Nvidia Surround (SLI)

[powdaman]

If I want to run SLI mode with 2 x GTX 580's do they both have to be same make/model etc??

I bought an evga yesterday and have just found out that you cannot run 3 monitors with one card so I have to buy another...

Powda

 

[Andrew Moore]

Nope, as long as they are both 580s itll be fine

Andy

 

[Phoenixdancer]

Lol

Next time do your homework.
Amd cards do it on one card

Yea you will need a second one. Just and buy the same

 

[powdaman]

do you think this will be fixed with a later driver release? I mean surely they want to compete with AMD on this?

 

[Greebo]

It will never happen or they would have done it ages ago.

 

[Rroff]

Hardware can only drive 2 displays so afaik no software update can fix it. If your gaming on 3+ monitors you really need more than 1 GPU anyhow.

 

[Phoenixdancer]

Nah they will never be able to. I dont think Nvidia want the hassle.

And Rroff, a 580GTX should be able to handle triple gameing anyway on its own.

 

[Rroff]

There are plenty of games that will humble a single GTX580 at 2560x and higher res with high quality settings.

 

[Duff-Man]

There are plenty of games that will humble a single GTX580 at 2560x and higher res with high quality settings.

The nice thing about a triple-screen setup is that you can use only the central screen for the more demanding titles, and use the triple-screen setup for the rest.

When my two new 30"-ers arrive from Hazro (overdue already, but they say they will be despatched before the end of the week), I'll have a chance to test them out with my pair of GTX480s. I'm not expecting to be able to get a playable framerate in (say) Crysis or Metro at 7680*1600 res, but for games like Fallout New Vegas, F1-2010 or left 4 dead I should be able to use the three screen setup reasonably well.

It's a pity that the nvidia cards don't offer single-GPU surround... But, if that's the price for the vastly improved performance over eyefinity, then it's a worthwhile tradeoff in my opinion.



EDIT - seems like the difference between eyefinity and nvidia surround isn't as big as it once was. This review from hardocp shows a pair of GTX480s beating a pair of 5870 2Gb cards by around 30% on average (in the apples to apples comparison), although in some cases the difference is barely more than the difference between the single card solutions.