For more downloads go to the Drivers and downloads. This package provides the driver for AMD Radeon HD 6950 and is supported on XPS Desktop and Alienware Desktop models that are running the following Windows Operating System: Windows 7-64 bit. Fixes & Enhancements. Just view this page, you can through the table list download AMD Radeon HD 6970 Graphics drivers for Windows 10, 8, 7, Vista and XP you want. Here you can update AMD drivers and other drivers. Driver DR is a professional Windows drivers download site, it supplies all devices for AMD and other manufacturers.
Date: 2010-12-26 21:12:29 |
Introduction
A few weeks ago AMD released the Radeon HD 6970 and Radeon HD 6950. Both cards are based on AMD's new Cayman core which is their first graphics processor to use a VLIW4 shader configuration.Just like on all other similar products, AMD's two Cayman variants, called Cayman Pro and Cayman XT, are based on the exact same GPU silicon. The model variant a GPU chip becomes is decided after the die is produced, at some point before it is put on the card. Creating new SKUs from the same silicon by locking features has been common practice in the industry since at least the Radeon 9500 in 2002.
This article is to unlock the Radeon HD 6950. The HD 6970 has nothing that can be unlocked.
Please
The picture above shows the disabled HD 6950 shaders in red. When unlocked, these deactivated units become active, resulting in a substantial performance increase.
AMD has two methods of locking the shader count on all of their recent GPUs. The first one relies on fuses inside the GPU, or on the substrate - a mechanism similar to Intel's multiplier locking. It is not reversible as far as we know. The second mechanism is the one we are interested in, AMD can configure the VGA BIOS in a way that it disables extra shaders, in addition to the ones disabled via the on-die fuses. This method is mostly used to create engineering samples or reviewer cards that match the target specifications. Usually production cards come with the shader count configured in the fuses, so that it can not be changed.
Apparently currently shipping Radeon HD 6950 cards from all manufacturers - which actually are all the same card with different sticker - have their shaders locked via the BIOS method, so we can exploit it easily.
Unlocking the shaders
Unlocking the additional shaders is done by flashing the card with a HD 6970 BIOS. You can find a few in our VGA BIOS collection. Any of these BIOSes will work on any reference design HD 6950 card. You could use the ASUS BIOS which comes with higher clocks & Overdrive limits and enables voltage changes via SmartDoctor, or stick with one of the reference BIOSes in case you are afraid the clocks might be too high.
I will describe the method for flashing from within Windows, which is safe enough on these cards because of the dual BIOS feature that enables easy recovery.
- Grab ATI Winflash from here (32 & 64-bit).
- Download HD 6970 BIOS. The Sapphire one I linked to will work on all reference design cards from any vendor.
- Make sure the BIOS switch on the card is set to the 1 position (pictured further down if you don't know where it is).
- Run ATI Winflash, click Save to save your BIOS, so you have a backup in case something goes wrong.
- Load the HD 6970 BIOS into Winflash by clicking Load Image, followed by Program.
- Let the flashing process complete and reboot your system.
- Check the shader count using GPU-Z, it should show 1536. Make sure you use version 0.5.0 or newer, the official 0.4.9 version does not support HD 6900 Series properly. If you see a shader count of 1600, your GPU-Z version is outdated.
- To ensure maximized performance open Catalyst Control Center, go to the Overdrive tab and set the PowerTune slider to the +20% setting. The 'Testing' section of this article has more data on that.
- Check stability in Windows desktop applications and games.
Update: I have uploaded a pack of all the files required together with some batch files to ease the process for less experienced users. You can download it here, please report success or any issues with the scripts in the comments for this article.
Update 2: Above method is only for 2 GB HD 6950 reference design cards. If you have a custom design or 1 GB card, then use RBE to modify your existing BIOS. Save the BIOS from your card, load it into RBE, enable the shader unlock option on the last tab, then flash that modified BIOS to the card instead of the one downloaded from this page.
Feel free to post in the discussion thread for this article if you need additional assistance with the flashing process.
