Modders repurpose old mining GPU for gaming
Modders have been experimenting with the AMD BC-250 GPU, a component initially designed for cryptocurrency mining, to turn it into a capable gaming card. The BC-250 was launched a few years ago during the cryptocurrency frenzy and has become an interesting component for those who enjoy Linux and tweaking hardware and software stacks.
The Linux community has been focused on turning the AMD BC-250 into a proper piece of gaming hardware, with recent developments bringing AMD’s frame generation and upscaling to the GPU. The BC-250 was not designed to support these technologies, but developers are making it work anyway.
The AMD BC-250 first appeared in 2022 as part of an Asrock server designed for cryptocurrency mining. Now that mining is no longer fashionable, individual BC-250 cards are commonly found on eBay and other second-hand markets at affordable prices.
The BC-250 silicon is derived from a cut-down version of the GPU used by Sony for the PlayStation 5, code-named Oberon, which is based on the RDNA 2 microarchitecture. This makes the processor relatively powerful by today’s standards.
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Modders and developers have been trying to exploit the BC-250’s architectural capabilities for gaming tasks, and they were eventually able to access all 40 RDNA 2 compute units available on the GPU. Now, the community has turned its attention to the BC-250’s upscaling capabilities.
Developers have shown that the former mining GPU can run the latest version of AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) upscaling and frame generation technology. A new fork of the project has turned FSR 4 into a practical Windows x64 DLL, which can be used with games that natively support FSR or with the upscaler-juggling project OptiScaler.
The new fork, BC250 FSR4 4.0.0-rc9, demonstrates how FSR 4 can significantly improve performance in games running under Linux. The single DLL can reduce the “GPU cost” that comes with 3D rendering, while image quality should stay the same. Results are particularly good at a 2560×1440 resolution, using a 1706×960 “Quality” input resolution.
The developers tested the BC-250 FSR4 DLL under Linux, using only the upscaling part of the FSR 4 tech. Windows support and FSR’s frame generation feature have not yet been tested. In any case, the new tool shows how far some coders, and likely die-hard open-source enthusiasts, are willing to go to repurpose a piece of hardware that was conceived to perform unrelated tasks.
