The problem is they would be totally useless on three 1600p monitors with their 3gb of vram.
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3 x 1600p Monitors: Tri 780ti's or Tri R290X's?
- Thread starter goochinbuda
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The problem is they would be totally useless on three 1600p monitors with their 3gb of vram.
Soldato
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Yep. Ti is a great card but 3gb for multi monitors above 1080 in general is like using an impact parachute
The new Maxwell Nvidia GPU's will be out in a few months and seeing as you obviously have money to burn id wait for those to come out as getting triple 290x's or 780Ti's will probably net you minimal frame increases. im an AMD fan but will be good to see how nvidias new architecture will be
Soldato
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Maxwell is at least 3/4 of a year away.
The 20nm GPU's from AMD and Nvidia are not going to be out in a few months, its going to be this time next year, Nvidia nor AMD are in any sort of a rush to go 20nm, very expensive, lower yields and not actually a great deal of an advantage in terms of efficiency vs 28nm. why do you think both AMD and Nvidia are still putting so much work into 28nm?
Mores law is starting to falter.
Stick with the Titans.
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I'm gonna stick with the Titans after everybodys advice here. Thanks again.
I finally got back into a bit of gaming after being out for nearly 2 months and out of curiosity I did a few tests over the weekend with BF4. With most settings on high (not ultra), GPU mem usage averages just over 3.5GB on 7680x1600. So that would rule out the the 780ti's and be cutting it too fine for the 290Xs anyway.
However frame rates varied wildly, from just playable to just too choppy and it just wasnt a comfortable experience at all. Going to the pause menu would crash the game and a hard reset was required.
Switching to a single 1600p monitor and I was getting avg frame rates around the 120 mark with all settings on Ultra so that just fine. (no overclocking on the GPU's for this test)
Last/current gen games until recently were very playable on 7680x1600 with some settings dialed back a bit. It begs the question as to whether the new games, and I'll include BF4 in that, are just too much even for 3 Titans to push around at good framerates despite their memory capacity.
One monitor is fine but I'm kinda reluctant to loose the 3 monitors as I much prefer that experience. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I most certainly underestimated the demands 3 1600p screens would place on the system.
One option would be to keep the 1600 screens until Maxwell comes along and in the meantime get 3 1080p screens which will allow me to play with decent framerates. I should be able to sell them on once I can go back to the 1600 screens. I'm basing all this on the premise that all next gen games are going to be as demanding as BF4 proved to be over the weekend.
One more test that I havent done is to repeat the above with some overclocking on the GPU's. I did this before on past games but results were mixed with some games fine and others crashing with certain overclocks.
I finally got back into a bit of gaming after being out for nearly 2 months and out of curiosity I did a few tests over the weekend with BF4. With most settings on high (not ultra), GPU mem usage averages just over 3.5GB on 7680x1600. So that would rule out the the 780ti's and be cutting it too fine for the 290Xs anyway.
However frame rates varied wildly, from just playable to just too choppy and it just wasnt a comfortable experience at all. Going to the pause menu would crash the game and a hard reset was required.
Switching to a single 1600p monitor and I was getting avg frame rates around the 120 mark with all settings on Ultra so that just fine. (no overclocking on the GPU's for this test)
Last/current gen games until recently were very playable on 7680x1600 with some settings dialed back a bit. It begs the question as to whether the new games, and I'll include BF4 in that, are just too much even for 3 Titans to push around at good framerates despite their memory capacity.
One monitor is fine but I'm kinda reluctant to loose the 3 monitors as I much prefer that experience. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I most certainly underestimated the demands 3 1600p screens would place on the system.
One option would be to keep the 1600 screens until Maxwell comes along and in the meantime get 3 1080p screens which will allow me to play with decent framerates. I should be able to sell them on once I can go back to the 1600 screens. I'm basing all this on the premise that all next gen games are going to be as demanding as BF4 proved to be over the weekend.
One more test that I havent done is to repeat the above with some overclocking on the GPU's. I did this before on past games but results were mixed with some games fine and others crashing with certain overclocks.
Soldato
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3.5GB is lower than I'd expect on the Titans, seeing as BF4 caches quite heavily! 
I think you're making the right choice for your setup regardless. 3/4GB is a thin line at that resolution
I think you're making the right choice for your setup regardless. 3/4GB is a thin line at that resolution
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Yeah, give Crysis 3 a go 
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Yeah, give Crysis 3 a go
Crysis 3 is actually fine. Settings dialed back a bit obviously but most on high, not very high. Never got an actual avg fps reading for this but from gameplay experience there probably is room for improvment no doubt. MSI Afterburner won't graph my FPS despite having the box checked in the settings. Think I've seen others mention this before. Might try fraps.
