We recently posted a news item discussing issues with AMD's 16.7.3 driver update, pushed live a few days ago. Among other problems – mostly instability, crashing, and screen flickering – owners of AMD RX 480 cards noticed a reduction in memory overclock potential on their video cards.
The maximum permissible memory overclock mysteriously changed from 2250MHz to 2050MHz with the new drivers. In our news post and accompanying video, we advised users wait to upgrade drivers (for a number of reasons), and also noted that this 200MHz limit reduction didn't really impact gaming performance in any meaningful way – just the “fun” of overclocking. And so the issue was minor in the face of the driver's more severe crashing/flickering issues, as we saw it, though we did seek an explanation from AMD as to the GPU memory overclock change.
That explanation was, for the most part, “we're looking into it.” GamersNexus has finally received word back and have a publishable statement that has been cleared by AMD:
“The fix is coming in our next hotfix driver (which is coming very shortly).”
That's it. That's what we've got – but it's enough to know that the imposed change may have been a mistake or bug, and it sounds as if the memory OC limitation will be reversed or further modified by the driver team. We do not have a date on the arrival of the hotfix.
If you're on 16.7.2, stay there a little bit longer. Note that most of the severe issues were found on our RX 480.
Here's the rest of the week's news, other than the RX 470:
Host: Steve “Lelldorianx” Burke
Video: Andrew “ColossalCake” Coleman
