NVIDIA 3D VISION SURROUND Experience @ [H]

Rivatuner is obsolete and was abandoned in Dec. 2009. The same guy who made Rivatuner went on to make Precision and then Afterburner, probably because he was paid by EVGA and MSI to make those programs..There is no need to use anything except Afterburner and the D3D Overrider function from Rivatuner these days.
 
BlueStorm said:
It's no stunt.. it's how SLI has *always worked*. I don't know why this bothers you now

By definition you can only SLI products with identical device IDs. This actually saves you from yourself btw.. why would you intentionally introduce microstutter by guaranteeing that alternating frames will always take longer to render on one gpu than another? I guess you want more frames per second, but you don't mind when you get an uneven framerate, leading to it feeling like a slower framerate?

Since you have 2 device IDs that are the same, and 1 device ID that is not, you can't SLI the 3 boards together. Simple as that.
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This is something that's always bothered me, I just never voiced it. My point is that ATi is a lot more flexible in this regard, so if ATi can link 3 GPUs using two cards, why can't nVidia? Why should I be forced to buy three cards, when I should be able to buy two? It can't be technical reasons, because their competitor can do it.

I can only conclude that it was a corporate decision: there's no reason why the GTX295 card could not expose each of its GPUs as a GTX275, since that's precisely what they are.

Not only that, but it's hardly likely to cause confusion. The kind of people that SLi and CrossfireX tend to know what they are doing. It's not like such setups are for Dell customers...
 
mas said:
rivatuner has been around for ages, well before precision tool (years and years), how is it that nobody knows about this? and by nobody I mean it seems to have been largely ignored by gamers, to the point where precision tool is all people know about (obviously since evga is a big name). it basically does the same thing as nvperfhud for system usage details in osd/fixed-graph format, complete with logging and hotkey functions. in fact, it was the success of this app that prompted the evga guys to hire unwinder, the dev behind this app, to create a scaled down version with some of the exact same functions we now know as evga precision tool. he's now also working with msi, so you know where this work is coming from when you see similar features in their mobo/gpu software as well.

a recent addition to rivatuner you guys might like to know about is the perfmons plugin, which now means that you are capable of monitoring anything going on in the windows os that you desire. everything. from hdd usage to system memory, networking, etc. this is huge since it's not limited to gpu and built in related performance details anymore. having access to an in game osd with all this info on the screen is invaluable to me, and it really makes me wonder every time I see people on dedicated forums like this messing around with one-trick tools like fraps (not counting vid capture function ofc) when trying to bench their games.

in any case it's good for this guy to finally get his work recognised, even if by proxy under major hardware mfg. I think his low profile is probably due to lack of promo, seems he's stuck with just the guru3d community for the most part this whole time, which has not been very prevalent in gaming even though lots of people go to them for custom/mobile gpu drivers.
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Yes, but as of Vista and Win7, the graphics memory in use is no longer displayed. There are some things that Rivatuner does not monitor. ATI Tray Tools is an awesome tool that's a lot like RT, but for ATI cards only.

Both Unwinder and Ray Adams deserve some kudos after all.
 
BlueStorm said:
1920x1200 will give you the same field of view space regardless of whether you're in Surround/Eyefinity or not. A well behaved game will determine it's FoV based on the aspect ratio, not resolution.

Big asterisk here.. this is totally dependent on the game supporting altering the field of view..

If it doesn't you'll get the same old pretty picture all stretched out to fill all 3 displays pixels, or a zoomed in (actually a *loss* of content) view to fill all pixels.

Some games by their nature will never support expanded FoV because developers see this as giving an unfair advantage to gamers with more money to spend on these setups. For example.. Starcraft 2 will never support Surround/Eyefinity with expanded FoV (for competitive parity reasons).
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Kind of pointless leaving out this part of your quote:
If you have 3 screens with 1920x1200 resolution in a surround/Eyefinity setup, you still have 1920x1200 resolution on each screen. The differense is that you have now 3 times more content.
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and then try to lecture me about it. Same goes with FOV as explained to the same user in the second post to him:
http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1035888210&postcount=101

Wouldn't it be better to repeat my posts with full quotes instead? :p

I mean, you post as if I was talking about single 1920x1200 and not 3X 1920x1200 screens in eyefinity/Nvidia surround...
 
