Soldato
There has been a fair bit of talk recently from users contemplating moving to a Surround/Eyefinity set up but not able to find many actual benchmarks on the latest drivers and/or with an overclock to work out if they have the GPU horse power necessary to drive three screens.
Following on from Gregster's excellent thread here I decided to run some of my own benchmarks on this generations top end nVidia GPU - the GTX 680 - with what I have termed a 'maximum overclock' on the latest drivers in a triple monitor resolution. All games were benched at a bezel corrected resolution of 5800*1080.
My own set-up was as follows:
i7 3770K
8GB Kingston HyperX RAM
MSI GTX 680 2GB (reference model)
Gigabyte Windforce 3x GTX 680 2GB
All tests ran on 306.23 drivers.
The CPU was clocked to 4.6 Ghz to do all that is possible to remove any CPU bottleneck. The GTX 680's were clocked to the highest possible common clock speed. For mine, that is a core speed of 1275 Mhz and a memory effective speed of 7.06 Ghz.
All tests were ran with Windows Aero disabled.
Before I get to the results I will tackle the elephant in the room and that is of course VRAM. There are a plethora of arguments on this subject throughout the forum (I am probably part of them all!) but in my testing I haven't seen anything to change my opinion that 2GB is not the limiting factor in today's games. What is undeniably true is that this resolution requires an extraordinary amount of GPU horse power to achieve playable frame rates on high to ultra settings.
If we just imagine for a second that these two GPU's had say 16GB of VRAM (!) to just take it out of the equation... there is not a single game I have tested where if I want to achieve playable frame-rates - and I'm being very generous in what I'm terming playable - I am close to the VRAM limit. A couple of games do run close but I have no intention of playing them at the FPS they give. I didn't actually run out of VRAM once in my testing. Metro 2033 on maximum settings was the closest but the MSAA VRAM requirement on its own is around 1GB which is quite frankly completely absurd. I have no idea why it is so high in that game.
Talking about future games now - unless the GPU power required to drive high to ultra settings decreases or remains close to static in comparison to today's games then I still feel you're going to be lowering settings to achieve acceptable FPS anyway in the future and as such lowering the VRAM requirement in the process. That's just my personal feel on it nothing scientific there.
In a fair few games I find myself tweaking with settings to achieve frame rates that I am happy with which of course in turn drops the VRAM required from close-ish to not close at all with BF3 being a great example of this.
The definition of acceptable frame rates is entirely subjective so I will let the numbers talk and then people are free to make their own minds up.
Regarding Surround/Eyefinity on one card - in all games I think you can achieve decent enough frame-rates even on one card although I haven't got time to test this. You will need to drop to medium/low settings though depending on the game.
Any questions feel free to ask and I'll try to answer. I haven't really got much more time to benchmark any more games. It takes a massive amount of time to do it properly as you really need to run each one a few times to even out any obvious anomalies.
Cheers!
Following on from Gregster's excellent thread here I decided to run some of my own benchmarks on this generations top end nVidia GPU - the GTX 680 - with what I have termed a 'maximum overclock' on the latest drivers in a triple monitor resolution. All games were benched at a bezel corrected resolution of 5800*1080.
My own set-up was as follows:
i7 3770K
8GB Kingston HyperX RAM
MSI GTX 680 2GB (reference model)
Gigabyte Windforce 3x GTX 680 2GB
All tests ran on 306.23 drivers.
The CPU was clocked to 4.6 Ghz to do all that is possible to remove any CPU bottleneck. The GTX 680's were clocked to the highest possible common clock speed. For mine, that is a core speed of 1275 Mhz and a memory effective speed of 7.06 Ghz.
All tests were ran with Windows Aero disabled.
Before I get to the results I will tackle the elephant in the room and that is of course VRAM. There are a plethora of arguments on this subject throughout the forum (I am probably part of them all!) but in my testing I haven't seen anything to change my opinion that 2GB is not the limiting factor in today's games. What is undeniably true is that this resolution requires an extraordinary amount of GPU horse power to achieve playable frame rates on high to ultra settings.
If we just imagine for a second that these two GPU's had say 16GB of VRAM (!) to just take it out of the equation... there is not a single game I have tested where if I want to achieve playable frame-rates - and I'm being very generous in what I'm terming playable - I am close to the VRAM limit. A couple of games do run close but I have no intention of playing them at the FPS they give. I didn't actually run out of VRAM once in my testing. Metro 2033 on maximum settings was the closest but the MSAA VRAM requirement on its own is around 1GB which is quite frankly completely absurd. I have no idea why it is so high in that game.
Talking about future games now - unless the GPU power required to drive high to ultra settings decreases or remains close to static in comparison to today's games then I still feel you're going to be lowering settings to achieve acceptable FPS anyway in the future and as such lowering the VRAM requirement in the process. That's just my personal feel on it nothing scientific there.
In a fair few games I find myself tweaking with settings to achieve frame rates that I am happy with which of course in turn drops the VRAM required from close-ish to not close at all with BF3 being a great example of this.
The definition of acceptable frame rates is entirely subjective so I will let the numbers talk and then people are free to make their own minds up.
Regarding Surround/Eyefinity on one card - in all games I think you can achieve decent enough frame-rates even on one card although I haven't got time to test this. You will need to drop to medium/low settings though depending on the game.
Any questions feel free to ask and I'll try to answer. I haven't really got much more time to benchmark any more games. It takes a massive amount of time to do it properly as you really need to run each one a few times to even out any obvious anomalies.
Cheers!
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