AMD FirePro vs Radeon Drivers - Should it make a differance?

[Dos_Box]

Those lovely peopel @ict-direct hav provided me with a Dell Precision M6500 mobile workstation for my sons birthday. It's the i5 M560 model so not top end but it also comes with a very nice FirePro m7820 as the graphics card.

Now I installed the last FirePro driver for this (which was a Windows 8 version, the laptop is Win 10) and is a little old.

When installed this driver, it shows the GPU correctly as a FirePro. However, if you use the AMD auto detect utility it downloads and install a newer Radeon driver with no problems but then in device manager the card is shown as a Radeon 5870.

Now, I know that many workstation level cards are actually their desktop cousins with extra bells and whistles but should this make much of a differance?

Just curious mind as he won't be hammering it with the latest games but it would be nice to know if the FirePro drivers would be better.

[ICTDirect_Dave]

I'm not sure the drivers should make a whole lot of difference. I know it wanted to put the Radeon Drivers on there when i set it up initially.

 

However from what i understand the main difference between gaming and pro cards is the firmware. A workstation card will be slower because it renders EVERYTHING just in case you wanted to look at a design from any given angle. A gaming card only renders what you can see at a given, allowing it to run games at a higher framerate.

 

I suggest you run it through 3DMark with each set of drivers installed and see if it makes a difference?

[Dos_Box]

I did that, they are just about the same tbh. I think the Radeon drivers have the edge slightly.