4850 x2 - scale well with two instances of a game?

[armstronga]

I run two copies of Everquest II on my PC at the same time. One on each monitor, not in full screen(exclusive) mode.
I am thinking of upgrading my graphics card and spending £250 to £300.

EQ2 makes a lot of use of textures, especially with two copies of it running simultaneously.

Question is, would the Radeon 4850 x2 be a good choice? 2GB of memory, great for textures. But would the dual GPU design scale well to two copies of the game? Or would it be more efficient to go for a single GPU solution?

 

[Minstadave]

Its only really 1GB of memory, as with any dual card setup both cards have duplicates of the same data.

 

[hernaldo]

I run two copies of Everquest II on my PC at the same time. One on each monitor, not in full screen(exclusive) mode.
I am thinking of upgrading my graphics card and spending £250 to £300.

EQ2 makes a lot of use of textures, especially with two copies of it running simultaneously.

Question is, would the Radeon 4850 x2 be a good choice? 2GB of memory, great for textures. But would the dual GPU design scale well to two copies of the game? Or would it be more efficient to go for a single GPU solution?

The 2 copies - 2 GPUs assumption....Is a red herring, you can't load balance between the 2 just because you have 2 GPUs.

 

[armstronga]

Well, that's what I posted here for. To get the opinion of those "in the know".

Thanks for the responses. Looks like a single GPU card for me.

What would be the best bang for the buck around £250 for my needs, would you say?

 

[mmj_uk]

If you want a card with lots of memory then Sapphire are supposed to be releasing a 2GB 4870 soon.

 

[ACESHIGH]

I dont see why the 4850x2 would be a bad choice as its quicker than most single core cards, so should be comparably good with 2 instances of a game.

 

[Combat squirrel]

Why you need to run 2 at a time ? surely you can only play one at once? lol

 

[dazzerd]

Hi there eq2 is a lightweight compared to most graphics cards. I used to play eq2 a lot with multiple clients. If you are looking to do the same you want to upgrade your cpu to at least a dual you can then set each instance of eq2 to use one core each. Or even better get a quad and use two cpus to to run each instance, I hear now that eq2 has become slightly multithreaded anyway.

Serioulsy any card since an x1800xt ot 7800 gtx has been able to max the game out graphically, the bottleneck has always been the cpu, geometry and shadow calcs are ran on the cpu currently rather than the gfx card. (however i hear a patch is coming out to rectify this soon too....)

If you buy a card just make sure it has a decent amount of vram to hold the textures. A4870 1gb would be ideal especially in liht of the new patches coming out.

ty

 

[armstronga]

Hi there eq2 is a lightweight compared to most graphics cards. I used to play eq2 a lot with multiple clients. If you are looking to do the same you want to upgrade your cpu to at least a dual you can then set each instance of eq2 to use one core each. Or even better get a quad and use two cpus to to run each instance, I hear now that eq2 has become slightly multithreaded anyway.

Serioulsy any card since an x1800xt ot 7800 gtx has been able to max the game out graphically, the bottleneck has always been the cpu, geometry and shadow calcs are ran on the cpu currently rather than the gfx card. (however i hear a patch is coming out to rectify this soon too....)

If you buy a card just make sure it has a decent amount of vram to hold the textures. A4870 1gb would be ideal especially in liht of the new patches coming out.

ty

I ended up buying the 4870 2GB Vapor-X from Sapphire. I will let you know how my duo EQ2 performance differs compared to my current 8800 GTS. Expecting the card any day now...