AMD FirePro S10000 dual-GPU card from 2012 runs Arc Raiders at playable frame rates — but half of its GPU power goes unused in the process

(Image credit: RandomGamingInHD - YouTube)

AMD's FirePro S10000 once served as the company's most powerful workstation graphics card back in 2012, putting two of the same Tahiti dies found in the Radeon HD 7950 on one Crossfire board. The world has long since moved on, but YouTube channel RandomGaminginHD found a used S10000 for sale and set out to see how powerful this card is in 2025 for gaming. Spoiler alert: this GPU was able to play Arc Raiders above 30 FPS, but using just one of its two GPUs.

Getting the S10000 gaming-ready, particularly to get both GPUs to cooperate in supported games, was no easy task. The GPU enthusiast had to make several changes to get the card to work at all with newer titles due to its age. This included using Windows 10 instead of Windows 11, and BIOS flashing the card so the S10000 would function with newer AMD Adrenalin drivers.

The AMD S10000 From 2012 - A $3600 Dual GPU Beast With Hidden Gaming Potential... - YouTube

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First, running the GPU out of the box on Windows 10, RandomGaminginHD discovered several weird quirks with the card. The S10000 only supports up to FirePro driver version 17.4 and not AMD's Adrenalin counterpart, which is critical for getting game optimizations. Under GPU-Z, the card shows up under two distinct names, S10000 and W9000 X2.

After researching the GPU's name, RandomGaminginHD discovered that the two model names are, in fact, the same GPU, only the W9000 X2 was never released under that name. In fact, the enthusiast discovered that AMD had slapped a "S10000" sticker over a "W9000 X2" badge on his particular card, suggesting AMD renamed the graphics card from W9000 X2 to S10000 just before the product's release in November 2012.

The S10000 was technically gaming capable in its out-of-the-box form with the most recent FirePro drivers it supports, running Crysis at just above 60 FPS. However, the YouTuber discovered the FirePro drivers don't enable CrossFire support whatsoever, preventing the second GPU from spinning up in supported games.

To fix this, RandomGaminginHD BIOS-flashed the graphics card with firmware from a Radeon HD 7990 dual-GPU gaming card. This made the S10000 identify as an HD 7990 to Windows 10 and enabled support for AMD's Adrenalin drivers, specifically version 22.6.1 from 2022.

With the S10000 disguised as an HD 7990, performance increased substantially thanks to the 2022 Adrenalin drivers enabling Crossfire support. In Crysis, the S10000 was able to achieve over 110 FPS most of the time with both GPUs sitting at around 65% usage. RandomGaminginHD also tested Crysis 3, GTA V, and Mafia 2, and found all three titles ran well, especially Mafia 2, which was able to take full advantage of both GPUs —both sitting above 90% usage all the time.

Moving to modern games, our intrepid tester tried Arc Raiders, Cyberpunk 2077, and CS2. Despite all three titles lacking multi-GPU support, Arc Raiders and CS2 ran at playable frame rates, albeit with extremely low graphics settings. At the lowest settings — 70% resolution scaling at 1080p — Arc Raiders ran at around 40-45 FPS. CS2 fared better, with 120-160 FPS depending on the scene. Cyberpunk 2077 handled the worst on this card, producing just 20-30 FPS on the S10000 at the lowest settings with FSR set to its ultra performance profile.

The S10000 ranked among the most powerful workstation cards in 2012, as Nvidia had shied away from dual-GPU professional cards at the time. The S10000 sported two Tahiti GPUs featuring 1,792 shader cores, 112 TMUs, 32 ROPs, and 28 CUs each. Memory was split across two 384-bit memory interfaces for each GPU, and each chip was connected to 3GB of GDDR5.

RandomInGamingHD's work to resurrect his particular S10000 shows how potent the dual-GPU graphics card was at the time. It was essentially an HD 7990 consumer graphics card, but with disabled cores on each die. If the second GPU worked in today's titles, the S10000 would likely be capable of playing Arc Raiders near 60 FPS and Cyberpunk 2077 at playable FPS, but with Crossfire and SLI support long gone in modern games, this is the best performance we'll ever see from this graphics card in those titles.

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Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.

