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.
A hardware comparison finds that Nintendo's Switch 2 and Valve's Steam Deck are closely matched in handheld mode, with the Switch 2's Nvidia Ampere GPU offering a slight graphical edge over the Deck's AMD RDNA 2 chip. The gap widens dramatically when the Switch 2 is docked, boosting its GPU output from about 1.71 to 3.7 TFLOPS, enabling 4K/60fps in titles like Metroid Prime 4, while the Deck sees no docked performance boost. Meanwhile, the Steam Deck's Zen 2 CPU can hit higher clock speeds and it also carries more unified memory, 16GB versus the Switch 2's 12GB.
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.
According to leaker Roland Quandt, AMD is preparing a Ryzen 5 7500 without the 'F' suffix, matching the Ryzen 5 7500F's six-core, twelve-thread design, 3.7GHz base and 5.0GHz boost clocks, 38MB combined cache, and 65W TDP. The only real difference is a basic two-CU RDNA 2 integrated GPU suitable for display output but not gaming, yet the chip is rumored to launch at around 230 Euros ($267), more than double the 7500F's current street price.