HokieFan80,  The SPERC 8 is a Shared PowerEdge RAID Controller  card installed on the VRTX, which supports Single Root Input Output Virtualization (SR-IOV). The SPERC 8.4 that the mainboard update is referencing is simply an upcoming firmware update scheduled for the SPERC card.   Hope this helps answer your question.
I noticed a new firmware is available for the VRTX mainboard, 2.1. The only documentation I can find says that it adds support for SPERC 8.4. Can someone from dell explain what SPERC 8.4 is? 
VRTX mainboard update 2.1 - SPERC 8.4 support