Use workstation drivers or desktop drivers?

[veri745]

I have an old FireGL 7700 (Radeon 3870 class) workstation graphics card that I'm using in a secondary system for my wife, and it's currently being used as my backup system while my primary is experiencing an RMA.

My question is, am I better off installing the workstation drivers or the normal desktop drivers?

Uses for the system are mostly casual with a bit of photo editing, but I'm planning on doing a bit of light gaming while my primary system is down, so I'm mostly concerned with gaming performance. I won't be using any CAD or professional graphics programs on the system.

 

[3DVagabond]

I don't believe the card will recognize the drivers. I know you can't run the FP drivers on the consumer cards. I've never known anyone to try it the other way around, like you are proposing.

 

[Lonbjerg]

Desktop drivers = lower presion = better FPS in gaming
Workstation drivers = higher precison = lower FPS in gaming.

There is a reason why they are called "desktop" and "workstation".

 

[veri745]

Well, it looks like 3DVagabond may be correct. Attempting to install the desktop version of catalyst 11.12 allows me to install an updated Catalyst Pro control center, but no display driver. I had to use the FirePro installer to get an updated display driver.

I thought I had remembered this card being detected as a Radeon 3870 a year ago or so when I installed the desktop drivers on it in a different system. I think the only difference was that this time Windows update already installed some FireGL drivers automatically, not sure if that made a difference or not.

 

[Phil L]

There is at least one way to trick the installer. Typically this is done to install workstation driver onto mainstream gamer cards, but no reason why it wont work in reverse, provided you using a driver of same base architecture. To do that you have to modify the INF file in the driver package to use the ID of your workstation card, which you can obtain by looking at the workstation driver package. The INF file basically just tells the computer which ID goes which driver, so you can just trick the installer. However, whether you will see any performance difference is hard to say without actually testing it.

Recently for a coworker's computer we opt for a Radeon 6870 (~$160), and installed FirePro 3D 8800 (~$1150) driver on top of (Cypress drive onto Barts). The program she uses is mainly SolidWorks, and as far as SW benchmark goes (specviewperf11), there was no real difference using Radeon or FirePro drivers (less than 5%, which can be contributed to noise in sampling).

Interestingly enough, the actual FirePro 8800 benchmark we could find on SolidWorks were lower performing than the Radeon 6870 with either FP or Radeon Driver (but caution on this, because these were not identical system setup). Nevertheless, this suggests that SW may not really leveraging GPGPU capability, and only use a GPU for display purpose, and no one is gonna constantly tumble and flip/rotate their parts non-stop while working on it.

However, using FirePro driver did enable the RealView feature in SolidWorks, which gives realistic shadow and reflections, which is mostly a cosmetic/gimmick feature that may or may not be of use depending on the user. But interestingly the hardware is identical of course, and all it took is for SW to think it has a FirePro card to enable said feature.

Anyway, anecdotes aside, here is a write-up on how to do the INF modding if you want to experiment with it (http://forum.notebookreview.com/asu...m/500390-g73-5870-softmod-firepro-8800-a.html) This is for FirePro 8800 onto Radeon 5870, but the same principle on INF modding is the same. Of course, you will be experimenting at your own risk, so it's up to you. Just make sure you wipe the drivers clean between each installs to minimize issues (e.g. using Driver Sweeper). Good luck if you choose to go this route, and post results!

*EDIT* With regards to the write-up on soft-modding, in my case all I did was the INF modding, nothing else. I didn't do the RivaTuner patching and the rest of the steps, because it was un-needed in our case. YMMV. You will have to find out your own INF ID for your card of course, not using the ones in the write-up.