Flashrom To Support Flashing ATI Graphics Cards

[bridgman]

Interesting!

Makes one wonder, what the motivation is to flash it

I can understand the purpose of coreBoot, if you are Google, but flashing a graphics card BIOS?

Back in the R300 days (and maybe earlier) we shipped some inexpensive cards which used the same GPU chip as more expensive cards but with some of the graphics pipes disabled. The GPUs on those boards were usually ones which failed functional test with all pipes enabled but which passed all the tests with one or more pipes disabled.

Flashing the BIOS allowed you to fool the driver into thinking it was running on a more expensive card, which enabled all the pipes and increased performance, but which often resulted in some corruption and occasional hangs as well. Ever since then, the dream of "flashing the BIOS to make my card run twice as fast" has persisted.

More recently, there were some cases where board manufacturers shipped VBIOS images which had less-than-optimal temp/speed profiles for the fan controllers. In these cases the manufacturers posted BIOS images with improved fan controller profile settings, along with a utility which allowed the BIOS to be re-flashed with the improved profile.

A number of users took advantage of tools which tweaked the clock settings in the BIOS images, allowing them to over-clock the boards further than the manufacturers allowed.

When the 4870 came out a number of owners decided to re-flash their boards without manufacturer support and used an existing flash utility. The result in almost every case was a non-functional board since the 4870 boards used a larger (128KB) ROM. This, in turn, resulted in a rash of reports that new 4870 boards were "failing for no reason" after a few hours use. After a new flash utility was released which programmed the *entire* ROM image the reports of "sudden 4870 death" stopped just as suddenly.

The main point is that flash tools are great for allowing in-the-field updates provided by the manufacturer (ie putting in an image designed for your board), but flashing with the image from even a slightly different board is generally a Bad Thing, and nearly impossible for the driver to code around since the BIOS contents are the driver's only source of information about the hardware on which it is running.

[bugmenot]

I think it is a good thing and if amd does not provide a bios flasher, it's great that other people do. I had problems with an OEM mainboard and flashed a different image, a BIOS from phillips, although i brought the pc in mediamarkt and there war actually a microstar BIOS in it. But this contained many bugs, you cannot imagine how happy I was, if I could flash another image! I hate it to depend on the manufacturer, because they do usually not help in such cases.

If a graphics card manufacturer is too stupid to implement good fan control or power saving, why not flash another image to be happy? Of course it is dangerous, but that's the only way.

[energyman]

well, back in my nvidia days a lot of people with problems solved them by flashing the card's bios...

[Louise]

Back in the R300 days (and maybe earlier) we shipped some inexpensive cards which used the same GPU chip as more expensive cards but with some of the graphics pipes disabled. The GPUs on those boards were usually ones which failed functional test with all pipes enabled but which passed all the tests with one or more pipes disabled.

Flashing the BIOS allowed you to fool the driver into thinking it was running on a more expensive card, which enabled all the pipes and increased performance, but which often resulted in some corruption and occasional hangs as well. Ever since then, the dream of "flashing the BIOS to make my card run twice as fast" has persisted.

More recently, there were some cases where board manufacturers shipped VBIOS images which had less-than-optimal temp/speed profiles for the fan controllers. In these cases the manufacturers posted BIOS images with improved fan controller profile settings, along with a utility which allowed the BIOS to be re-flashed with the improved profile.

A number of users took advantage of tools which tweaked the clock settings in the BIOS images, allowing them to over-clock the boards further than the manufacturers allowed.

So the VBIOS on my Asus graphics card is programmed by Asus, and not ATi?

Does IGP's also have a VBIOS? (Sounds expensive to put a flash inside the Northbridge?)

