Quad 7970s or can we do tri-fire 7970+ 1 7990???

E

eclypse

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Coming from Quad 580 SLI to ATI cards.. brand new build all around and i just opened up the 3 new 7970s today and cant wait to possably fire this up this evening after bleeding the water cooling.

Anyways.. question is, can i run 3 7970s and add a 7990 in the future? Or does it have to be 2 7970s and 1 7990?

Also currently gona try these cards out with there stock air cooler but obviously if they run good enough for me in eyefinity with BF3 i'll be keeping them and would add water cooling to the cards.. i figure it would be tough to chain the 7970s in line with the 7990 in water cooling. :( Anyone ever been able to do that with the 6900 cards?

IF i cant run 3 cards with the 7990.. woner if i should return 1 of the 7970s or just forget the 7990 and grab a 4th 7970.
 
The 6990 allowed for tri-fire with a 6970 or lower. The 6990 just downclocks to the lower cards specs. AFAIK the setups can be

4 - 7970's
1 - 7990 + 1 7970
2 - 7990
1 - 7990 + 2 7970s

Only 4 GPU's maximum can operate in quad-fire.
 
Ok but can i do 3 7970s along with the 7990 so it would be like 5 cards total? Or is the limit of GPUs in crossfire 4 meaning 2 7970s and 1 7990?
 
Limit of 4 physical GPU chips so 2 7970s and 1 7990 would be the max since the 7990 is a dual GPU card. Technically you can put more but they will not run in CFX. You could have 4 7990's on 1 board but only 2 7990's would run in Quadfire while the other 2 would be idle. But you could use 4 7990's for GPU intensive apps like Bitmining for example. (Atleast I think you can.)
 
Thanks.. Crap. Now to figure out if i just buy another 7970 or possably just return 1 7970 and wait for the 7990.

I'm sure 2 7990s would basicly be the same as 4 7970s.. though the huge benifit of the 7990 would be the 4 mini display ports.
 
4 7970's I believe would be faster, you would just be consuming more electricity and creating more heat, so prepare for some epic cooling solutions. Or if you live in a cold climate then it can double as a space heater.
 
NickJames said:
4 7970's I believe would be faster, you would just be consuming more electricity and creating more heat, so prepare for some epic cooling solutions. Or if you live in a cold climate then it can double as a space heater.
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Already dealt with that for the past 2 years now with quad 480s-580s. 7970s use less watts so it should be better. My water cooling can handle it no probs. http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.aspx?m=693435
 
NickJames said:
Limit of 4 physical GPU chips so 2 7970s and 1 7990 would be the max since the 7990 is a dual GPU card. Technically you can put more but they will not run in CFX. You could have 4 7990's on 1 board but only 2 7990's would run in Quadfire while the other 2 would be idle. But you could use 4 7990's for GPU intensive apps like Bitmining for example. (Atleast I think you can.)
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Why crossfire dosn't support more than 4 gpu? Just wondering...
 
kingduqc said:
Why crossfire dosn't support more than 4 gpu? Just wondering...
Click to expand...

Why don't they support PLP?

My guess is that niche setups get the least attention in development. Hell, AMD can barely get working drivers out for new games, and >4-GPU setups would probably require a hardware change.
 
curious, is there any thing that will challenge quad 7970s?(let alone dual 7970's)

Battlefield 3 Eyefinity 3x30" maybe?
 
4-GPU for games is an OS restriction, you can use up to 8 independently.
 
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This is crazy if you have this much $ go with tri 780s. Would smoke 4 7970s and no bs microstutter frame timing that won't be fixed for anything over 2 cards and 1600p for who knows how long. I ran 2 heavily over clocked 7950s at well over 60fps in eyefinity and it ran like shit cuz of frames times. With vsync was much better but input lag was horrible with vsync and eyefinity.
 