Testing
We can see that enabling the shaders without any clock increases improves performance. Once the clock speeds are adjusted to match the HD 6970, the card effectively performs just as well as a full blown Radeon HD 6970.
I did some additional power consumption tests and it seems that AMD's PowerTune power limiting system does not get 'upgraded' by the BIOS flash. We see that even when modded, the HD 6950 (at HD 6970 shaders and clocks) runs into the PowerTune limit earlier than the regular HD 6970 which results in reduced power draw but also reduced performance in Furmark. With a power consumption of 202 W, the modded HD 6950 is well below the 225 W specification limit of the HD 6950 power configuration.
Once we up the power limit in Catalyst Control Center by +20%, we see that the modded HD 6950 draws 252 W, which exceeds its specification (225 W) by 27 W. This move also improves rendering performance by a good deal, so I would recommend it to all users who perform this mod and have a half-decent power supply. Going 12% beyond the specified power limit will not have any ill effects on your hardware and is well covered by manufacturing tolerances and overspeccing, but it reduces the possibility of stuttering or other performance slowdowns caused by AMD PowerTune.
What if something goes wrong?
So you flashed the BIOS and your card doesn't work for one reason or the other?![Specs Specs](https://imagescdn.tweaktown.com/content/4/1/4155_06_sapphire_radeon_hd_6950_2gb_dirt_3_edition_video_card_review.jpg)
If your card boots fine but does not work reliably in 3D, you can just boot the card and flash back the original BIOS of your card (that's why you should always save your BIOS before doing any flashing experiments.
In case your card does not boot at all you can use AMD's new backup BIOS feature:
![Radeon Radeon](/uploads/1/2/6/3/126369348/518432587.jpg)
- Set the BIOS switch (pictured above) in the 2 position to enable the recovery BIOS and restart the computer. This will let you boot the card without problems.
- Boot into Windows/DOS prompt and get ready to flash the card - do not start the flashing process just yet.
- Set the BIOS switch in the 1 position with the system running and ready to flash.
- Flash your saved BIOS to the card.
- Reboot, done.
Test Results
(Last updated March 28th)Manufacturer | Cards tested | Unlocks and works fine | Unlocks but rendering errors | Does not unlock |
AMD | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
ASUS | 40 | 39 | 1 | 0 |
Club3D | 21 | 20 | 0 | 1 |
Diamond | 8 | 7 | 1 | 0 |
Gigabyte | 48 | 48 | 0 | 0 |
HIS | 71 | 70 | 1 | 0 |
MSI | 27 | 26 | 1 | 0 |
PowerColor | 76 | 73 | 3 | 0 |
Sapphire | 242 | 230 | 12 | 0 |
XFX | 146 | 143 | 3 | 0 |
VTX3D | 11 | 10 | 1 | 0 |
Visiontek | 5 | 5 | 0 | 0 |
AMD HD3D
All new is AMD HD3D - it is comparable to NVIDIA's 3D Vision and thus brings 3D display support for games, movies and videos to the AMD Radeon lineup of graphics cards. This of course will require separate 3D Goggles. HD3D includes support for Blu-ray in 3D third-party 3D applications.
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The new implementation is very tricky and in it's default setup, far far away from what NVIDIA's does (and I do mean that in a negative way). Now, 3D Blu-ray support will only need you to have the right hardware (glasses, graphcis card, 3D TV/monitor HDMI 1.4a cable) and a software playback solution supporting it.
3D Gaming wise.. AMD waved everything away, and that's where we think AMD HD3D is going to fail.
Windows iso download tools free. There are no kits, there is no real driver support within the Catalyst drivers. You can play games in 3D yet you'll need to actively get support for this yourself. Meaning AMD handed out 3D game support to 3rd party vendors. To get 3D Game support you must buy software from a company like DDD (Dynamic Digital Depth), the software implementation costs 50 USD, this will allow you to play games in 3D. Unfortunately these known methods in the past always have proven to be a little icky with lack of native game support. Next to that you'll need to seek and purchase a 3D Monitor with goggles and/or find a kit that provides these.
