On March 19, news emerged that upgrading graphics cards with larger memory capacity isn't a big deal anymore. The team led by Paulo Gomes has taken things to the next level by unlocking the full memory bus width of the RX 5600 XT graphics card. They didn't stop there; they also upgraded its memory and overclocked it.
The RX 5600 XT was launched in January 2020, utilizing the first-generation RNDA architecture with a Navi 10 XLE GPU core and 2304 stream processors. It originally came with a 192-bit memory bus width and 6GB of GDDR6 memory.
Interestingly, its higher-tier counterpart, the RX 5700 XT, features a full 256-bit memory bus width and 8GB of capacity, while the workstation-class Radeon Pro 5700 XT even boasts 16GB.
Paulo Gomes utilized a Radeon RX 5600 XT from XFX and unveiled the blocked 64-bit bus width by injecting hexadecimal input commands into the memory BIOS. He experimented with four different memory capacities – 6GB, 8GB, 12GB, and 16GB – and tested them using Unigine SuperPosition at 1080p Extreme settings.
Firstly, doubling the capacity to 12GB while keeping the bus width unchanged resulted in identical performance, with a 14% improvement achievable through overclocking.
Secondly, unlocking the bus width and increasing the capacity to 8GB led to an 11% performance boost.
Thirdly, with the bus width unlocked and capacity expanded to 16GB, performance also increased by 11%. With deep overclocking, the performance gain reached 29%, nearly matching that of an RX 6600 XT.
Clearly, for older cards like the RX 5600 XT, simply increasing memory capacity yields no tangible benefits. Unlocking the bus width proves useful, with overclocking remaining the most effective measure.
The next question: should we consider unlocking the RX 7700 XT next?
