In pursuing my obsession with old hardware, I decided to try a crazy experiment. I took my Dell Precision T5500 (dual X5687 Xeons + R9 Fury) and installed Cyberpunk on it, in both Windows and Linux. Once I applied Feral Interactive’s “gamemode” the results were…surprising.
I’m actually having some difficulty trying to figure out how this is possible. In plain ol’ Windows 10, I was getting about 35 fps at Medium 1080p. After applying a hacked driver (AMD dropped support for the Fury in 2021) that went up to 46 fps.
Meanwhile in Linux, I hit 45 fps out of the box (again at 1080p Medium.) While that is a 20% increase over untweaked windows, I wanted to see what else I could do. When I applied “gamemoderun %command%” to the Steam launch parameters, the in-game benchmark hit 70 fps at 1080p High.
What the heck is gamemode doing? Even I never figure it out, I’ll have fun with the results…
Gamemode does a bunch of small tweaks to kernel parameters that really don’t matter, but the biggest benefit it does is that it sets the CPU scaling to performance. Sometimes just pegging the CPU to 100% makes things run smoother.
Drivers will also play a big role here. I assume you are using Mesa? Mesa is constantly getting optimizations and said optimizations will apply to your card, while in Windows the driver is no longer seeing developments (dropped support).
This is a great point, and the same holds true for Windows. Choosing the “high performance” power plan in Control Panel may increase your FPS substantially.
On my Westmere-EP systems (X5675, X5690), using the high performance power plan was always necessary to get tolerable gaming performance.
This particular Xeon has excellent clock speed however they don’t generally stack up compared to say a 5000 series RYZEN.
I don’t play Cyberpunk but my R9 FuryX on my RYZEN 9 5900X is amazing. I had to sell my VEGA during the height of crypto and bought a Fury cheap at the time, £200.
What I have noticed is that even a card like a R9 390 will not perform at it’s best on Zen1 or even Zen2. I would guess that the Xeon, as lovely as it is, it not pushing that Fury as hard as it can really go.
It’s interesting what that gamemode thing is doing, probably getting the CPU to work harder some how. As odd as it sounds and as hard to measure as it is, I’d say the Fury is bottlenecked bu the CPU. It’s actually not much less powerful than mid to low modern GPUs. HBM counts for a lot.
I’m not going to dispute the raw horsepower of the Ryzen 5000 & 7000 series. But ATM I don’t have the financial wherewithal to afford such a beast of a CPU. I do have a Zen 1 machine available, as well as a 10th Gen Intel gaming laptop, so this was more of a proof of concept than anything else.
As of 2021, AMD dropped further development of Radeon drivers for the Fury as well as a whole batch of older GCN cards. The NimeZ team has hacked modern AMD drivers and, for lack of a better term, backported them to run on these older GCN cards. As I showed in the video above, I got quite a performance lift from them in Windows.
It’s not raw horsepower that makes the Zen3 5000 series fast in games. It’s their superior latency when pushing frames. Consider the way the RYZEN 7 5800X3D is far faster FPS yet much less ‘horsepower’ than the straight 5800X. In fact I bet your Xeon has faster FPS on that Fury than the RYZEN Zen1.
an interesting tidbit with nahelem, if you use an nvidia card with a lower VRAM like a 1060 3GB it will perform much slower due to it relying on system memory than the same card on a ddr4 platform
