It seems AMD have been reading a few websites that broke NDA lift on the GTX 660Ti, as they've confirmed and sent out to reviewers the new HD7950 BIOS. This BIOS is designed to boost the performance of the reference designed HD7950 enough to ensure a victory in benchmarking suites come 7PM tonight (when NDA lifts for the GTX 660Ti).
Unfortunately for AMD, most people received their GTX 660's a while ago, so will have already completed testing, and it won't be until the next round of reviews that we see changes in the HD7950 score.
Regardless of reviewer tactics from AMD, the BIOS is now publicly available for download on many popular tech sites, such as here on TechPowerup. AMD warn that this BIOS update may not work on every card, and should only be attempted if your card has a "dual BIOS" switch (so you have a backup BIOS should the update fail).
It's safe to say if you have a reference designed card the updated BIOS is more than safe to use, though for custom PCB users, please contact your GPU manufacturer before applying the updated BIOS.
Oh yeh, I guess I should explain what the changes to the BIOS were right? Essentially it's a small overclock, with the addition of "PowerTune Boost", essentially copying the Nvidia "GPU Boost" technology on a firmware level.
The reference clock for the HD7950 used to be 800MHz with no boost, now a core clock of 850MHz is the new standard, along with a "boost" clock of 925MHz should the game or application demand such a high clock speed.
In our breif testing this morning, the new BIOS should give the 7950 an average of 10% performance gains across the board, bringing it within 5% of the '7970 reference design - nice!
