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Which option is better for multiple monitor gaming.

  • GTX 680 4GB in SLI

    Votes: 23 57.5%

  • HD 7970GE in CF

    Votes: 17 42.5%
  • Total voters
    40
A

Andaellyn

n00b
Joined
Dec 29, 2012
Messages
8
Coming up this February, I am going to upgrade my computer and I have been looking around and I really want to venture into the eyefinity/surround gaming side of pc gaming.

I am looking at two different cards right now and I don't know what is really better.

I know that if you look on the hardocp there is a review on multiple monitors for NV and AMD, but i would just like some feed back because maybe the 680 was performing worse because they had less memory to use, but what if they were 4gb?

My real question is i want to know if the 7970GE in CF would be better than the GTX 680 4gb in SLI.

Is the increase in performance in the 7970ge in cf worth the headache from drivers and the issues that i have heard floating around?

*Off Topic* Do you guys think that Crysis 3 will perform better on AMD or Nvidia cards? ;)

Cheers
 
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More Vram does not mean more performance. You could have a 680 with a 100 gigs of ram, and it would still perform the same as a 680 @ 2gb of ram at 1080p. Vram is important when there are lots of textures, so at 4k, you might run into vram issues with a 2gb card that you might not with a 4gb. For 'future-proofing', just go with the 4gb's, as you will be able to play most future games and not have to worry about vram issues with textures.

The two cards are better for different games, so for the most part, any difference is not really important. So long you get a frame rate you are okay with, that is good.

Personally, i went with AMD just because no cards fit my color scheme. They are all good cards.
 
Robertmarcus said:
More Vram does not mean more performance. You could have a 680 with a 100 gigs of ram, and it would still perform the same as a 680 @ 2gb of ram at 1080p. Vram is important when there are lots of textures, so at 4k, you might run into vram issues with a 2gb card that you might not with a 4gb. For 'future-proofing', just go with the 4gb's, as you will be able to play most future games and not have to worry about vram issues with textures.

The two cards are better for different games, so for the most part, any difference is not really important. So long you get a frame rate you are okay with, that is good.

Personally, i went with AMD just because no cards fit my color scheme. They are all good cards.
Click to expand...

I was talking about the VRAM because the Hardocp review of multiple monitor gaming used 2gb cards at 5760x1080 and i want to know if the nvidia cards were 4gb could their be an increase at 5760x1080, maybe the lack of vram was causing poor performance for nv?
 
After just briefly looking over the Hardocp review, it looks like 4gb of vram is possibly helpful, but performance increase, i dont really think so. If it was running out of Vram, then it would be tanking (like single digit fps) in performance. I recommend the 4gb version because who knows how demanding bf4 or crysis 3 will be on the vram.

Overall, just go with the 4gb vram model if money is no matter.
 
If going sigle card and OC'ing, go with ATI. If other then go with Nvidia
 
i do plan on going 3monitors so i want to end up going 2 cards. Is there any reason you advise me to go with the green team if i want to go with 2 cards over amd?
 
Going by my experience nVidia cards work in SLI without any hitch out-of-the-box (never tested it on 6xx series though by myself), but AMD CF has some issues which AMD needs to take care of with their drivers. Take case of Far Cry 3 - I'm using HD7950 in crossfire and experience micro-stuttering. Although this isn't a big issue since this can corrected by using 3rd party tool RadeonPro which has option to enable Dyanamic V-Syn control, which is similar to adaptive v-sync implemented in latest nvidia drivers. But I can say that CF setup will give you more punch than nvidia SLI if we consider the raw power of the cards along with overclocking potentials.
 
Andaellyn said:
I was talking about the VRAM because the Hardocp review of multiple monitor gaming used 2gb cards at 5760x1080 and i want to know if the nvidia cards were 4gb could their be an increase at 5760x1080, maybe the lack of vram was causing poor performance for nv?
Click to expand...

No. More VRAM won't increase performance. When a game needs more VRAM than the video card has, it starts caching on the hard drive. This results in a dramatic reduction of FPS that cannot be described as "poor" - it's unplayable, usually under 10 FPS. There is no mistaking when this happens, and it didn't happen in the HardOCP review.

