Oldie Firepro D500

[Steven Rimmington]

Bit of a strange one I have an old FirePro D500 GPU which is a dual GPU in a Mac Pro running Bootcamp Windows 10. I have reused the Mac for my daughter to play Roblox and Fortnite, surprisingly it's playing games very well at 1080p. I have noticed benchmarks are using both GPUS however I have just checked the task manager and noticed when gaming only one GPU is been used. Is there any settings within Windows to use both? I can only select each GPU not both, hope that makes sense

Spoiler: While Gaming

https://i.ibb.co/P4Zm4fr/DDSDSDSD.png

Spoiler: Benchmark

 

[Quixote]

Dual GPU for gaming has effectively been dead for many years on both AMD & NVidia on Windows. Outside of windows it never really existed.
As you say, the cards are decent enough for these types of games, but you're effectively using 1 of them.
To be honest, there never really were any pro applications either that propery used them together. No good GPU renderer ever supported Open CL properly & consistantly & Apple lost interest in favour of Metal & their onboard graphics a few years later. Fairly typical example of a nice piece of Apple engineering that never really had the support to be properly useful for what it was advertised for.
That said, as you discovered, they're nice enough systems even if the 2nd GPU is basically useless.

 

[Steven Rimmington]

Thanks for the reply. I gathered as much, shame really as one GPU is effectively doing. I figured I would run this on Windows 10 and get some more life out of it for the little one. I'm quite surprised how well it plays games been from 2013 such a shame I can't get the other GPU to help.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The D500 is essential an old HD7800XT with the 384 bit memory interface from the HD7950 3GB.

The GCN1.0 cards have better DX12/Vulkan support than the Kepler cards and 3GB of VRAM also helps.

Also there are modded third party drivers for the older GCN cards too:

NEW Life for your GCN GPU? Benchmarking "NimeZ" Drivers on the HD 7970

Today we test out the custom modded "NimeZ" AMD Radeon December 2021 driver set with some gaming benchmarks before and after.Sponsor: Get Windows 10 Pro here...

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