What the modding community is doing with AMD BC-250 cards is crazy. These boards are actually the chips (APUs) created for the PlayStation 5, but they ended up being reused in 2022 inside cards made only for cryptocurrency mining.
When the mining business collapsed, they were left forgotten on the second-hand market for just over $100. Today, hardware enthusiasts are bringing them back to do what they know best: turn them into Linux gaming consoles.
AMD BC-250
The work behind this is huge. The community not only managed to fully unlock the hardware, going from 6 to 8 Zen 2 CPU cores and unlocking up to 40 RDNA 2 compute units on the graphics side instead of the 24 enabled by default, but they have now taken a huge step forward in software by optimizing FSR 4.
AMD never designed this GPU to run advanced upscaling algorithms such as FSR 4. However, through a custom DLL compatible with projects such as OptiScaler and Proton on Linux, developers managed to make use of INT8 precision instructions to reduce GPU processing times when running FSR 4.1.1.
The tests speak for themselves. At 1440p resolution, starting from a native base of 960p, the GPU time needed to process the image dropped from 11.51 milliseconds to just 5.92 ms, practically cutting it in half while achieving exactly the same visual quality as the original solution. Even at 1080p, it dropped from 7.13 ms to just 3.93 ms.
With more than 145 custom 3D-printed case designs, custom cooling systems, firmware patches, and optimized operating systems such as Bazzite, the community achieved what seemed inevitable. Those cards secretly created by AMD for the cryptocurrency boom finally ended up fulfilling the goal that the silicon was designed for from the beginning: running video games.
