The Witcher 3 Performance Review: A Critical Analysis

As we delve into the world of gaming and emulation on the D500 GPU, it's essential to assess its performance capabilities. In this review, we'll explore the Witcher 3 at 720p low, using a single D500 GPU, and discuss the results.

Using a single D500 GPU, I observed that The Witcher 3 averaged around 48 frames per second (FPS) at 720p low settings. While this may seem respectable, it's essential to consider the game's optimization and the capabilities of the GPU. Given the age of the game and its optimization over the years, I expected better performance.

However, when Crossfire was enabled, I noticed a slight improvement in frame rate, but with more dips than using a single D500 GPU. This suggests that while Crossfire can enhance performance, it's not a guarantee of smoother gameplay. Despite this, The Witcher 3 remains a challenging game to optimize for lower-end hardware.

Moving on to Street Fighter 5, I initially tested the game at 1080p high settings, which resulted in an average of around 45 FPS. This was followed by a dip under 60 frames per second, forcing me to adjust the settings to 900p medium. While this provided better performance, it still didn't reach the desired level.

Street Fighter 5 serves as a reminder that even newer games can be challenging to optimize for lower-end hardware. As we move forward with testing, it's essential to consider the limitations of these GPUs and how they'll perform in various games.

Next, I decided to test God of War, which unfortunately didn't provide the desired performance. Running at 720p low settings with resolution scaling set to 60%, I averaged around 38 FPS. This was a surprise given the game's reputation for being visually stunning. However, it highlights the limitations of these GPUs in running modern AAA games.

Moving on to emulation, I tested PSP using PPSSPP, which ran at a constant 60 FPS with 5x resolution and direct X11 backend. This demonstrated the potential of PSP emulators and their ability to provide smooth gameplay.

In addition, I tested PS2 using PC sx2, which also ran at 1080p with direct X11 backend. However, when it came to God of War II, I had to drop the resolution to 720p due to performance limitations.

The Dolphin Emulator proved to be a more promising option for emulating Wii U games, allowing me to use direct X11 backend and achieving impressive performance. Testing Tatsunoko versus Capcom at 1080p resulted in smooth gameplay, showcasing the potential of this emulator.

Rounding out the testing was Rogue Squadron II on GameCube, which ran at 720p full speed using Dolphin Emulator's openg backend. This demonstrated the capabilities of the D500 GPU in running classic games.

Finally, I discussed the importance of adding more CPU cores and threads to the system, potentially enhancing performance. With current limitations attributed to the GPU, upgrading the CPU could help bridge the gap between performance expectations and actual results.

As we conclude this review, it's essential to consider the limitations of the D500 GPU in running modern games and emulation. While there are potential for improvements with additional hardware upgrades or optimization tweaks, it's crucial to understand these limitations before investing in such a system.

