A new tool that circulates in online forums could help you coax more performance out of your AMD Radeon graphics card bu unlocking the disabled cores of the Hawaii, Tonga and Fiji GPUs. The software is a potentially risky way to unleash some of the Compute Units locked down before shipping on Fiji-based Radeon R9 Fury Air graphics cards-which would unlock extra performance in your graphics card. The tool may also work on some Hawaii- and Tonga-based cards.

Some GPUs are inevitably damaged or just end up defective rigth after production.
The defective hardware (Compute Units, in this case) are then disabled, and these "cut-down" GPUs are then used in a less powerful graphics card. Thus, a GPU that would be defective on a Radeon Fury X (which has 64 Compute Units) become the guts behind the air-cooled, step-down Radeon Fury (which rocks 56 Compute Units).

But still, there can be some fine CUs in the step-down card. Sometimes those CUs are disabled either physically or just locked down with software in order to bring the GPU in line with the graphics card’s specs. This hack relies on unlocking software-disabled CUs, if there are any.

The hack uses two basic components. First, there’s a little utility dubbed Cuinfo from Overclock user Tx12. The utility works in concert with another tool, dubbed Memory Info, to tease out information about active and inactive compute units on AMD cards, and whether there’s a chance of unlocking some extra power.

The second part requires tinkering with your BIOS and extracting files from programs such as GPU Tweak II or the R9 Fury Bios update toolkit, as well as using Cuinfo’s companion "AtomTool" utility.

Be aware that the tricky procedure could end up bricking your system or trashing your graphics card.