Crossfire and HD3D

I'm sitting on a single HD6870 now and I'm feeling the urge to experience 3D gaming and what not. I reckon I would need a second card to get decent framerates but the information I found is conflicting.

Does Crossfire fully support HD3D?

Do you think 2xHD6870 (2500K at 4.4) would run most games decently in 3D or should I just save up for a better card?

edit: I should say that I want a minimum of 1080p at 60Hz in 3D!

with 2 6870's you might be close on a few games and not so good on other...

but to do 3D you need a 1080p 120HZ monitor not 60HZ ....

Elmy said:

with 2 6870's you might be close on a few games and not so good on other...

but to do 3D you need a 1080p 120HZ monitor not 60HZ ....

Click to expand...

I was planning on a 46-50 inch 3D Panasonic plasma to use for gaming and movies.

It seems AMD added support for Crossfire with Catalyst 12.1, though I don't know how well it works.

What would be best for 3D; 2x6870 or one GTX 580?

GTX680 sli
or 7970 CF.
I dont know what the status of AMDs 3D support is.
I do feel that the extra Gig of Vram will come in handy for 3D rendering.

{NG}Fidel said:

GTX680 sli
or 7970 CF.
I dont know what the status of AMDs 3D support is.
I do feel that the extra Gig of Vram will come in handy for 3D rendering.

Click to expand...

Sadly that's not an option. By the time I have money for that, GTX 685 (or whatever they're calling it) will be out!

I'm satisfied with the performance I'm getting out of my single HD6870 for "2D gaming", will HD3D require more than twice the GPU power?

I'm fairly certain that no 3D TVs have true 120Hz inputs. So aiming for 120fps probably isn't worthwhile on that display.

tejpis said:

I was planning on a 46-50 inch 3D Panasonic plasma to use for gaming and movies.

It seems AMD added support for Crossfire with Catalyst 12.1, though I don't know how well it works.

What would be best for 3D; 2x6870 or one GTX 580?

Click to expand...

I have 3 * Samsung S27A950 and am able to play HD3D crossfire eyefinity. I have tried it only with 12.2 (cannot speak for 12.1) but works fine. I can use Deus Ex with the native HD3D support and have played SWTOR using TriDef driver (they have a fix to unlock eyfinity crossfire).

Note: All monitors are connected using DisplayPort (on Asus 7970 DCII). Some sites report that DP connection might be a requirement.

Yeah, Crossfire should fully support HD3D these days. Like aandea mentioned, if you're using eyefinity and tridef, you'll want our tool here to enable it:
http://www.tridef.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=1862

120Hz 3D will only work using DisplayPort, or a few specific dual-link dvi monitors. The newer samsung ones like the aandea has will do HD3D over DVI, HDMI and DP. Though only DVI and DP will give you 120Hz.***

As for GPU usage, 3D is about as demanding as it gets, due to the fact that you basically need double the frames for the same gameplay experience as you have in 2D. I find with active 3D that I usually want to enable vsync, due to screen tearing weirdness with the shutter glasses. Not so noticeable on the line interlaced screens.


*** The 7xxx series cards support Fast HDMI, which a 300MHz HDMI transmitter. This gives you 1080p/120 (1080p/60 3D) over HDMI 1.4a, but also requires the TV to support this new HDMI spec as well. Not usefull for the OP, but figured I might as well mention it.