GoKawiil
Tech News
A community of Linux modders has been reworking the AMD BC-250, a cheap leftover mining GPU built from a cut-down PlayStation 5 chip, into a functional PC gaming card. The latest breakthrough unlocks all 40 of its RDNA 2 compute units and packages AMD's FSR 4 upscaling and frame generation as a Windows DLL that can be dropped into compatible games.
A community developer has reworked AMD's FSR 4 upscaler to run far more efficiently on the BC-250, a leftover PS5-derived crypto-mining board now being turned into a Linux gaming device. Testing showed 1440p processing time drop from 11.51ms to 5.92ms, with similar roughly 50% gains at 1080p and 4K, while producing output identical to the original shaders. The gains build on earlier Mesa driver work and now shift the optimization into a portable FidelityFX DLL.
The AMD BC-250 is a leftover PlayStation 5 APU that failed console binning standards and was instead sold on mining server boards built by ASRock. With mainstream GPU mining now unprofitable, these boards have flooded the secondhand market for roughly $70-$100, giving hobbyists a full single-board PC with 6 Zen 2 cores, 24 RDNA 2 compute units, and 16GB of shared GDDR6 memory.
A hobbyist bought two ASRock BC-250 mining cards from AliExpress for £126 and £103 respectively, and successfully unlocked all 40 compute units on both despite AMD's binning meant to disable some cores. One card also unlocked all 8 CPU cores, while the other had one faulty core, but both performed well running the gpt-oss-20b language model via llama.cpp, hitting up to 100 tokens per second at 8K context.