GTX480 dual sli enough for 3 x 30" NV Surround

T

thegamer36

Weaksauce
Joined
Jun 12, 2006
Messages
112
Just as the title says...is a GTX480 dual sli rig enough to run games at 7680x1600 resolution?

Thanks.
 
Waits for vega to respond, since he has actual experience w. The cards in question

Short answer, yes, but you will be memory limited and not be able to run any AA.

I'm sure you will still get a very good gaming experience
 
Depends what games. You're going to run into severe problems with only 1.5GB of memory per card. You will also probably have to sacrifice detail level quite considerably, to high settings, and possibly some medium mixed in with the more demanding titles out there.

Let's take Bad Company 2 as an example.
Two GTX570s (similar to 480s, but they scale slightly better and are marginally faster, maybe a 5-10% difference in total) manage an average of 49fps and a minimum of 25, at 5760x1200, with 4xAA.
Now 7680x1600 is 78% more pixels, so assuming demand scales linearly with pixel count (not quite but it's not too far off), you'd be looking at more like an average of 28 and a minimum of 15, with the 570s.
Take into account this is 480s not 570s, and maybe an average of 26 and a minimum of 14. This is pretty unplayable.
You could possibly gleam up to 40% more performance by turning AA off, but personally I wouldn't want to play a game like Battlefield at 36fps average, 20fps minimum. It isn't that nice. Personal preference of course.

Taking a more demanding title, Metro 2033:
Using the same maths, with AA and Depth of field both already disabled, and detail level reduced to high, two 480s will be looking at around 14fps minimum and 21fps average, and this time there's no AA to disable as it's already off.
You might get roughly playable frame rates with all the details set to medium and tesselation turned off, but only because this is a single player title. It'll be playable, but it won't be smooth.
 
For 30" I don't think anything but the 580's will even come close to doing justice to your monitors. Quite likely that setup will demand 3-Way SLI but that 1.5GB is just plain limited at that res. My comparatively paltry 5760x1080 struggles a bit on dual 1GB 460's (going to upgrade soon).

Just for giggles I ran the numbers on your setup - you are running 12288000 pixels at 24 bits per pixel for 294912000 bits or 36864000 bytes / 1024 = 36,000k or about 35.5MB for one frame and to run 60 frames a sec it would need 2130MB for one whole second to be buffered on the card without any mem for post processing. Those are some insane numbers when I look at it that way.

If AMD just got the message we want 120Hz on all 3 monitors and released a 120Hz (supported) DP to DVI dongle I'd go with their 2GB solutions. Unfortunately they don't seem to be getting it leaving me no choice but NV.
 
One day we'll all be using Geforce 800's or Raden 9000's and be able to look back and say "Remember when it was a pain in the ass to run 3x 30" monitors with AA and get decent fps?" then laugh and go back to our 12000x3000 3d gaming rigs at 120fps.
 
Not going to happen. Games will just get even more demanding and prevent things like that!
 
As others depends on the game but I wouldn't recommend less than 3x SLI for that resolution as it can be very demanding obviously. Running 3x 5760x1080 in 3D actually pushes as few more pixels than 7680x1600 and and 3x SLI makes a lot of stuff playable in 3D that just isn't with only 2x, but SLI scales incredibly well in 3D.

You can always try out 2x SLI but make sure you have at least a 3x SLI board in case you're wanting more performance and you should be able to pickup a 3rd 480 for a decent price if needed.
 
With the types of games I play, with the 480's/580's I ran into VRAM issues on my 3x30" setup. I've changed them out and currently building a quad-6970 sub-zero setup.
 
I don't think quad-GPU even works properly on either side.

Even 3-way 580 SLI is CPU-bottlenecked (per Guru3D.com's testing) in many games, though that's at 2500x1600 w/4xAA.
 
Ultima99 said:
No they wont. We'll still be playing 360 and PS3 ports! :(
Click to expand...

People seem to be under the impression that console ports aren't demanding. They are. They're part of the reason dedicated PC ports are so demanding. The console ports are so badly converted they run like crap, so PC games devs set the bar at 'run like crap' and make the games look as good as they can within that degree of tolerance.
I still don't think I can play the original R6 Vegas.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top