3 x 1600p Monitors: Tri 780ti's or Tri R290X's?

[goochinbuda]

Gentlemen,

I'm torn between 'upgrading' my current system to either 780ti's or R290X's. I currently have 3 Titans all underwater driving 3 monitors giving 7680x1600 which if my quick calculations are correct is approx 35% more than a single 4K screen.

Since I'll be putting them underwater, the cooler noise of the 290x's wont be an issue. All the graphics cards are on a 480 + 280 rad. The CPU and mobo is on a separate loop so there is plenty of cooling capacity for the GPU's.

The main issue I have is that the Titans I have dont overclock as well as I'd like due to whatever reason. My brother will happily take two of the Titans off me so that's giving me the itch to upgrade *if* it gets me worthwhile performance gains.

I'm leaning more towards the 290x's as the few SLI/CF reviews Ive seen so far would suggest that the 290x's in CF pull ahead of the 780ti's at 4K resolutions.

VFM is not really a priority. I'm looking for whatever will give me better performance at my current resolution.

Yes....I know I'm insane but I've gone past caring about that long ago!

I should probably wait for non-ref 290x's but if the improvements there are only on the cooler then there probably isnt any point in waiting.

Cheers.

 

[goochinbuda]

Thanks for all the suggestions folks. Much appreciated. I think I'll wait and see if and when 6GB versions of the 780ti's come along and I'll re-evaluate then.

If money is no object you could always just get another Titan and go quad SLI.

Would that not push the bottleneck back onto the CPU though, if it cannot feed 4 GPU's quickly enough? I though I read this back in the early reviews of the Titans.
The CPU is an i7 3930K oc'ed to around 4.8GHz. Think I can get it closer to 5.

 

[goochinbuda]

Do your Titans struggle and are you able to play everything you want at reasonable fps?

If your not having any problems i'd just not bother. Or wait a bit for more reviews to emerge at those kind of resolutions.

Unless your game for buying them and doing the reviews for everyone else

On games like Crysis 3, yes they would struggle a little bit with very high settings and AA switched on. But dialing back to high and lowering the AA to low and I've got very playable framerates. With 1600p I probably dont need as much AA anyway. Nearly all current games are more than fine, I'm just concerned with the next gen games coming soon. Its all well and good having a huge vram capacity but if it cant be pushed around fast enough well then....
No doubt I underestimated just what a load a 7680x1600 res would place on the system. I didnt quite realise how much of that 6GB would be consumed at this resolution!
The only reason why I considered the newer cards was due to the higher memory throughput as oppossed to the capacity.
Is it straightforward to see how much mem is being used while gaming? I've never actually done it.

On a side issue most of the problems I have would seem to be driver related and I've had to switch back to the 314 drivers several times. 320.xx were unusable. However I've been travelling for the last 2 months so this weekend I'll update the drivers to the latest and see how things go.

Once again, thank you everybody for your input.

 

[goochinbuda]

OP go for another Titan and go quad sli, at your resolution there is no bottleneck on the CPU. The problem with 4 way sli is the same as 3 way sli, sometimes the support is not there.

I'll give it some thought. I've seen in some instances that 4-way can have a negative impact in some games over 3 -way. I guessing this down to lack of proper support ingame as opposed to CPU bottlenecking?

Thanks

 

[goochinbuda]

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.

 

[goochinbuda]

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.

 

[goochinbuda]

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.

 

[goochinbuda]

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.

 

[goochinbuda]

Seems like a lot of hassle considering what you've got already.

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.

If you find time it would be nice to see some performance numbers from Fraps with what you've got now though.

I'll gather some results over the coming nights before I make a decision by the end of the week.

 

[goochinbuda]

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.

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?

 

[goochinbuda]

ok so some quick tests I did earlier this evening.

Tomb Raider Benchmark:
Resolution: 7680x1600
Hair setting: normal
Shadow details: normal
AA: FXAA
Everything else at their max setting.
Min FPS: 62
Max FPS: 85
Avg FPS: 78


Crysis 3:
Resolution: 7680x1600
Level: Red Star Rising
Texture Detail: Very High
Game Effects from the Advanced Graphics menu: High
Filtering: 1x
AA: FXAA
GPU memory usage: ~3GB according to MSI AB.

Difficult to get the average but according to Fraps, the FPS was around the low 50's, occasionally dipping down to around 40 and below during heavy fighting scenes.

I hadn't played Crysis 3 in a good while but it certainly felt a lot smoother than BF4 over the weekend.

 

[goochinbuda]

Forgot to add that the above was done with a 3930K @ 4.7GHz.
No overclocking on the GPUs.

The Valley Benchmark proved a hell of a challenge though and was very poor at 7680x1600 at max settings. Changing to 5760 x 1080 at ultra detail 8x, gave an average FPS of 37.

How accurate is FRAPs though? I had it overlayed in the top corner of the screen and I was comparing it to the figure Valley was reporting. At times, Fraps seemed to be around 10FPS lower than what Valley was reporting.