When Nvidia puts out a cooler running card in the future and I have money to invest in three 120Hz monitors, I will have no hesitation to moving back to green for 3D Surround. I really love 3D gaming and movies. The performance differential and scaling over CF is phenomenal.
 
DOOM 3 was one the game that would not work with Surround or 3D Vision no matter how hard I tried with my console commands. And really, who gives a damn?
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Well that's a pity. I like Doom 3. I'm not rich enough to afford anything like this though.

Great review, and I appreciate the personal notes from Kyle regarding the 3D. Some people might have similar issues with the 3D making them feel ill that they might not anticipate. Nvidia may be late to the multi-monitor display game, but they did put 3D on the market, and now that they do have multi-monitor capability the competition between ATI and Nvidia will only keep going. That's a definite win for the enthusiast now matter which brand you prefer. :)
 
Here's something I'm curious about: If a game doesn't play nice with SLI, does it automatically mean surround is not an option? I can't really think of a game off the top of my head. I do know however, that for Blur, I have to disable xfire to run it in eyefinity. For some reason, it gets terrible frames with xifre on, and triple those frames with just one card.

My roommate's running a gtx 480 SLI setup, but he was pretty much forced to water cool them which I don't like. If nvidia's next gen cards can SLI without producing unreasonable heat, then that's a very likely upgrade for me when they roll around. However, I am a little nervous about what I mentioned earlier... I do like the option of turning off xfire when it's detrimental to a specific game in triple wide.
 
To quote several people and reply, the reason why Nv Surround is available on 2XX series is that the 5XXX ATIs were made with hardware support for what they're doing, driving three or more screens from a single card and a single core. 2XX were not made for this and the 4XX were certainly not made for this. It's software VS hardware (I'm not counting CUDA core usage for this) some of us knew what performance penalty to expect for that reason, but it is a great step forward for PC gamers - getting another advantage over console players.
 
Tamlin_WSGF said:
Kind of pointless leaving out this part of your quote:

and then try to lecture me about it. Same goes with FOV as explained to the same user in the second post to him:
http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1035888210&postcount=101

Wouldn't it be better to repeat my posts with full quotes instead? :p

I mean, you post as if I was talking about single 1920x1200 and not 3X 1920x1200 screens in eyefinity/Nvidia surround...
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No one is lecturing you.. I thought you said you have more visibility with 1920x1200 across 3 screens (i.e. total of 1920x1200) than with 1920x1200 on 1 screen.. which isn't true.

But it seems I misunderstood that part.

Either way, the FoV must still be allowed to deviate and that's an application side decision.
 
Intel_Hydralisk said:
Here's something I'm curious about: If a game doesn't play nice with SLI, does it automatically mean surround is not an option? I can't really think of a game off the top of my head. I do know however, that for Blur, I have to disable xfire to run it in eyefinity. For some reason, it gets terrible frames with xifre on, and triple those frames with just one card.

My roommate's running a gtx 480 SLI setup, but he was pretty much forced to water cool them which I don't like. If nvidia's next gen cards can SLI without producing unreasonable heat, then that's a very likely upgrade for me when they roll around. However, I am a little nervous about what I mentioned earlier... I do like the option of turning off xfire when it's detrimental to a specific game in triple wide.
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Good question, however SLI is totally profile based like Crossfire. Even with SLI enabled, SLI won't even run for a given game unless NVIDIA has looked at the game and specified to the driver via profile how to run it in multi-gpu mode, which is basically a guarantee that by default, the worst you should see is single-gpu performance levels, eliminating the need to disable SLI altogether for that game.

Besides, you can go into the control panel and specify in a given games profile that it run in single GPU mode. There is no need to hard-toggle the global state of SLI on or off for situations like this.
 
