Yes after the worldwide release of the AMD Vega 56 Graphics Card it was just a short waiting game until someone would try to flash the Vega 64 Bios to a Vega 56. This has always been done with AMD Cards shortly after their release and just like then it still boosts the Power of the cheaper graphics cards. Sadly it isn’t possible to activate the deactivated Shader Caches like on some early AMD RX 290 GPU and turn them into an RX290X but it seems that this isn’t even needed.
Picture by Techreport.com
Thanks to a User over at Chiphell who managed to actually get a Vega 56 and also flashed a Vega 64 BIOS to it, we know now that this can turn a Vega 56 into the good Bang for the Buck card that the Vega 64 never was. According to the 3DMark Firestrike Benchmark the User ran, a Vega 56 with a Vega64 BIOS is only around 2% slower than a real Vega64 GPU and with a bit of overclocking it can even surpass a Reference Vega 64. As you can see from the Picture the Graphic-chip runs with up to 1.630MHz instead of the stock 1..590MHz and the HBM2 VRAM runs with up to 945MHz instead of the Stock 800MHz.
In the following picture you can see the Difference between a Stock Vega 56, the Vega 56 with a Vega 64 BIOS, a Reference Vega 64 and on the right side a Vega 56 with a Vega 64 BIOS overclocked.
This is quite an interesting “Bios-Mod” which allows the cheaper Vega 56 to compete with a GTX1080 and actually be a Rival to it from both a Performance and Money perspective. I hope to see more Tests done with this soon since I wonder how good it actually competes against a GTX 1070 and GTX1080 and how much Power it draws as well as how much Heat it generates. If you want to take a look at the original Thread you can find it here.
Source: Gamestar.de (german)