HOODedDutchman said:
This is crazy if you have this much $ go with tri 780s. Would smoke 4 7970s and no bs microstutter frame timing that won't be fixed for anything over 2 cards and 1600p for who knows how long. I ran 2 heavily over clocked 7950s at well over 60fps in eyefinity and it ran like shit cuz of frames times. With vsync was much better but input lag was horrible with vsync and eyefinity.
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780s don't scale that well man. 770s scale much better.
 
Scale pretty dam good actually. Really good compared to the trifire 7970 review posted earlier.

http://us.hardware.info/reviews/463...0-in-sli-and-3-way-sli-metro-2033---5760x1080

770 tri sli do well in some games but its likely being bottlenecked by the cpu. Look at the metro 2033 numbers. Memory bus and amount absolutely cripple the 770 tri sli setup in that game. The 780 tri sli gets 5x the fps in metro 2033 at 5760x1080. From 10 to 49 lol. 770 tri sli scale about 132% over 1 card while 780 tri sli scales 113% over 1 card so 19% difference, but if more games start coming out like metro then, well the numbers speak for themselves there.

Point is I'd bet the house 780 would give a MUCH better experience in frames, smoothness, and driver support. My guess would be amd won't fix frame times in anything over single monitor and will put a hardware fix in their next gen and use this as a selling point.
 
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The main issue is the memory- I'd bet that 4GB GTX770's (or 4GB GTX670's/GTX680's) will scale better than 3GB GTX780's, accounting for the raw performance delta. Memory bus has little to do with it- it's memory bandwidth, however you get it, and it only has to be 'enough' for the GPU and application in question. More bandwidth than the GPU can use isn't going to boost any framerates.

But overall- 2x 3GB GTX780's or 3x 4GB GTX670/680/770? It depends. If you have a decent board that can split at least eight PCIe 3.0 lanes to each GPU and a high-enough resolution, I'd bet on Tri-SLI here.

And in the near future, you're going to want every GB of memory you can get on a GPU. When console games can use 4GB-6GB for graphics, expect to need 8GB-12GB on the desktop, especially with incoming high-resolution monitors up to and including 4k.
 
Depends on the game. I know metro 2033 scales with bus width. Metro last light is a bit different but memory still takes a large effect.
 
HOODedDutchman said:
Depends on the game. I know metro 2033 scales with bus width. Metro last light is a bit different but memory still takes a large effect.
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Be specific here- bus width, by itself, is a single-dimensional variable used in part to describe the actually pertinent variable, which is memory bandwidth. The other variable is the transfer rate per bit, which is the product of the clock frequency and the number of bits transferred per clock (two for DDR1/2/3 schemes, four per clock for DDR5).

A 64bit bus at 2GHz talking to DDR5 will still provide the same bandwidth as a 128bit bus at 2GHz talking to DDR3. It's the resulting bandwidth that makes the difference here.

Now, latency is also a problem- but latency doesn't vary by bus width, but rather by the type of memory and clock frequency used.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1040125558&postcount=3

I have already dissected the data for you:
2 games like 2x780 no matter the memory buffer size because they do not scale beyond 2 GPUs- Hitman Absolution adn metro LL. And 2 games, Crysis 3 and Metro 2033 like more memory.

I really don't know where do you get that idea that Metro 2033 is an example of future games from consoles ports, because Windows 8.1 API uses tiled resources, that will lower hardware requirements for gaming , especially memory, since with tiled resources you no longer load textures into memory that will not be rendered in the final frame.If anything that Microsoft said is true about tiled resources, and it better be because of the way Xbox One handles memory, future games will require less memory.
Or the Xbox One is dead already in the competition with PS4.

I wouldn't put my money on 6GB becoming mainstream for the next 2 cards generations. NVIDIA is kicking a$$e$ with those 2GB 770s. Remember those were triple fullhd monitors in high settings.

PCIE 3.0 matters?
really?
last review i saw compared 3 way titans in PCIE 2.0 vs 3.0.
results? PCIe 3.0 around 2% more FPS...:rolleyes:
Click to expand...
 
