Earlier today, we covered AMD's Ryzen chipset driver 7.02.13.148, which packs several new programs aimed at improving application compatibility and Microsoft Pluton support, among others.
While browsing, Neowin noticed that the company has put up a new support document on its website that shares information related to UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) support on its newest RX 9000 series graphics cards.
AMD unveiled its new 9070 series GPUs last week to take on Nvidia's RTX 5070/Ti cards. The initial reception so far seems to be positive as the firm is promising to offer close to RTX 5070 Ti levels of performance at just over the price of a 5070. Aside from gaming, AI / ML and media encoding/decoding performance is also said to be improved greatly.
In the new document about UEFI support, AMD has stated that Radeon GPUs 9000 series onwards will officially support only UEFI mode and thus if your system is configured to use legacy BIOS or CSM (compatibility support module), it may not work and could fail to boot.
The requirement is similar to Windows 11's which makes UEFI / Secure Boot mandatory and is done to enhance OS security. Aside from security, there are other benefits of UEFI like Fast Boot. AMD explains:
Compared to the older “legacy” BIOS firmware, UEFI firmware offers many new and useful features, including:
- Greatly improved security
- Fully specified interfaces that ensure interoperability and testability
- Dependable firmware updates from the internet with minimal user interaction
- Support for hard drives larger than 2.2TB
- Support for many new types of PC hardware, including NVMe SSD boot support
- Windows® Secure Boot for malware prevention
- Faster shutdown, startup, sleep, and resume times
To fully leverage the benefits of UEFI, only UEFI Mode will be officially supported starting from the AMD RDNA™ 4 generation of graphics cards (Radeon™ RX 9000 Series Graphics and later).
AMD also reminds us about ReSizable BAR also called Smart Access Memory in the case of Radeon as a benefit of UEFI.
It has also been hinted that there could be performance and compatibility issues if users do not have UEFI firmware enabled on their systems, as it writes:
It is important for your PC to be configured for UEFI Mode to ensure optimal compatibility, performance, and user experience with your AMD Radeon™ RX 9000 Series and newer graphics cards.
This means such unsupported devices running Windows 11 without UEFI / Secure Boot will not work optimally with a Radeon 9000 series graphics card, and hence you will be better off upgrading to a new PC.
As a trivia, if you are wondering whether your current graphics card's VGA BIOS (vBIOS) comes with a UEFI module, you can use TechPowerUp's GPU-Z to find that as it contains a small checkbox with that information.
12 Comments - Add comment