A popular method of GPU overclocking is ineffective.
Overclocking expert @Buildzoid1 recently posted on Twitter about his frustration with AMD’s RX 7000 series overclocking capabilities. Apparently, AMD has disabled power play table manipulation on its new GPUs, preventing enthusiasts from modifying their power and frequency curves beyond their official specifications.
So apparently AMD hates overclocking so much that they decided to lock the power play tables on RX 7000. I guess my RTX 2080 will probably get replaced with another Nvidia GPU.
— Buildzoid (@Buildzoid1) December 23, 2022
Power play tables offer an alternative to BIOS modifications or BIOS swaps for modifying the clock speed, power, and voltage behavior of a GPU via the Windows registry. This can be a safer method for running GPUs outside of their official specifications, as it eliminates any risk associated with flashing the BIOS.
Adjusting power play tables – or manipulating the BIOS – has a number of advantages if you are wondering why AMD’s overclocking feature set in the Adrenalin software is insufficient. One is that users can bypass firmware-related GPU hardware limitations and push the hardware to its limits. The voltage/frequency curve must also be optimized for increased efficiency. In either case, it enables extreme overclockers and enthusiasts to fine-tune their GPU’s behavior in a manner inaccessible via standard overclocking software.
Unfortunately, we do not know the precise reason why AMD disabled power play manipulation on its Radeon RX 7000 GPUs, despite the fact that its previous generation cards supported this feature. However, an AMD engineer on Reddit may be able to shed some light on the situation. In a Reddit thread discussing RX 7000’s power consumption issues, user Falk_csgo inquired about GPU overclocking driver limitations; AMD engineer AMD PoolShark28 replied, “Architecturally RDNA3 has some changes to how PPTables are manipulated…”
At the very least, we now know that the RX 7000’s power play tables can be edited and accessed differently than in the RX 6000 series. This is most likely the reason why the power play tables on RX 7000 series were disabled.
Hopefully, this means that AMD will restore access to the power play table at some point in the future. However, we truly do not know.