Intel_Hydralisk said:
Here's something I'm curious about: If a game doesn't play nice with SLI, does it automatically mean surround is not an option? I can't really think of a game off the top of my head. I do know however, that for Blur, I have to disable xfire to run it in eyefinity. For some reason, it gets terrible frames with xifre on, and triple those frames with just one card.

My roommate's running a gtx 480 SLI setup, but he was pretty much forced to water cool them which I don't like. If nvidia's next gen cards can SLI without producing unreasonable heat, then that's a very likely upgrade for me when they roll around. However, I am a little nervous about what I mentioned earlier... I do like the option of turning off xfire when it's detrimental to a specific game in triple wide.
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I'm running 3x SLI on air and its not a problem but my office is setup for this kind of thing. No you don't want to sit next to my sif rig but I've been keeping my rigs 8 feet from me for years now.
 
With the 2nd card driving one monitor, does it drop down to 2d speeds when not gaming?
 
BlueStorm said:
No one is lecturing you.. I thought you said you have more visibility with 1920x1200 across 3 screens (i.e. total of 1920x1200) than with 1920x1200 on 1 screen.. which isn't true.

But it seems I misunderstood that part.

Either way, the FoV must still be allowed to deviate and that's an application side decision.
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You have misunderstood then. :)

Fov is the key issue to see more, thus field of view. Mostly its tied to aspect ratio, but we have also discovered at WSGF something we call pixel based, where the fov is tied to the amount of pixels, instead of the aspect ratio of the display. Red alert 2 is an example of this. Thats more the exception though.

Seems that times are changing a bit when it comes to locking fov though. Battlefield 2 for instance had a locked fov for widescreen users, only allowing for 4:3, since widescreen gave an advantage if FOV was set properly to aspect ratio. On BFBC2, they turned and now DICE supports multi-mon gaming with proper fov correction. :)

The "unfair" advantage argument will probably disappear I guess, now that the user base gets larger as we saw with widescreen earlier. Until then, most newer games can be corrected afterwards if developers don't do this. :cool:
 
Kyle,

Are you planning on testing NV Surround with any of the GTX2xx cards?



bizzmeister said:
I think just the daily amount of people playing COD Modern Warfare 2 on xbox 360 craps all over the ENTIRE pc gaming community with the amount of online gamers at any given time lol.
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Maybe as far as a single FPS goes. The amount of people playing WoW at this instant is probably more than every gamer online on the PS3 and 360 right now. :p
 
Anyone get this running on HL2? I loaded HL2:EP2 but the video section doesn't even show me an option above 19x12.
 
Matrices said:
Anyone get this running on HL2? I loaded HL2:EP2 but the video section doesn't even show me an option above 19x12.
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Try running 16:9 aspect ratio first. Some games require you to change the aspect ratio before the resolutions become available. :)
 
bizzmeister said:
Console gaming has just taken a dump on PC gaming because its soo cheap and easy to use. I think just the daily amount of people playing COD Modern Warfare 2 on xbox 360 craps all over the ENTIRE pc gaming community with the amount of online gamers at any given time lol.
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Then there's this whole WOW thing you know. That's the main reason the higher ups want a subscription based COD... no matter how overpriced you make a DLC, it's still just one month's worth of subscription in WOW.
 
kuyaglen said:
With the 2nd card driving one monitor, does it drop down to 2d speeds when not gaming?
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The other thing about this driver is the fact that now both my cards idle at 33C instead of 39C because apparently they fixed their multi-monitor clock problems!

A++!
 
Matrices said:
Wow, that actually worked. :) It doesn't make sense to me, but it worked.
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It's just the way the game developers perceive the way that gamers think: select the type of monitor you have first (16:9, 16:10 or 4:3), then pick the resolution you want for that aspect ratio.

Either way, gratz on getting it working. :)
 
One thing that Kyle missed in his review, but Hardware Canucks (I think) caught, is that the bezel correction in these betas is buggy. They work - but if you go back and try to tweak them, they will break. You need to exit span mode and reenter span mode if you want to make changes to bezel correction.

Now that I can see for myself what the hell bezel correction really is, yes I think it removes a great annoyance of uneven lines across monitors.
 
