AMD FirePro Duel 3GB expected performance?

[DrLemur]

Hi,

While I am fully aware my Mac Pro (6-core 2013) is not a "gaming machine" specifically, I have been wondering at what frame rates for games I should be expecting to achieve on medium - high graphics quality settings. For most games even sitting under the native resolution for my 27' thunderbolt display on medium settings the most I really ever achieve is around 20-40fps depending on what is going on in the game. The highest I've seen it touch is 60fps.

I guess I'm just a bit confused as to what exactly determines fps.. Is it how the game itself was made.. my hardware.. an obscure mixture of both? Also I was never able to understand while playing games using bootcamp under (windows 8.1 Pro) why I need to disable the second GPU entirely or games will underperform or give me these weird jitters and clipping etc.. if I don't. Seems mad to me. That other 3GB GPU so far just seems like a waste of space. Maybe my games and apps are just not built to harness the power of them or my machine just isn't as powerful as I thought. I've even had one game (specifically GTAIV) refuse to run entirely at more than the lowest settings on 800X600 claiming I don't have enough video memory. Honestly been running windows via bootcamp on the iMacs for years with all kinds of games superbly without a hitch and compared to this machine it's really not stacking up. If anyone has had any similar issues or can shed some light on this please let me know. The one thing I haven't tried is running games from my tiny 256GB internal SSD drive rather than the slower external USB2 but that's impossible right now since my internal is full. Does anyone think it's worth me getting a better external drive to run things on and if this is even a factor in improving performance? Don't want to spend out if I'm way off base with my thinking.. Any help or advice very much appreciated. Cheers,

- Dan

 

[N19h7m4r3]

It depends on hardware, drivers, the game engine, and how the game was made.

Some games are very badly made and always run badly, others do better.

I take it you're playing in Windows? If so download the latest AMD Radeon Catalyst drivers for R9 cards, they'll give you a massive performance increase over the stock bootcamp ones. Which is also the reason you get judders with both GPU's on, they rely on XFIRE/Crossfire drivers.

GTA 4 is also one of the worst made games on PC around, still struggling and running badly performance wise.

For reference the FirePro D300's perform about as well as two AMD 7870XT's/R7 270X's.


Also USB2 speeds are dire, a USB 3 external will really help with loading times.

I also suggest you use the search function, there are many gaming related threads for the Mac Pro such as this.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1713198/

 

[DrLemur]

I take it you're playing in Windows? If so download the latest AMD Radeon Catalyst drivers for R9 cards, they'll give you a massive performance increase over the stock bootcamp ones. Which is also the reason you get judders with both GPU's on, they rely on XFIRE/Crossfire drivers.

Thank you! You're the most helpful person I've run into in a long time And yeah running in Windows. I was just wondering if I do install the Catalyst drivers of which you speak do I then need to first uninstall the bootcamp AMD firepro control centre etc? Or just leave it as is. Just wondering if there will be a conflict. (Mac guy here.. know nothing of the PC world really..) Anyway thanks again for the advice and the link. Very helpful. Cheers.

 

[N19h7m4r3]

Thank you! You're the most helpful person I've run into in a long time And yeah running in Windows. I was just wondering if I do install the Catalyst drivers of which you speak do I then need to first uninstall the bootcamp AMD firepro control centre etc? Or just leave it as is. Just wondering if there will be a conflict. (Mac guy here.. know nothing of the PC world really..) Anyway thanks again for the advice and the link. Very helpful. Cheers.

Well once you down load, and run them it should give you the option of a clean install, where it first cleans out the old drivers before proceeding.

 

[DrLemur]

Updated the drivers and it fixed the jitteryness clipping thing with some games like Skyrim but not others. However when I turn the second GPU off this time everything works about 80% better and faster than before so even if I have to turn it off for certain games this helped a whole lot. Thanks a whole lot!

 

[N19h7m4r3]

Updated the drivers and it fixed the jitteryness clipping thing with some games like Skyrim but not others. However when I turn the second GPU off this time everything works about 80% better and faster than before so even if I have to turn it off for certain games this helped a whole lot. Thanks a whole lot!

It certainly does depend on some games. Some do not have XFIRE/SLI support and those might get jittery or run worse than with a single GPU.

Quite some experimentation sometimes. On the AMD driver site it'll often show in it's notes which new or old games get performance gains from the new driver updates.