Uploaded April 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago
My AMD Firepro W7000 is a workstation version of 2012's HD 7870 that has double the memory, giving it 4GB of VRAM. In this video, I test it out on Fedora (a popular Linux distribution) using the AMDGPU kernel driver instead of the old "Radeon" driver. Avatar Frontiers of Pandora was awarded Digital Foundry's "Best Game Graphics of 2023" award for it's stunning ray traced visual at all quality settings! This includes the settings tested in this video, medium, at native 720p and 1080p. This GCN 1.0 GPU isn't even the top of the stack for the HD 7000 series generation. This game isn't really playable on this card like this, but it almost is and that's impressive! This card is waaay below minimum spec in terms of performance, VRAM, and API support. Linux's AMDGPU driver provides much much better performance/support for these old GPUs these days and it's a beautiful thing. I was amazed this got over 2 FPS!
Recording takes a significant amount of FPS off, despite using CPU encoding. When not recording, the HD 7870 gets about 25% more FPS, reaching 20fps at native 720p and dropping to the mid to high teens. I'm amazed software ray tracing works in any fashion on this GPU tbh. No RT emulation going on here, I haven't been able to get that to work in any games :/ . So games that support software RT is all I got for now. I'm just using standard Proton 9 without any launch arguments. The only thing I had to do for this GPU was enable the AMDGPU driver instead of the old Radeon driver that was the old driver for these GPUs.
0:00 - 2:45 Setup/Settings
2:45 - 6:54 Medium Settings Native 720p
6:54 - 7:26 Medium Settings Native 1080p
7:26 - 8:15 Medium Settings Native 720p
8:15 - 9:06 Medium Settings Native 1080p
#hd7870 #avatarfrontiersofpandora #finewine #linuxgaming
My AMD Firepro W7000 is a workstation version of 2012's HD 7870 that has double the memory, giving it 4GB of VRAM. In this video, I test it out on Fedora (a popular Linux distribution) using the AMDGPU kernel driver instead of the old "Radeon" driver. Avatar Frontiers of Pandora was awarded Digital Foundry's "Best Game Graphics of 2023" award for it's stunning ray traced visual at all quality settings! This includes the settings tested in this video, medium, at native 720p and 1080p. This GCN 1.0 GPU isn't even the top of the stack for the HD 7000 series generation. This game isn't really playable on this card like this, but it almost is and that's impressive! This card is waaay below minimum spec in terms of performance, VRAM, and API support. Linux's AMDGPU driver provides much much better performance/support for these old GPUs these days and it's a beautiful thing. I was amazed this got over 2 FPS!
Recording takes a significant amount of FPS off, despite using CPU encoding. When not recording, the HD 7870 gets about 25% more FPS, reaching 20fps at native 720p and dropping to the mid to high teens. I'm amazed software ray tracing works in any fashion on this GPU tbh. No RT emulation going on here, I haven't been able to get that to work in any games :/ . So games that support software RT is all I got for now. I'm just using standard Proton 9 without any launch arguments. The only thing I had to do for this GPU was enable the AMDGPU driver instead of the old Radeon driver that was the old driver for these GPUs.
0:00 - 2:45 Setup/Settings
2:45 - 6:54 Medium Settings Native 720p
6:54 - 7:26 Medium Settings Native 1080p
7:26 - 8:15 Medium Settings Native 720p
8:15 - 9:06 Medium Settings Native 1080p
#hd7870 #avatarfrontiersofpandora #finewine #linuxgaming
