myne wrote on 2026-02-18, 00:54:People forget that the bus is mostly used in bursts if the card has enough ram. […]
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People forget that the bus is mostly used in bursts if the card has enough ram.
It's a big burst to fill the ram during loading, and then a relative trickle of geometry and instructions during play.
Ie, the load times are likely to be awful, but the gameplay should be relatively decent assuming the cpu/driver can keep up.
It is likely to perform more consistently with a frame rate cap though.
I think this probably explained something with my current AIMB-865 setup, using a FirePro W4100 behind a PEX8112 on a PCI slot.
- Linux (EndeavourOS) works best with "amdgpu" driver, which has almost no issues even at 1080p 120Hz/144Hz resoultion. The default "radeon" driver behaves very buggy, however.
- Windows 7 works mostly fine on certain driver versions at 1080p 120Hz/144Hz resolution. No major issues apart from slowdowns when I drag a selection rectangle large enough.
- WEI on Win7 reports a score about 7.6 for Aero and Graphics using latest Radeon Enterprise drivers that work correctly (some versions appear to have known issues). With older Catalyst drivers, however, I get a score up to 6.8-6.9.
So PCI bus bottleneck does affect some functionality but not everything. Considering the high WEI score I'm getting on Win7, the bottleneck likely did not impair functions that actually matter.
I could not get that card working with WinXP due to Code 10 on that board, though. The card, which uses a smaller factor but otherwise identical to FirePro W600 GPU-wise, is not officially supported on XP anyway.