On the subject of 1080p screens - are those with 3 of them using 1920x1080 or 2560x1080? Obviously 1920 is the safer option but I'm wondering if I can get away with 2560 thus increasing their resale value. Pixelwise it comes out at 8.2m for 3 screens which is pretty much the same as a single 4k screen.
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3.5GB is lower than I'd expect on the Titans, seeing as BF4 caches quite heavily!
I think you're making the right choice for your setup regardless. 3/4GB is a thin line at that resolution
Next time, I'll go back and do the test again, both at very high and Ultra settings to get a memory usage reading. Hopefully the damn thing wont crash before I get a useful reading at ultra.
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Yeah BF4 is a bit on the ropey side ATM.
Nonsense! Whack up the settings to max in Crysis 3. What's the point in having all that hardware if you can't max it out
Nonsense! Whack up the settings to max in Crysis 3. What's the point in having all that hardware if you can't max it out
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Nonsense! Whack up the settings to max in Crysis 3. What's the point in having all that hardware if you can't max it out
Oh I'd agree completely
hence the question on which horizontal res for a 1080 screen above I'd get away with.
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Seems like a lot of hassle considering what you've got already. But if you're willing to purchase 3 1080 monitors for now that's your prerogative, your money!
2560x1080 isn't all that many more pixels than 1920 so the performance hit won't be that bad. Plus it'll give you a lot more screen area! The PPI isn't so low that it looks stretched at all. I had a 2560x1080 monitor and was very impressed with it. Very good alternative if you're willing to spend.
If you find time it would be nice to see some performance numbers from Fraps with what you've got now though.
2560x1080 isn't all that many more pixels than 1920 so the performance hit won't be that bad. Plus it'll give you a lot more screen area! The PPI isn't so low that it looks stretched at all. I had a 2560x1080 monitor and was very impressed with it. Very good alternative if you're willing to spend.
If you find time it would be nice to see some performance numbers from Fraps with what you've got now though.
I'm gonna stick with the Titans after everybodys advice here. Thanks again.
I finally got back into a bit of gaming after being out for nearly 2 months and out of curiosity I did a few tests over the weekend with BF4. With most settings on high (not ultra), GPU mem usage averages just over 3.5GB on 7680x1600. So that would rule out the the 780ti's and be cutting it too fine for the 290Xs anyway.
However frame rates varied wildly, from just playable to just too choppy and it just wasnt a comfortable experience at all. Going to the pause menu would crash the game and a hard reset was required.
Switching to a single 1600p monitor and I was getting avg frame rates around the 120 mark with all settings on Ultra so that just fine. (no overclocking on the GPU's for this test)
Last/current gen games until recently were very playable on 7680x1600 with some settings dialed back a bit. It begs the question as to whether the new games, and I'll include BF4 in that, are just too much even for 3 Titans to push around at good framerates despite their memory capacity.
One monitor is fine but I'm kinda reluctant to loose the 3 monitors as I much prefer that experience. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I most certainly underestimated the demands 3 1600p screens would place on the system.
One option would be to keep the 1600 screens until Maxwell comes along and in the meantime get 3 1080p screens which will allow me to play with decent framerates. I should be able to sell them on once I can go back to the 1600 screens. I'm basing all this on the premise that all next gen games are going to be as demanding as BF4 proved to be over the weekend.
One more test that I havent done is to repeat the above with some overclocking on the GPU's. I did this before on past games but results were mixed with some games fine and others crashing with certain overclocks.
I agree that the 6GB titans are probably best due to the vram
However, Nvidia has stated many times that 2 card SLI is 100% supported. Tri-SLi and Quad-SLI do work & in theory should be ok, however it is not 100% supported or recommended by Nvidia so is very likely to be buggy.
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Tri SLi scales well if you disregard the awful bottleneck at 1080. Quad SLi has never scaled that well though, and has negative impact more often than not.
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Its a bit of hassle alright but 1080 would probably have been the proper decision in the first place. As you said, pointless having hardware and not being able to max it out or at least close to it.
I'll gather some results over the coming nights before I make a decision by the end of the week.
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Could you explain more on the bottleneck here? I have an ASIC/FPGA background but my knowledge of PC architecture wouldnt be so great. I would have thought that with more GPUs in the system you can effectively process the frames more quickly so the CPU might not be able to feed the GPUs quickly enough therefore causing an underrun.
But Kaapstad stated earlier that quad sli is unlikely to bottleneck my CPU at 7680x1600. How is this so? Is it that this extreme res would keep the CPU busy enough and unlikely to cause a data underrun to the GPU's, even in quad sli?