock for comparison?

 

4885mhz no cpu oc ?

edit: 4485mhz ?

 

I thought this was more than just a bios update and was supposed to change the control panel as well?
It comes with a 800/1000 oc as well.
The batch file is a bunch of nothing, made to look like it's doing something. All it does is flash the bios to your card(s).

 

For what i can see they just change the clocks with RBE and change the bios name to Hybrid but that's all lol

 

that's all I got out of it too, but I didn't do a hex comparison. I smell hoax...

 

Did anyone do a hex compare to original BIOS it is based on?

If not, can someone please post both modified and stock BIOS of same version to a zip, I could do a compare easily to determine that.. and we can know if it's just some junk or what

 

here you go

 

Looks like stock BIOS for 6990 was used for this hybrid rather than stock BIOS for 6970 as a base. Can someone find that one for comparison? (should be dated 07/18/11)

 

no oc the bus remain 99.98? those core stay at 45 45 45 45. i can't on my m18x now , even I use hd3000 , it keep crushing , no idea what I did. dammit!

 

yeah, i think ill wait on flashing this go round..... still not vantage runs with this. im not a 3dmark11 fan...

and i can do that with that same over clock as well if im not mistaken...but not infront of my machine at the moment.

will rep ya though when i can.

 

I sadly do not have a 6990 bios, hopefully someone else will.

 

if you want i can attach my 6990 vbios from my r3
how come there is no talk about the voltage, wouldn't you think running that many shaders would cause instability in the card especially with an oc without additional voltage.

here is a 6990 vbios:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/tfwjtz

 

that should work

 

attached above

 

Thanks!

Much closer, although this BIOS is dated 04/18/11 rather than 07/18/11, so not the exact same version. Is there perhaps a newer BIOS version floating around? That ones version string reads is 013.012.000.012.040.739, duno what the hybrid one is based on since they overwrote the version string.

At first glance, these are the changed offsets and their (previous, new) hex, dec values:

0xAE70: 0x4C1701 (71500) -> 0x803801 (80000)
0xAE73: 0x905F01 (90000) -> 0xA08601 (100000)
0xAE90: 0x409C00 (40000) -> 0x803801 (80000)
0xAE96: 0xE8034C (4981736) -> 0x4C044C (4981836)
0xAED0: 0x409C00 (40000) -> 0x803801 (80000)
0xF779: 0xFFFFFFFF (4294967295) -> 0x0000008A (2315255808)

i'm not sure on the default clocks, but 715mhz -> 800mhz, 900mhz -> 1ghz overclocks for core, ram?

Other than these changed values, the other major difference is that there's
a large section of the BIOS zeroed out, from 0xF800 to the end (0x1FFF0). Maybe that is the initial contents of memory or something (that must be non-critical to booting, but obviously ends up in a BSOD at some point).. but yeah. The code part of things seems unmodified... and there's no way in heck you're going to implement something like hyperthreading changing just those values above..

Other suspect things are that the date strings are so close:
04/18/11,16:55:32
07/18/11,00:18:32

It seems odd that the version the hybrid BIOS is based on would just-so-happen to be built at the same second (different hour and minute) and same day of the month, but 3 months later..

So if you change those 6 offsets above, the version/date strings (which have no affect on BIOS behavior), and zero out the last 0x107F0 bytes of the file, you've converted the stock dell 6990m vBIOS (posted above) to the hybrid A01 BIOS.

 

someone have a backup of the original 6970m bios? before i attempt to flash? i don't have a usb drive

 

Yes ,
715 to 800.
900 to 1k.

 

I suspect if you were to take the stock 6790 vBIOS and modified offset that matches 0xAE96 above (might not be the same offset since code differs, but i mean the same value) it would show the same shader count, and the rest of it is just malarky