8 Comments Comment from the forums

teeejay94

Confusing as to why AMD would drop support with cards like this still in the wild. They just want dual GPUs to go away so bad, you know why though? Has nothing to do with lack of technology they both, Nvidia and AMD, dont actually want to put the money forth to make this tech good. They're literally just being cheap AF. Record profits instead of record customer satisfaction. I think this is probably the lowest satisfaction rate weve ever seen especially coming from Nvidia. Thats why Nvidia relies also on people who don't know what they're talking about, they'll just go on and on all day about how great something is without a care at all for objectivity. Thats the one thing Nvidia especially hates is objective opinions. Jensen is somewhat going "won't you just like this product already" No, I won't. Why would I like a 5090 because you finally upped the vram after begging you for more vram for 10 years? HA!
Reply
usertests

teeejay94 said:
Has nothing to do with lack of technology they both, Nvidia and AMD, dont actually want to put the money forth to make this tech good. They're literally just being cheap AF.
Dual cards are obviously difficult to support because of latency and other issues. They might end up converging on something similar once GPUs start using multiple GCDs, but they'll operate differently and be seen as single units by games. Despite RDNA3 using chiplets, we still haven't seen consumer GPUs adopt multiple GCDs, and everything consumer-oriented from Nvidia has been monolithic.

High-end VR might work with dual (two separate) GPUs targeting both eyes independently, and there are ways to use more than one GPU, like Lossless Scaling on a second GPU, or the PhysX trick that has been made temporarily obsolete. Otherwise, it's dead.
Reply
User of Computers

teeejay94 said:
Confusing as to why AMD would drop support with cards like this still in the wild. They just want dual GPUs to go away so bad, you know why though? Has nothing to do with lack of technology they both, Nvidia and AMD, dont actually want to put the money forth to make this tech good. They're literally just being cheap AF. Record profits instead of record customer satisfaction. I think this is probably the lowest satisfaction rate weve ever seen especially coming from Nvidia. Thats why Nvidia relies also on people who don't know what they're talking about, they'll just go on and on all day about how great something is without a care at all for objectivity. Thats the one thing Nvidia especially hates is objective opinions. Jensen is somewhat going "won't you just like this product already" No, I won't. Why would I like a 5090 because you finally upped the vram after begging you for more vram for 10 years? HA!
...alternatively, the card is over a decade old, and driver support for even the single-GPU cards has been gone for 2 or 3 years. Something tells me that this isn't a grand conspiracy. I think the card is just ancient. I'm not sure why you're foaming at the mouth over this.
Reply
blppt

Remember we were promised that dual GPUs would survive and even possibly thrive with DX12 technologies, even able to mix GPU brands?
Reply
Moores_Ghost

blppt said:
Remember we were promised that dual GPUs would survive and even possibly thrive with DX12 technologies, even able to mix GPU brands?
This. Multigpu is a real, viable solution for gamers on budgets and DX12 has had it since day one with one title supporting it so far. Microsoft built it and no one uses it.
Reply
spongiemaster

blppt said:
Remember we were promised that dual GPUs would survive and even possibly thrive with DX12 technologies, even able to mix GPU brands?
And you believed any of that? DX12 was the death of multi GPU support because it shifted the burden of development to the game developers rather than the hardware makers. There was zero chance game studios were going to put in any effort to support such a niche market that promised zero return on that investment. AMD and Nvidia at least had the incentive that they could sell additional cards, and they still dumped support because of how complex the driver development was for so small a market.
Reply
blppt

spongiemaster said:
And you believed any of that?
To some extent, yes, but that was before it became apparent that the devs would struggle just to get a handle on the shader compilation difficulty, which immediately erased any chance of mGPU support on their end.

Also, I doubt AMD and Nvidia like the idea of cheaper graphics cards in parallel matching their flagship GPUs (Nvidia and their $3K 5090). Before it wasn't a huge issue because there was inconsistent performance with AFR rendering, but DX12 introduced a mode that wouldn't necessarily require that hack job of a mGPU solution.
Reply
call101010

With the power demand of high end cards today , dual GPU is a dream to come back ... regardless of any other reason. gone are the days of dual GPUs ...
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