Kidfinger said:
Anything I can do to help out the [H] :D I just bought another 480 and clicked on the linky that popped up in my sig. Got it through the egg. Special right now where they are 499 with free 3 day shipping :D.
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Yes you did! Thanks. Your card here.

Bankie said:
Kyle,

Are you planning on testing NV Surround with any of the GTX2xx cards?
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Yes.
 
Matrices said:
One thing that Kyle missed in his review, but Hardware Canucks (I think) caught, is that the bezel correction in these betas is buggy. They work - but if you go back and try to tweak them, they will break. You need to exit span mode and reenter span mode if you want to make changes to bezel correction.

Now that I can see for myself what the hell bezel correction really is, yes I think it removes a great annoyance of uneven lines across monitors.
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Figured this out on my own when I noticed that bezel correction was off but it had been working. Good thing to know for now, hopefully this gets fixed in the WHQL release.
 
Physx is completely fucked for me in Batman using Surround. At 19x12, it's fine. At 6040x1200, enabling Physx brings my FPS to 3.
 
Ouch. Is that permanent or just because this is beta? Would be pretty messed up if one Nvidia feature invalidates another. Granted, Physx isn't all that, but damn I'd like to use it for the one freakin' game where it does something.
 
Also, it seems like you were writing about 3D Surround, not Surround (which is what I'm running), when you talked about needing to disable Physx.

Batman: AA is simply a visual feast at any resolution, but when you move to multi-display resolutions with all the quality dials turned up, it can simply be an exalting gaming experience. We even had Very High PhysX turned on at 5760x1080. Turning on 3D, again killed the performance, forcing us to turn off PhysX so both our GPUs could be utilized for video (something NVIDIA promised me years ago would never ever be the case). Killing PhysX though allowed for solid 3D gameplay with all the eye candy though, giving solid 35-40 framerates. The NVIDIA driver did force 2XAA as well, but the visuals were still stunning. The 3D did make things a bit dark, and again, my office was not dark, but the lights were off in middle of the day.
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It sounds like you were running Phsyx at "very high" in 2D Surround, correct?
 
Matrices said:
Physx is completely fucked for me in Batman using Surround. At 19x12, it's fine. At 6040x1200, enabling Physx brings my FPS to 3.
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Yeah there's a problem even with my setup. When Surround is enabled there's no way to set aside a GPU for PhysX and that's the problem. And with only 2 cards you can't set dedicate a GPU for PhysX anyway. Not a biggie, I expected as much, I do wonder if there's a way to do with with 3 or more cards or no. Need to ask around.
 
Yeah, but when you're in SLI mode with two cards, you still don't have a card set aside for Physx, but your frames don't dip into garbage territory, right? I can run in SLI mode at 19x12 (which by definition means neither card is Physx dedicated) and my performance is fine with Physx set to max.

So this problem is something Surround-specific. My frame rate is literally 2-3 FPS with Physx+Surround using 2 GPUs, and that just doesn't make sense unless there is specifically an issue with Physx and multiple monitors.
 
Matrices said:
Rivatuner is obsolete and was abandoned in Dec. 2009. The same guy who made Rivatuner went on to make Precision and then Afterburner, probably because he was paid by EVGA and MSI to make those programs..There is no need to use anything except Afterburner and the D3D Overrider function from Rivatuner these days.
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Bo_Fox said:
Yes, but as of Vista and Win7, the graphics memory in use is no longer displayed. There are some things that Rivatuner does not monitor. ATI Tray Tools is an awesome tool that's a lot like RT, but for ATI cards only.

Both Unwinder and Ray Adams deserve some kudos after all.
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my main use was always the osd, besides fan and overclocking profiles, which still work in the latest version. all types of memory display work for me since I'm still on xp, I guess that's just another reason for me to put off upgrading. I wouldn't say it was obsolete or abandoned, especially since I can't think of one other program with this kind of flexibility. true it hasn't been updated in a long time once he got busy, but most the core functions still work even with latest drivers.

those dx override features are only having problems recently, since nvidia changed their api/codepaths with the new 257.xx version forceware, but full specs have been published so it's only a matter of time before they get added. if anything was obsolete I would say it's this part, which could be easily replaced by more advanced apps like nhancer. I wouldn't expect timely updates anyway, when this is completely free and he's got other stuff to do.
 