If you have any questions or would like to see more content, feel free to leave them in the comments below. Thank you for watching!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enI know this game was released around the time the trash can Mac Pro was released but still seeing it running this well on this machine years later is pretty impressive hey what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again today we're going to be checking out some gaming and emulation on this 2013 trash can Mac Pro these were released by Apple between 2013 and 2018 and it was kind of a big failure high-end configurations could go for around $3,000 and yeah I mean that's still expensive even in 2023 for a PC like this but uh this one here was actually given to me by one of my buddies I didn't think it was going to work I didn't mention anything about it I just said yeah go ahead send it over I'll see what I can do with it booted it up and to my surprise it actually had Windows 10 installed with boot camp and a smaller partition on the SSD with Mac OS to get that up and running so while we're doing all of our gaming and emulation in this video we're going to be using Windows 10 but if there's an interest we can check out Mac OS and there are a couple other operating systems that we can boot from USB on this device like one of my favorite Standalone emulation operating systems bosera you can actually get this up and running from USB on these x86 based Mac devices like I mentioned when these were initially released a rig like this went for about $3,000 right now for a very similarly configured Mac Pro trash can version you can pick it up for $33.99 the one listed here has double the ram of the one we're going to be taking a look look at but I'm going to tell you right now don't go out and buy one of these unless you have a specific use case scenario where you need one of these trash can Mac pros and off the top of my head I can't think of a scenario that would require this specific PC but you know with all of the advancements in CPU and GPU technology this is definitely coming in on the lower side of performance given that it's 2023 and these were released in 2013 to 2018 so when it comes to the specs of the one we're going to be testing out in this video for the CPU we've got the Intel xon E5 1650 V2 six cores 12 threads a base clock of 3.5 GHz and a turbo up to 3.9 I do have the option to upgrade this to a 12 core 24 thread CPU and I might do it given the price on those they're around $40 to $50 used on eBay right now but for the GPU we've actually got a dual firepro setup here two d500 gpus clocked at 800 MHz with 3 GB of gddr5 V Ram each these are works gpus and when they were initially released these were pretty powerful but uh unfortunately in 2023 we don't have Vulcan support with these basically we can go up to directex 11 so some of the emulators and games that required Vulcan just aren't going to work on these gpus right now this also has 32 GB of RAM a 512 GB SSD we're going to be running Windows 10 but like I mentioned if the interest is there I can do another video testing out Mac OS with gaming and emulation on this device but I think we're going to get the best performance out of Windows all right so here we are got Windows 10 running unfortunately we can't get Windows 11 on this machine we've got that six core 12 thread Zeon CPU and like I mentioned there is a 12 core upgrade so we could get 12 cores and 24 threads and you know if it's a major upgrade helps out with performance I might make another video 32 GB of RAM and we've got the Dual AMD firepro d500 gpus actually pretty awesome but they're old gpus they don't support Vulcan they each have 3 GB of vram now I will tell you that using this as an everyday desktop is actually pretty Snappy I mean you want to do some web browsing some document editing some email checking some video playback from YouTube and of course it'll still handle video editing it'll still handle photo editing but it's just not going to be as fast as newer CPUs and gpus on the market right now the very first thing I wanted to take a look at were a couple benchmarks that I ramm I tried several different benchmarks and most of them just crashed out on me tried them several times and just kind of gave up but these were the ones I was able to get through geek bench 5 single core 791 multicore 4,443 multi not looking bad given the age of this chip but we do have six cores and 12 threads the last one I was able to get through was 3D Mark time spy and we get a total score of 1,387 definitely looking very low and keep in mind we can enable Crossfire but that was giving me more issues than I wanted to deal with right now so we're actually just running these on one of the d500 gpus so obviously these synthetic benchmarks aren't phenomenal but I still want to get into some real world gaming to see how this thing performs and first up we've got Injustice 2 at 1080p low to my surprise we're getting 60 FPS out of it I could probably take some of these settings up to medium kind of impressed here you know with the first couple games that I tested uh it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be I figured we'd be at 30 or maybe even under 30 with a game like this at 1080p given the of the CPU and gpus but yeah as you can see it does run it at full speed you're toasty GTA 5 was about the best performing game that I tested and one thing to keep in mind is this game was released in 2013 so is the Mac Pro when this game was released these were actually some high-end gpus 1080p normal settings we get an average of around 87 FPS with this one your here's the Witcher 3 720p low and with this I also tried Crossfire uh it seemed to give me a little better frame rate but I had more dips than I did just using a single d500 now going into this I figured we'd get much better performance out of it given you know the age of the game and how well optimized it's been over the years but unfortunately we're only getting that average of around 48 at 720p low with The Witcher 3 next on the list we've got Street Fighter 5 900p medium settings originally going into this game I went straight to 1080p High settings to see what it would do we only averaged about 45 FPS and even at medium settings 1080p it did dip under 60 so I had to drop it down to 900p there was one more newer game that I wanted to test before we move over to some emulation and that was God of War we're at 720p low and I do have resolution scale set to 60% so we're