In an attempt to squeeze more performance out of their GPU, a user on Reddit has successfully flashed the BIOS of a Radeon RX 9070 XT onto their non-XT variant. As per a post by u/noVa_realiZe on the r/Radeon subreddit, they were pretty satisfied with the results, as their PowerColor RX 9070 Reaper gained an uplift of 25% in synthetic benchmarks, and around 8-12% while gaming.
The user notes that they performed the vBIOS flash using an open-source tool published on Overclock.net by user Benik3. If you’re interested in the full flashing process, you can follow the post here. Keep in mind, however, that flashing a GPU with the BIOS of another model may void your warranty and can potentially brick your card.
According to testing done by u/noVa_realiZe, the performance gains from flashing the BIOS were immediately noticeable in synthetic benchmarks. In 3DMark Steel Nomad, the stock non-XT card managed a score of around 5,821, while the same card with the XT BIOS went up to 6,461. After some more tinkering with the voltages and memory clock speeds, the card peaked at 7,277, which is a notable improvement over stock performance.
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The performance uplift is reduced when it comes to actual gaming, though. In Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p with a mix of ray-tracing settings, the undervolted stock card averaged 70 FPS. After flashing and tuning the card, the same setup pushed averages closer to 78 FPS, with noticeable improvements to 1% and 0.1% lows.