IdiotInCharge said:
The main issue is the memory- I'd bet that 4GB GTX770's (or 4GB GTX670's/GTX680's) will scale better than 3GB GTX780's, accounting for the raw performance delta. Memory bus has little to do with it- it's memory bandwidth, however you get it, and it only has to be 'enough' for the GPU and application in question. More bandwidth than the GPU can use isn't going to boost any framerates.

But overall- 2x 3GB GTX780's or 3x 4GB GTX670/680/770? It depends. If you have a decent board that can split at least eight PCIe 3.0 lanes to each GPU and a high-enough resolution, I'd bet on Tri-SLI here.

And in the near future, you're going to want every GB of memory you can get on a GPU. When console games can use 4GB-6GB for graphics, expect to need 8GB-12GB on the desktop, especially with incoming high-resolution monitors up to and including 4k.
Click to expand...

Maybe at 4k you'll need 6GB+. Not all data has to be stored in VRAM so I don't get why you think just because a console game uses 4-6 that you'll need the same on PC or possibly more.
 
geok1ng said:
http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1040125558&postcount=3

I have already dissected the data for you:
2 games like 2x780 no matter the memory buffer size because they do not scale beyond 2 GPUs- Hitman Absolution adn metro LL. And 2 games, Crysis 3 and Metro 2033 like more memory.

I really don't know where do you get that idea that Metro 2033 is an example of future games from consoles ports, because Windows 8.1 API uses tiled resources, that will lower hardware requirements for gaming , especially memory, since with tiled resources you no longer load textures into memory that will not be rendered in the final frame.If anything that Microsoft said is true about tiled resources, and it better be because of the way Xbox One handles memory, future games will require less memory.
Or the Xbox One is dead already in the competition with PS4.

I wouldn't put my money on 6GB becoming mainstream for the next 2 cards generations. NVIDIA is kicking a$$e$ with those 2GB 770s. Remember those were triple fullhd monitors in high settings.

PCIE 3.0 matters?
really?
last review i saw compared 3 way titans in PCIE 2.0 vs 3.0.
results? PCIe 3.0 around 2% more FPS...:rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Are you blind? I hope not, but it's always possible; there are plenty of ways for blind people to interface with computers, and by extension, forums like this one.

But if you're not blind, then look into the future a little- not the past- and try to see where we're headed. We have 15 years of discrete 3D hardware history to draw upon.

Would you imagine that the first real graphics card only had 4MB of RAM? It's true. And it ran the games of that day really, really well.

But I'm not talking about then, and I'm not talking about now- I'm talking about games coming in the future that will be developed for the incoming consoles as well as PCs.

The thing is, developers are going to go from having <512MB to run their games on up to 4GB-6GB; and that's not going to be for increased resolution, and the games themselves aren't going to get much more 'complex'; which means that the main benefactor for that extra memory will be game assets. The artists and level designers will make very quick use of that extra memory, be sure of it.

So where does that leave us on the PC? Well, let's say a particular game uses ~4GB of memory for graphics on the consoles, which is more than reasonable, then it's also reasonable that with higher resolutions on the PC, or even at 1080p, you'd want more than 4GB of memory per GPU. So let's call 6GB the minimum, and 8GB or more desirable. And why not? Memory's cheap, that's why these consoles have 8GB in the first place.

And remember, even with the Xbone's 'tiled' setup, it's DDR3 is going to have access to a higher bandwidth, lower latency memory pool than a desktop GPU running over a PCIe bus. So yeah, not only are you going to want to have enough dedicated graphics memory, but you're also going to want to have the GPU(s) on the fastest bus available, if you want to run games being released in the near future at their highest settings.
 
x3sphere said:
Maybe at 4k you'll need 6GB+. Not all data has to be stored in VRAM so I don't get why you think just because a console game uses 4-6 that you'll need the same on PC or possibly more.
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Extra resolution only takes up more VRAM if you go batty with the AA settings- particularly MSAA. But that's on the way out, since it's expensive and not terribly useful for shader intensive games.