well under 720p and we can average around 38 FPS with this game I knew we weren't going to get great performance with this and I wanted to test more newer AAA games but a lot of the stuff just wouldn't start up due to the graphics drivers we have here with the d500 moving over to some emulation we've got PSP using PPSSPP chains of Olympus 5x resolution direct X11 backend this ran at a constant 60 and we're upscaled over 1080p with it so seeing the kind of performance we're getting here with PSP and chains of Olympus then we're not going to have an issue with any of these PSP games as long as the game's compatible with the emulator it's going to run it at full speed we can upscale the easier to emulate stuff even higher than this taking it up a notch to PS2 using PC sx2 1080p direct X11 backend and a lot of the stuff that I tested ran at full speed 1080p but when it came to God of War II I had to drop it down to 720p if we had access to Vulcan on these gpus we'd be able to do a lot more emulation unfortunately when it comes to like PS3 and Wii U at least in Windows Vulcan is definitely the preferred backend to use but with both of those emulators we only have access to either openg or Vulcans so we have to stick with openg and we're not going to get great performance with those higher end emulators but luckily the Dolphin Emulator does allow us to use the direct X11 backend and I will see an awesome performance here 1080p here with tatsunoko versus Capcom and I went through and tested a couple GameCube games something like Rogue Squadron 2 will run at 720p full speed on this machine so yeah we can get some gaming and emulation out of the way on this device but I wouldn't run out and buy one now there is some more testing that I want to do and with all of the PC games you saw running in this video we were using only one of those d500 gpus and I know a lot of older games would run much better with Crossfire X enabled as long as the game supported it but uh yeah the next thing I want to do here is actually test out bosera for emulation I've always had much better luck with these AMD gpus and openg and Linux so there might be a chance we could get some Wii U booted up on this and play it through that operating system or even the newer release of simu for Mac OS itself and yeah this is exactly what what I was running into with a lot of newer games it would just crash immediately sometimes it would come up right to the loading screen and then shut right down there was really nothing I could do about it and I've looked around for you know hack drivers for this thing unfortunately it's just so old nobody's really messing around with the d500s anymore but that's going to wrap it up for this one I really appreciate you watching if there's anything else you want to see running on this let me know I've got it sitting here I didn't put any money into it so far but we can still upgrade that CPU and with what we've tested so far it's really the GPU holding us back but adding six more course and 12 more threads isn't going to hurt anything I mean it's only going to up that CPU performance so that might be something I want to do down the road and you know if the performance increase is good enough I'll come back to it and make another quick video if you've got any questions let me know down below like always thanks for watchingI know this game was released around the time the trash can Mac Pro was released but still seeing it running this well on this machine years later is pretty impressive hey what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again today we're going to be checking out some gaming and emulation on this 2013 trash can Mac Pro these were released by Apple between 2013 and 2018 and it was kind of a big failure high-end configurations could go for around $3,000 and yeah I mean that's still expensive even in 2023 for a PC like this but uh this one here was actually given to me by one of my buddies I didn't think it was going to work I didn't mention anything about it I just said yeah go ahead send it over I'll see what I can do with it booted it up and to my surprise it actually had Windows 10 installed with boot camp and a smaller partition on the SSD with Mac OS to get that up and running so while we're doing all of our gaming and emulation in this video we're going to be using Windows 10 but if there's an interest we can check out Mac OS and there are a couple other operating systems that we can boot from USB on this device like one of my favorite Standalone emulation operating systems bosera you can actually get this up and running from USB on these x86 based Mac devices like I mentioned when these were initially released a rig like this went for about $3,000 right now for a very similarly configured Mac Pro trash can version you can pick it up for $33.99 the one listed here has double the ram of the one we're going to be taking a look look at but I'm going to tell you right now don't go out and buy one of these unless you have a specific use case scenario where you need one of these trash can Mac pros and off the top of my head I can't think of a scenario that would require this specific PC but you know with all of the advancements in CPU and GPU technology this is definitely coming in on the lower side of performance given that it's 2023 and these were released in 2013 to 2018 so when it comes to the specs of the one we're going to be testing out in this video for the CPU we've got the Intel xon E5 1650 V2 six cores 12 threads a base clock of 3.5 GHz and a turbo up to 3.9 I do have the option to upgrade this to a 12 core 24 thread CPU and I might do it given the price on those they're around $40 to $50 used on eBay right now but for the GPU we've actually got a dual firepro setup here two d500 gpus clocked at 800 MHz with 3 GB of gddr5 V Ram each these are works gpus and when they were initially released these were pretty powerful but uh unfortunately in 2023 we don't have Vulcan support with these basically we can go up to directex 11 so some of the emulators and games that required Vulcan just aren't going to work on these gpus right now this also has 32 GB of RAM a 512 GB SSD we're going to be running Windows 10 but like I mentioned if the interest is there I can do another video testing out Mac OS with gaming and emulation on this device but I think we're going to get the best performance out of Windows all right so here we are got Windows 10 running unfortunately we can't get Windows 11 on this machine we've got that six