Nice preview. I say preview because I think calling it a review would be unfair to you guys since it's beta and you haven't been able to post game compatibility lists and FPS yet so I wouldn't wanna hold you accountable.

That said honestly man between the lines I read "Nvidia GTX4XX is still overpriced crap, drivers don't work(well) yet, but hey at least you poor schmucks who stayed in the pool despite nvidias bowel issues finally sorta got 3D Surround."

[H] pushes Surround/Eyefinity with all it's might and with good reason, but it sucks you gotta push shit to make the flowers grow.

I'll go back to Nvidia eventually when the cards stop sucking and drivers go through a couple more digits, but the signs that said I should ditch my displaycrap adapter and 5870 while they're still worth money just aren't there. Yeah, I like you guys am one of the lucky ones. Eyefinity works beautifully for me all the time with nary a hitch. Maybe I'll look back to the Nvidia camp after this summer.



(note all my sucking and crap statements are specifically in regards to the heat, power, and performance issues of GTX4XX. I have and will always be an nvidia fanboy until G80 is nothing but a distant memory.)
 
Would love to see how scalable tri sli GTX480s are in both 2d and 3d surround, especially on some of the newer DX10/11 games at 5760x1080.
 
Really great review Kyle. Jumping ship back to the green team asap.
 
Originally Posted by Kyle Bennet

Yes, that is correct. But even in 2D Surround, one GPU was fully being utilized by PhysX, in both Very High and Normal setting. 3D Surround forced me to turn it off.
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I guess I'm just not following you. Are you saying that you were running 3 cards, with one dedicated to PhysX? My situation is that I have two cards, and in Surround mode, Physx crawls if I use a Surround resolution, but it's fine if I use a normal resolution. In either case, of course, neither of my cards are dedicated to Physx, since they're both tied up in SLI. So how was one of your cards "fully utilized" in Physx while you were in Surround mode - a third card?
 
Matrices said:
I guess I'm just not following you. Are you saying that you were running 3 cards, with one dedicated to PhysX? My situation is that I have two cards, and in Surround mode, Physx crawls if I use a Surround resolution, but it's fine if I use a normal resolution. In either case, of course, neither of my cards are dedicated to Physx, since they're both tied up in SLI. So how was one of your cards "fully utilized" in Physx while you were in Surround mode - a third card?
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They are tied up in phys-x. Go to your surround/physx tab in the control panel and it will ask you what to do for physx. The options for me are Auto-GPU1-GPU2-CPU. If I set to auto, it puts it on GPU1. What Kyle means is that it literally uses GPU1 for physx and attempts to game while GPU1 is being heavily taxed for physx despite being in SLI (surround that is, I don't know about non-surround).

I attempted Batman and can confirm the shitty phys-x performance.
 
Right, but the difference is that he was able to actually play in 2D Surround using very high Physx whereas it seems we're seeing just the opposite.
 
thehybridfrog said:
I attempted Batman and can confirm the shitty phys-x performance.
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When Surround is enabled the check box to dedicate a GPU to PhysX is disabled. Even with only one monitor PhysX performance was suboptimal unless I dedicated one GPU to PhysX so I think this is at the core of the problem.

I didn't find the PhysX performance shiffy in Batman AA but framerates would drop into the 20's but run up to 100+ and that big fluctuation causes its own issues.
 
Seems like no one is having issues but myself (assume I am missing something obvious). I cannot get any game to run, everything locks up immediately after loading. I have installed and reinstalled with driver sweeper including a fresh OS install, tried many different resolutions, switched around dvi connections, still no luck, 2d desktop in surround is just fine.

I have been running this setup for a while now in SLI, a 5870, and a 5970. Any ideas?

2 gtx 480's
P6T7-ws i7 920
PCP&C 860
3x30" 3007wfp's
 
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