We're sure that the actual 3rd party vendors really like this as it will boost their sales, we however doubt very much the end-user will share that sentiment as well.
Universal Video Decoder 3.0
UVD, short for Universal Video Decoder, synonym to the video processors embedded into the GPU of the graphics card. With proper 3rd party software like WinDVD or PowerDVD or the free Media Player Classic you can enable support for UVD which provides hardware acceleration for media content like MPEG2, H.264 and VC-1 high definition video formats used by Blu-ray.
In short, this feature allows the video processor in the GPU to apply hardware acceleration and video processing functions while keeping power consumption & CPU utilization low on your movies and video's.
That means a low CPU utilization whilst scoring maximum image quality. Over the years this engine has advanced and it's really not massively different opposed to the older UVD engines but we do see some new tweaks. Dual stream decoding was already introduced in UVD2 So example, if you playback a Blu-ray movie and simultaneously want to see a director's commentary (guided by video) you can now look at both the movie and in a smaller screen see the additional content (like picture-in-picture). Obviously this is Blu-ray 2.0 compatibility here, and the additional content is an actual feature of the movie. But definitely fun to see.
UVD 3.0 allows for
- Hardware acceleration decode of two 1080P HD streams
- Compatible with Windows Aero mode - playback of HD videos while Aero remains enabled
- Video gamma - independent gamma control from Windows desktop.
- Brighter whites - Blue Stretch processing increases the blue value of white colors for bright videos
- Dynamic Video Range - Controls levels of black and white during playback
Dynamic Contrast Enhancement will improve the contrast ratios in videos in real-time, on the fly. It's a bit of a trivial thing to do, as there are certain situations where you do not want your contrast increased.
Another feature is Dynamic Color Enhancement. It's pretty much a color tone enhancement feature and will slightly enforce a color correction where it's needed. We'll show you that in a bit as I quite like this feature; it makes certain aspects of a movie a little more vivid. New in UVD3 is now managing entropy and bit stream support for MPEG2 and MPEG4 DiVX/xVID movies, and also there is of course hardware support for Blu-Ray 3D's multi-view codec. Have a peek at the above block diagram demonstrating that.
To be able to playback high-def content you'll still need software like WinDVD or PowerDVD, a HD source (Blu-ray player) and a HDCP capable monitor or television.
For those interested in MKV / x.264 GPU based content acceleration, playback and image quality enhancements, please read this guide we have written. We spotted this lovely little free application to manage this.
Bitstreaming audio
Directly tied to the UVD3 engine is obviously also sound. AMD's Radeon series 3000, 4000, 5000 and now 6000 cards can pass lossless sound directly through the HDMI connector. This has been upgraded as it's now possible to have 7.1 channel lossless sound 192kHz / 24-bit. The HDMI audio output follows HDMI standard 1.4a and supports Dolby True HD and DTS-HD audio. Obviously there is also support for standard PCM, AC-3 and DTS. HDMI 1.4a allows bitrates up to 65Mbps and 3DTV.
So with an AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series video card, all you need to do is install the card into your motherboard and connect it to your receiver with an HDMI cable. As the AMD Radeon HD 6870 or AMD Radeon HD 6850 card removes the need for a separate sound card.
Requirements
- Playback software , say CyberLinks PowerDVD 9 or newer
- AV receiver that supports Blu-ray player support Dolby TrueHD / DTS-HD Master Audio (HDMI v1.3 compliant)
- Two HDMI cables (male to male connectors, rated at 225MHz or higher)
- Appropriate speaker cables for your surround sound speaker system
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HDMI 1.4a - HDMI has been updated to the latest version 1.4a, which was released last March. 1.4a adds support for the two mandatory 3-D format (Side-by-Side Horizontal & Top-and-Bottom), which was dropped from the original 1.4 version. So supported are all the new 3D TVs and for the geeks, the new HDMI Frame packing format.