core 12 thread Zeon CPU and like I mentioned there is a 12 core upgrade so we could get 12 cores and 24 threads and you know if it's a major upgrade helps out with performance I might make another video 32 GB of RAM and we've got the Dual AMD firepro d500 gpus actually pretty awesome but they're old gpus they don't support Vulcan they each have 3 GB of vram now I will tell you that using this as an everyday desktop is actually pretty Snappy I mean you want to do some web browsing some document editing some email checking some video playback from YouTube and of course it'll still handle video editing it'll still handle photo editing but it's just not going to be as fast as newer CPUs and gpus on the market right now the very first thing I wanted to take a look at were a couple benchmarks that I ramm I tried several different benchmarks and most of them just crashed out on me tried them several times and just kind of gave up but these were the ones I was able to get through geek bench 5 single core 791 multicore 4,443 multi not looking bad given the age of this chip but we do have six cores and 12 threads the last one I was able to get through was 3D Mark time spy and we get a total score of 1,387 definitely looking very low and keep in mind we can enable Crossfire but that was giving me more issues than I wanted to deal with right now so we're actually just running these on one of the d500 gpus so obviously these synthetic benchmarks aren't phenomenal but I still want to get into some real world gaming to see how this thing performs and first up we've got Injustice 2 at 1080p low to my surprise we're getting 60 FPS out of it I could probably take some of these settings up to medium kind of impressed here you know with the first couple games that I tested uh it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be I figured we'd be at 30 or maybe even under 30 with a game like this at 1080p given the of the CPU and gpus but yeah as you can see it does run it at full speed you're toasty GTA 5 was about the best performing game that I tested and one thing to keep in mind is this game was released in 2013 so is the Mac Pro when this game was released these were actually some high-end gpus 1080p normal settings we get an average of around 87 FPS with this one your here's the Witcher 3 720p low and with this I also tried Crossfire uh it seemed to give me a little better frame rate but I had more dips than I did just using a single d500 now going into this I figured we'd get much better performance out of it given you know the age of the game and how well optimized it's been over the years but unfortunately we're only getting that average of around 48 at 720p low with The Witcher 3 next on the list we've got Street Fighter 5 900p medium settings originally going into this game I went straight to 1080p High settings to see what it would do we only averaged about 45 FPS and even at medium settings 1080p it did dip under 60 so I had to drop it down to 900p there was one more newer game that I wanted to test before we move over to some emulation and that was God of War we're at 720p low and I do have resolution scale set to 60% so we're well under 720p and we can average around 38 FPS with this game I knew we weren't going to get great performance with this and I wanted to test more newer AAA games but a lot of the stuff just wouldn't start up due to the graphics drivers we have here with the d500 moving over to some emulation we've got PSP using PPSSPP chains of Olympus 5x resolution direct X11 backend this ran at a constant 60 and we're upscaled over 1080p with it so seeing the kind of performance we're getting here with PSP and chains of Olympus then we're not going to have an issue with any of these PSP games as long as the game's compatible with the emulator it's going to run it at full speed we can upscale the easier to emulate stuff even higher than this taking it up a notch to PS2 using PC sx2 1080p direct X11 backend and a lot of the stuff that I tested ran at full speed 1080p but when it came to God of War II I had to drop it down to 720p if we had access to Vulcan on these gpus we'd be able to do a lot more emulation unfortunately when it comes to like PS3 and Wii U at least in Windows Vulcan is definitely the preferred backend to use but with both of those emulators we only have access to either openg or Vulcans so we have to stick with openg and we're not going to get great performance with those higher end emulators but luckily the Dolphin Emulator does allow us to use the direct X11 backend and I will see an awesome performance here 1080p here with tatsunoko versus Capcom and I went through and tested a couple GameCube games something like Rogue Squadron 2 will run at 720p full speed on this machine so yeah we can get some gaming and emulation out of the way on this device but I wouldn't run out and buy one now there is some more testing that I want to do and with all of the PC games you saw running in this video we were using only one of those d500 gpus and I know a lot of older games would run much better with Crossfire X enabled as long as the game supported it but uh yeah the next thing I want to do here is actually test out bosera for emulation I've always had much better luck with these AMD gpus and openg and Linux so there might be a chance we could get some Wii U booted up on this and play it through that operating system or even the newer release of simu for Mac OS itself and yeah this is exactly what what I was running into with a lot of newer games it would just crash immediately sometimes it would come up right to the loading screen and then shut right down there was really nothing I could do about it and I've looked around for you know hack drivers for this thing unfortunately it's just so old nobody's really messing around with the d500s anymore but that's going to wrap it up for this one I really appreciate you watching if there's anything else you want to see running on this let me know I've got it sitting here I didn't put any money into it so far but we can still upgrade that CPU and with what we've tested so far it's really the GPU holding us back but adding six more course and 12 more threads isn't going to hurt anything I mean it's only going to up that CPU performance so that might be something I want to do down the road and you know if the performance increase is good enough I'll come back to it and make another quick video if you've got any questions let me know down below like always thanks for watching\n"