Surround v Eyefinity

[Wilderbeast]

HI,

I have dual 590gtx cards running across 3 1920x1200 screens. The problem being that when I use them both, its actually slower then using one

In single screen format the dual cards make short work of beating the single card, but across the triple screens using surround, then its ever so slightly worse. Playing defiance (yes yes, not the greatest game) over 3 screens leads to jerkiness that makes me have to play it on one monitor. This happens with 2 590's as well as a single, again its slightly better as a single. Its not a vram limit as it never goes above 1400mb, in defiance it's less then 900mb. I also play swtor (again not a great game, but all my friends play it, so it's more of a social thing) and the cards are much worse together in this than separate. I thought that maybe it was a PCIe issue, as with both cards in, the slots go down to 8x, but then it would affect the single screen as well, which it doesn't.

I was thinking of side-grading to a titan, but unsure how it would do across 3 screens, also I was looking at the AMD solutions and wondered if anyone out there has any experience with them across 3 screens.

Last option would be to just get a 30" 2560x1600 monitor instead of the 3 screens. I feel that this would likely be the best solution with regards to performance, but also the least desirable as I'd be losing some screen space.

Cost is relatively unimportant, though I defiantly will not be stretching to 2 titans, however 2 7970's or 2 680's would certainly be an option or maybe a 690 or possibly even a 7990.

My specs:

i7 2600k @ 4ghz
Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3R
8 gigs of 667mhz
2 590gtx, though I only ever have one fitted

 

[Rusty0611]

I would say that it's possible with 2 590s you're getting hampered slightly by PCI-E 2.0. Possibly.

What you're seeing though looks to be a classic case of negative SLI scaling. At a very basic level the game can't handle 4 GPUs and as such having them enabled is reducing performance. 590s are still quite cool cards and you should be able to sell them up and recoup a decent amount of cash.

2 7970s is your fastest option for triple screen gaming but I feel that nVidia Surround is a slightly better implementation than Eyefinity so you may want to consider two 670/680s.

Be aware though that when both the 7970 and 680s are clocked up to decent levels the 7970s will be 5-30% faster depending on the game. There's some exceptions to the rule but generally that holds true.

Although as a side point is there any need to go crossfire/SLI? The games you play aren't the most demanding.... and unless you play anything else a single 7970 might be a better option for you.

 

[Orcvader]

From the sounds of things it could be just poor SLi scaling, there's not many games that can take advantage of four GPU cores. They just end up confused either on the software level or the driver level and ends up with less performance. This needs to be fixed either via a game update, and/or a driver update.

If I remember correctly AMD cards does better with high end resolutions, so probably 2x 7950/7970s will be the best way to go.

 

[Wilderbeast]

Bearing in mind that I will not be overclocking the graphics card, will the 7970 really be enough on its own? I guess I could just get one and then if its not enough, buy another one. Really want to hear from someone who has eyefinity at these kind of resolutions.

I also play D3 across 3 screens, dunno how intensive that game is, but it seems to be fine on just on 590.

 

[Orcvader]

If it helps, I have tried Eyefinity on my 7950, overclocked to 1ghz (so similiar performance to a 7970 boost). On some games such as Simcity, it plays fine. Others like BF3, I need to turn the settings down but the quality detail is not always that different from max anyway. It all varies on the game you're playing.

I went back to single screen gaming anyway since I use the others for things like Skype, borwser, etc .

 

[Rusty0611]

I tried Surround and Eyefinity .

680 SLI and 7950 CF.