When the 4870 came out a number of owners decided to re-flash their boards without manufacturer support and used an existing flash utility. The result in almost every case was a non-functional board since the 4870 boards used a larger (128KB) ROM. This, in turn, resulted in a rash of reports that new 4870 boards were "failing for no reason" after a few hours use. After a new flash utility was released which programmed the *entire* ROM image the reports of "sudden 4870 death" stopped just as suddenly.

haha

The main point is that flash tools are great for allowing in-the-field updates provided by the manufacturer (ie putting in an image designed for your board), but flashing with the image from even a slightly different board is generally a Bad Thing, and nearly impossible for the driver to code around since the BIOS contents are the driver's only source of information about the hardware on which it is running.

I will never understand, why someone (today) would want to try and enable extra features on GPU's/CPU's. They are so cheap today, and even thought AMD have planned to release a dual core Phenom, which actually is a quad core Phenom, I would never want to trade a 100% working CPU for a maybe running CPU.

Then there's those that say that it is so easy to enable the extra cores on e.g. a triple core to become a quad core, and AMD wants users to do that. But still, a AM2+ quad core costs almost nothing now a days.

And with the AMD/Intel case yesterday, we might even see even cheaper quad cores due to increased sells

[bridgman]

So the VBIOS on my Asus graphics card is programmed by Asus, and not ATi?

Does IGP's also have a VBIOS? (Sounds expensive to put a flash inside the Northbridge?)

We supply the BIOS code and data tables but the board mfg changes specific data tables to match their board design & preferences.

IGPs also have a VBIOS, but it's stored in the same ROM chip on the motherboard which holds the system BIOS (SBIOS). It's not actually stored inside the Northbridge chip.

[Melcar]

Back in the R300 days (and maybe earlier) we shipped some inexpensive cards which used the same GPU chip as more expensive cards but with some of the graphics pipes disabled. The GPUs on those boards were usually ones which failed functional test with all pipes enabled but which passed all the tests with one or more pipes disabled.

Flashing the BIOS allowed you to fool the driver into thinking it was running on a more expensive card, which enabled all the pipes and increased performance, but which often resulted in some corruption and occasional hangs as well. Ever since then, the dream of "flashing the BIOS to make my card run twice as fast" has persisted.

...

Those where the good ol' days. x800gto -> x850xt. So much awesomeness.

[bridgman]

Yeah, that's what I'm talking about

There was a 4-pipe R300 board which could be reflashed to 8 pipes as well.

[Adarion]

The result in almost every case was a non-functional board since the 4870 boards used a larger (128KB) ROM. This, in turn, resulted in a rash of reports that new 4870 boards were "failing for no reason" after a few hours use.

Heh. Don't tell me there have been people flashing their cards with a more or less obviously inappropriate VBIOS image and then complainig to ATI-AMD their cards would fail.
LOL. I mean, how fresh can people just be?

If I bricked my HW due to my own incompetence I wouldn't dare to complain, I'd rather ask for an advice what could be done to revive it.


How different are VBIOS implementations by the vendors? Is there a generic image/code from ATI/AMD that would work everywhere (like a driver does) or do they really contain a lot of "unique" code? Because then one would have a hard time to try updating some card when the specific vendor won't support in in terms of VBIOS updates. (I'm glad to have my passive Sapphire 3870 and my passive IGPs so I won't run into fan noise problems...)

[energyman]

Adarion you never have been on an overclocker board. Those imbeciles RMA perfectly fine boards because they do not overclock as good as one from another random guy (thus making boards more expensive for everybody). Those idiots flash bios files from different boards&cards to get some mythical bios option or gain a 0.05% increase in superpi or 20 more points in 3dmark. And if they brick it - they complain. Very, very loudly. To the manufacturer. Hardware would be cheaper and the world a better place without this dumb f***s.

[Kano]

Using tools like atitool (win) you can get a vga bios backup for ati cards. nvclock makes a backup for nvidia ones. In case you want to mod it Which i did for a Radeon 9700 back then, you could raise the refresh rates up to 85 hz for vesa modes (good for crt) and oc it by default - could be done with rovclock too, but i wanted more speed before that tool was developed *g*