Some players are noting VRAM usage of more than 2GB in some newer games, particularly Battlefield 3, even at much lower resolutions. This isn't a case of the game needing more than 2GB of VRAM; those games are noticing that there's lots of VRAM available and prefetching textures ahead of when they are needed.
 
evilsofa said:
No. More VRAM won't increase performance. When a game needs more VRAM than the video card has, it starts caching on the hard drive. This results in a dramatic reduction of FPS that cannot be described as "poor" - it's unplayable, usually under 10 FPS. There is no mistaking when this happens, and it didn't happen in the HardOCP review.

Some players are noting VRAM usage of more than 2GB in some newer games, particularly Battlefield 3, even at much lower resolutions. This isn't a case of the game needing more than 2GB of VRAM; those games are noticing that there's lots of VRAM available and prefetching textures ahead of when they are needed.
Click to expand...

thank you for clearing this up for me. Do you know any games that are out that would need more than 2gb of vram?
 
Andaellyn said:
thank you for clearing this up for me. Do you know any games that are out that would need more than 2gb of vram?
Click to expand...

The only time you need more than 2GB of vram would be with multiple monitors. Then games like BF3 Multiplayer (singleplayer still seems fine) or using high texture map mods on games like Skyrim.
 
rinaldo00 said:
The only time you need more than 2GB of vram would be with multiple monitors. Then games like BF3 Multiplayer (singleplayer still seems fine) or using high texture map mods on games like Skyrim.
Click to expand...

Is the 3gb even enough offered by AMD cards?
 
I've been there and done that with Crossfire and Eyefinity. I wouldn't attempt it again. I sold my second video card because I was sick of dealing with little Crossfire problems and negative scaling or the dreaded "micro stutter". I can't even get my Eyefinity setup to reliably stay in Eyefinity after a reboot, so now I don't even use that either because it pisses me off so much.
 
after looking around i have thought about the 670 4gb in SLI because i see so much stuff going on about the 670 performing similar to 680's. Opinions?
 
evilsofa said:
No. More VRAM won't increase performance. When a game needs more VRAM than the video card has, it starts caching on the hard drive. This results in a dramatic reduction of FPS that cannot be described as "poor" - it's unplayable, usually under 10 FPS. There is no mistaking when this happens, and it didn't happen in the HardOCP review.

Some players are noting VRAM usage of more than 2GB in some newer games, particularly Battlefield 3, even at much lower resolutions. This isn't a case of the game needing more than 2GB of VRAM; those games are noticing that there's lots of VRAM available and prefetching textures ahead of when they are needed.
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure if it runs out of vram, it caches to system ram, not the hard drive. Hard drive caching happens when your OS needs more memory than you have. So while you'll lose performance, it won't be single digit fps. Just look at the benchmarks for 2GB vs 4GB or even 1GB vs 2GB cards where the cards with more memory got better performance. Since the only difference between the cards is memory, it is safe to assume the performance increase is because the cards with less RAM had their RAM used up, but the performance difference between the two isn't unplayable vs playable so I'm not exactly sure where this misinformation of single digit FPS is coming from.
 
RamonGTP said:
I'm pretty sure if it runs out of vram, it caches to system ram, not the hard drive. Hard drive caching happens when your OS needs more memory than you have. So while you'll lose performance, it won't be single digit fps. Just look at the benchmarks for 2GB vs 4GB or even 1GB vs 2GB cards where the cards with more memory got better performance. Since the only difference between the cards is memory, it is safe to assume the performance increase is because the cards with less RAM had their RAM used up, but the performance difference between the two isn't unplayable vs playable so I'm not exactly sure where this misinformation of single digit FPS is coming from.
Click to expand...

The complaints I saw here awhile back were from users at 5760x triple displays using the original GTX 580 cards with only 1.5GB in SLI. Their only choice to solve the problem at the time was to switch to 3GB AMD cards in Crossfire.

Look at the graphs where the FPS falls flat on the floor at zero FPS for 2GB and 3GB cards and doesn't for 4GB for Hitman Absolution at 5760x1200 in the recent 4GB SLI review:

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/01/14/asus_geforce_gtx_670_directcu_ii_4gb_sli_review/3

It's worth noting how difficult it was to make this happen on 2GB cards; none of the other heavy-hitting games showed this. You won't see this on single 2GB cards because they lack the GPU power to play at settings that could make it happen, and you won't see it at all on single displays.
 
If you're doing multiple high-res monitor gaming, then definitely go for 4gb SLI. The 3GB on radeons will get you by but SLI is easier to set up than CF.

670 4GB SLI will give you the best bang for the buck, but 680 4GB SLI works too.
 
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