Skyrim: Very bad performance on AMD FirePro m8900 (6970m)

My friend just got a Dell m6600 with FirePro m8900, identical to the 6970m (for under 1200$, good deal BTW?)
Skyrim is performing VERY badly, seems to be dropping below 15fps on MEDIUM in many areas.

I've seen a lot of guides on improving performance but in general they seem to be for low end cards. For no apparent reason my 5870m is performing a lot better.
Any idea whats going on here?

 

Is he using the latest Catalyst drivers (12.6 Beta)?

 

professional cards do not perform the same as consumer cards. consumer cards will perform better in games but worse in professional applications like CAD, CS6, and other programs. Its the opposite for the professional cards.

 

This, the same for nvidia as cards like the quadro series wont perform that well in games.

 

its like having a football and a basketball player. They might be the same height, weight, run equally as fast and have similar physical attributes, but if they trade professions, the basketball player wont play football very well and the football player wont play basketball very well. Same thing with CAD GPUs and consumer GPU.

 

^ Cmon the FirePro series does not perform THAT bad when playing games. Medium 15 fps frequently? That sounds like a bad GDDR5 memory or driver issue.

 

yes they do... the drivers are not optimized for gaming. a firepro or a quadro will never perform in games anywhere near what a consumer card can do. your card has no problems with it, you just have the wrong card for what you want to do

 

There's no way the firepro performs less than my 8800mgts.

 

Even if professional cards and gaming cards have different performance due to drivers, they still perform exceptionally and near their gaming counterparts.

Seems like there is an actual issue with the machine TC. even my old HD5870m can run it near 60fps with high/ultra mix.

 

@Niff: Flash the card to a 6970m and install the Catalyst drivers, should solve your issues.

 

Try disabling all shadows completely in the .ini's and see if that makes any difference.

 

Thanks ryzeki and svl7. Yeah no one else seems to get it. As a matter of fact people have run benchmarks of all sorts of games on the m8900 with FirePro drivers and there was not a significant performance decrease at all. The biggest performance decrease was under 500 points out of 5000 or so, I don't pay much attention to game benchmarks but you get the point.

Anyway, my question(s) now svl7 is why do you recommend flashing it, when the problem is at least not directly because it is a FirePro? Are you speaking from personal experience with the m8900? Can you provide a vBIOS file that will definitely work?

I hate flashing ATI vbios... I think I will just try the drivers first...
I feel bad because I convinced him to buy a Dell m6600 over an MSI with gtx 670m, and now my gateway nv78 is outperforming his 1000$ laptop

In any case this will have to wait till the 2nd because he will be in switzerland soon.

 

Which resolution are you running the game at? Also are you running lots of mods or is this the vanilla game?

There are really only 2 settings that have a major impact on frame rate. Try turning off anti aliasing (MSAA) and using FXAA instead. That should result in a huge fps boost. If the frame rate is still too low, try reducing the shadow quality slider. All other graphics settings can remain maxed.

With my specs (AMD 5830m), and using official high res texture pack + a couple of texture mods I get average 40-60 fps at 1920x1080, all settings maxed except using FXAA instead of MSAA. Drops down a bit lower in Markarth, or if I run a mod that results in massive battles with dozens of enemies on screen at once.

 

LOL its that easy?

 

Come to think of it my mind just pulled up some furmark results of our 2 cards from memory... I'm thinking now and pretty sure the 5870m is performing better at furmark... This must be a more serious possible hardware issue.

I guess we may be contacting Dell support when he gets back from switzerland.