But consider that PCs have significantly more rendering horsepower than these incoming consoles- do you think that game developers are unaware of that? Do you think that they're just going to ignore the PC's performance advantage? I expect them to do what they've been doing, which has been to develop bleeding-edge games with the top end PC in mind, and then scale that down to the consoles.

The only difference now, of course, is that these consoles start ahead of the game with regard to available graphics memory; WAY ahead. So while your PC today can easily be many times faster than these consoles, we're all behind on graphics memory. Only those select few that picked up 6GB HD7970's or TItans are even close, and they might even feel the strain with the settings cranked far right.

So, do we need that extra VRAM today? No, not at all. But can I honestly recommend a card that doesn't have excess VRAM? Nope, that'd be a disservice. And given that we're nearing the start of another GPU cycle, it makes sense to recommend people hold off to see what AMD does next. They couldn't possibly be oblivious to the need for GPUs with more VRAM, and memory is cheap.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
Are you blind? I hope not, but it's always possible; there are plenty of ways for blind people to interface with computers, and by extension, forums like this one.

But if you're not blind, then look into the future a little- not the past- and try to see where we're headed. We have 15 years of discrete 3D hardware history to draw upon.
Click to expand...

Better blind than idiot. Consoles run with integrated graphics in crossfire, grossly comparable with 7850 today. Only an idiot in charge would assume that giving 12Gb of DDR5 to a 7850 would allow it to run games at higher quality settings and resolutions than, say, a 2GB 770.

You need a bugged gaming engine in triple screen resolutions at insane AA levels to fill 2GB today. ¨6GB wont be mainstream in 2 generations like 2GB is today. Hell, i do not even see the next generation of VGAs having CPUs with the power needed to break those plataform bound results at 1440p.

Lets look into the future: we need more CPU fuel. Intel has giving us 5% performance increases over the upgrades: 2600k>3570k>4770k. Without CPU power i don't see much future for 3xtitan or 2x9970 on the next months of games to be released. Even if we have more CPU power, VGAs need way more processing power to actually fill, use and need 6GB of VRAM.

Until them 4k@60hz is a goal whose climbing will require more CPU, more Gflops, not more GBs. And 4k@60hz is not even the high end gaming rig today, that title belongs to 3x1440p@120Hz. Nothing, absolutely nothing on sale today can couple with that challenge in the games that "matter" for the 6GB idiots in charge. by the time we have CPUs that do not limit the frame rates, no card selling today could handle it, no matter how many GB of DDR5 the seller slaps over it.


yes, i can recommend and even purchase myself a 2Gb/3Gb card, knowing that future hypothetical games that require more than that will not be playable with a 4Gb version of the cards sold today. In my list of card setups, there is only 1 price range that i recommend 4Gb cards: 3x770@4GB. 2x770 do not have the juice to run games that need more than 2GB and 1x770@4Gb is the most idiotic advice one can give.

4Gb 760? why not 12GB 7850s like the consoles:rolleyes:
 
Fine, you win. Please don't buy a graphics card with more than 2GB of VRAM; you couldn't possibly need it.

(and yes, I did see that you mention 4GB cards- but then again, I actually read your post...)
 
Martha Stewart said:
curious, is there any thing that will challenge quad 7970s?(let alone dual 7970's)

Battlefield 3 Eyefinity 3x30" maybe?
Click to expand...

Glad you asked. 2 7970's do a good job at 7680x1600. A third GPU would probably be optimal. 2 7970's at 2560x1600 is complete overkill though.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
I find 2xGTX670's at 2560x1600 to be far from overkill; even under-powered, in BF3.
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Yea, I would tend to agree with you here. I don't think dual 7970s would ever be considered "overkill" @ 1600P, unless you are playing old Direct 8/9 games..

FC3 and Crysis 3 are classic examples of games that can eat dual 7970/680/770 setups @ 1600P..
 
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