Triple Monitor Gaming: GeForce GTX 590 vs. Radeon HD 6990

I hope I don't run into your setup in a well lit alley!:haha:

When three 30s are turned on any alley is well lit, its when they go into stanby mode that you will be in trouble.

:haha::haha: Stop it!...your making me ascared!

I bet thats true. My three 25"s at 300 cd/m2 are a bit overwhelming on a white site. I bet you get a sunburn when those things go white.

I'm not so sure a big new monitor is such a good investment for you Leek:
:haha:

I guess it's not so bad if the panels are new enough to have the overdrive feature, but I've seen high fps shooters "lag" on 8ms IPS panels without overdrive and some of the cheaper (sub $300 is slowly becoming popular for smaller size screens) ones artifact moreso during an overdriven frame than the $500-$600+ panels. The reason why I say 8ms and not the 5ms you usually find on the top of the line models is because of that price: people who want an IPS panel for general use tend to go on the cheaper side, so they sacrifice some performance here and there for that lower price. On the super nice Dell/Apple/HP 27/30s this doesn't tend to be a problem as much, but of course you're also paying $900-$1300.

Just an observation considering the general population of IPS panels. If I could afford it I'd love to get a Dell U2711, but that's besides the point. =)

Great review, been waiting to see how those two cards would go against each other at those resolutions, had a feeling Green wouldn't do so well at the higher settings. I have been using 3x22" for about 8 months and love it. Games run smooth and other than metro 2033 can run everything maxed with 2 GTX 460 1GB @ 5760x1080. I think this is a taste thing, some like it others don't, to each their own I guess. I couldn't go back to a single monitor. I was troubled by the bezel for about a day then I just got use to it. If you really want to get dizzy load up EVE and just go outside a station and spin the view!

@Steve: "Don't take my findings personally, I really don't like dual or triple monitor setups for gaming, does nothing for me as I am only focused on the center screen, don't have time for sightseeing when fragging."

lol, we're comparing ideas on "things"/ "objects" So that we can all be informed and make better choices about our purchases in the future..not my identity. I'd have to slap my own self for taking this stuff personally,haha. Tho you seem like a cool cat for caring and bringing it up, "Much Respect". I'm also glad that you saw "intimidated by the setup" in the correct light..it was meant to make you chuckle as of course ur not intimidated by ur setup, excited if anything. But i wanted more understanding from the writer so i teased u a bit..my bad. Please don't take that personally either.

When i shoot in real life i always need to be "sightseeing"..so the "sights" don't accidentally get in the way of my bullets...FPS on the center screen only; is like trying to shoot with those horse blinders on or a helmet that doesn't let your peripheral into viewing without looking left or right. Extremely debilitating and dangerous...That's in real life.. Now in gaming if u wanna believe such a handicap is fine as long as ur used to it, then by all means, make yourself happy. But your definitely @ a disadvantage to someone with an peripheral field of view. I have a 50in Samsung plasma directly above my three 27in monitors, I game on them both depending on who's in the room and the game. Still, unanimously everyone that watches says the same thing "no-matter how big the screen is if u don't have ur peripheral..big disadvantage" (alot of my freinds are "gun nuts" that im trying to get into gaming or upgrade their computer)

@Steve said: "On another note how the hell does a single 6870 handle 5760x1200? Do you just use medium/low settings?"

Medium to high settings actually, I have an overclocking "fetish", but i haven't graduated to LN2 yet. My XFX (non black ed)6870 is clocked(without voltage increase) with AFTERBURNER 1007/1251, when gaming i go to 1025/1251,(volts added now)for benchies..1050/1251. Phenom2x6 @ 4.1. 12gb(8gb+4gb) of Gskill Ripjaws 2000 running@ 2006...Rosewill 850w PSU, Asus C.H.IV Mobo,.. Mushkin 120G SSD..the rest is unimportant....

My last 3, 3D Mark 11 scores are: 4812-4804-4804.
My last 2, 3D Mark Vantage are: 18960 & 18423 (Gpu score 18538 Cpu 20350)

I game on three 27" fine, but im okay with around or right above 30 FPS. at medium to high settings. Still..my second 6970 is in the air as we i type this and my framerates will be increased by Friday.

@Steve - Can you rerun the benchmarks using a pair of the newer GTX 590s with 3 GB buffers versus a pair of HD 6970s with 2 GB buffers ? My impression is that with the current design of both AMD and Nvidia dual-GPU cards, we are not seeing the true performance potential of a dual GPU configuration using the current high-end parts of both companies.

