When AMD first indicated that it locked the power play tables (opens in new tab) on its latest Radeon RX 7000-series graphics processors a month ago, it meant one popular overclocking method was not supported at the time. Now, it looks like AMD has completely locked down manipulations of the power play tables with its RDNA 3 GPUs. That means the More Power Tool utility (opens in new tab) will not be able to support the new cards, and overclocking will be essentially limited to AMD’s Adrenalin software.
“[When it comes to power play tables], pretty much everything is double and triple secured,” one of the More Power Tools developers wrote, reports CapFrameX. “[To make things work,] we would have to rewrite firmware and drivers, and we cannot do that. Not even under Linux. So, there will be no MPT for RDNA3. AMD really screwed it up this time.”
AMD’s Radeon RX 7900-series graphics boards are among the best graphics cards money can buy today, so it’s no surprise that enthusiasts may want to push them to their limits. For now, they won’t be able to do so without tools like MPT. It remains to be seen how significantly it will affect their market popularity and AMD’s GPU market share, but certainly such limitations will decrease their adoption by enthusiasts.
Using software like More Power Tool allows users to increase voltages and optimize the voltage curve for better overclocking, bypassing firmware limitations. This can result in higher clocks and more stable overclocking, assuming that there’s sufficient cooling. But with RDNA 3 AMD decided to change the way GPU power play tables can be altered, which renders programs like MPT useless. Apparently, there is no way to add RDNA 3 support to More Power Tools unless AMD changes its mind and allows developers to do so.
In fact, even a ‘simple’ firmware update (to alter voltages and/or allow bypassing AMD-set limitations using software) does not work with Radeon RX 7000-series GPUs, as firmware flashing is controlled by AMD’s platform security processor.
“Incidentally, firmware flashing is also controlled via PSP, and we can no longer easily hack AMD software to enable you to flash it,” the developer said. “Seems to only work with an external programmer, so now you now pay for your power limits and features, but cannot change or activate them afterwards.”