Sorry for the mistake in the earlier post. I meant GTX 580s.

If you can get me two of the newer GTX 580's I will test what ever you want on them

For the love of god don't do it! if he gets a pair of 580's to go with those three 30' dells, he will be the nightmare from down under!

I don't understand why game devs don't treat 3 screens as 3 individual "cameras" looking into the game world, instead of just expanding the FOV for the existing single "camera".

Sure, you'd have 3 vanishing points, so it'd look funny if you tried to publish all three as a single image (eg. a screenshot), but it really wouldn't be a problem for the gamer turning his head, and having bezels between each screen.

This solution would truly allow the gamer to separate his viewing direction from his gun direction, without distortion, which would be nice....

Seriously, why don't they do this? Anyone?

My guess would be that it is such a small niche market that providing better support to multi-monitor gamers is not a priority. After all there are so many more important things that game developers are failing to support these days, so multi-monitor support has to be low if they cannot get the basics right.

That said there are a few games that do support multiple monitors correctly and do detected them as individual panels, it’s just not wide spread.

Other quality games such as StarCraft II do not support multiple monitors because there is no point, as you are unable to see any more of the playing field to avoid giving richer gamers an advantage. I personally think that sucks but it is what it is.

What really bothers me about this article AND the comments posted is that everyone has seemingly overlooked the glaring difference in the tested cards.

AMD card --> 4GB of VRAM video memory = 2GB per card
NVID card --> 3GB of VRAM video memory = 1.5GB per card

This is the main reason for the performance difference particularly at the top resolution.

When a video card runs out of VRAM the frame rate drops dramatically as you can see in a number of the max res 7600 benchmarks although this fact is not even noted.

Antialiasing also uses large amount of VRAM which is also why bumping the AA to 4x, 8x etc effects the Radeon card less.

Video memory is mirrored across a multi card setup so basically the ATI card has 2GB to work with while the Nvidia card has 1.5GB to work with, 25% less to work with.

Its a shame this wasn't mentioned because it unfairly weights the results and is a definite inhibitor at extreme resolutions.

The 6990 and 590 are enough to make the concept of multi-display gaming cross my mind, but not more than that or enough to spend money on it.

40nm is 2009. The next step, 32nm, was not delivered to AMD & Nvidia on time by TSMC so they kept 40nm for 2010, and are planning to go directly to 28nm this year. Production has already started so expect a huge leap in performance and efficiency when they come, and that is sooner than you might think. You will get 25% better performance from a HD7950 CF than the 6990 and it will operate fine on a 560W PSU.

I don't think one should wait if that someone is a gamer. Go right ahead and build an i5 2500k with a HD68xx or GTX 560ti and a 1080P display, because you will get very close to optimum performance in the biggest games out now such as Portal2, Blackops, and Star Craft 2. Just don't blow your money on a high-end multi-display system now. Neither the game developers, GPU manufacturers, nor the display manufacturers are agreeing on how to connect their products optimally but that will change very soon.

I am not sure why this bothers you, there is nothing we can do about the limited memory capacity of the GeForce GTX 590, it is what it is.

Furthermore we discussed the likeliness of the poor 7680x1600 performance as a video memory limitation anyway.

From the Dirt 2 comments as an example…

“This margin was reduced to just 6% in favor of the GeForce GTX 590 at 5760x1200 and then at the resolution of 7680x1600 everything went wrong for the GTX 590. Probably a driver bug or a video memory limitation, the Radeon HD 6990 sailed along happily with 53fps but the GeForce couldn't deliver. We tried reducing the anti-aliasing level to 2x which did breathe quite a bit of life back into the GeForce GTX 590 as it was able to average 42fps at 7680x1600, which still made it 28% slower than the Radeon HD 6990.”

Enough said.

"That's what AMD said" lol
And because of the "Eyefinity" direction is why they put more VRAM. It's Nvidia's fault for thinking their vidcards had enough VRAM. Not the reviewers fault nor the people who are commenting. Nvidia should have been better prepared in that arena (although i was reading a recent review that showed a more powerful cpu..i.e. I7-2600K Oc'd past 4.2 will bring the "get-e-up" out of those Nvidia GPu's)

It's important reviews like this happen so we can ALL learn something..especially the big companies(if they ever read this stuff)