Graphics Most suitable GPU config for gaming @ 2,560 x 1,600

If you look at my home grown results, you'll see in Batman Arkham Asylum and Stalker CoP that dual SLI doesn't scale as well as tri SLI; These are only two games however.

Definitely! A single GTX580 can apparently overclock like a mofo - I'm not having such luck with a multi GPU set up.

I fully agree with wuyanxu; at 2560x1600 and above, GPU power becomes the limiting factor in most modern games. Your overclocked CPU should be absolutely fine.

 

If your card can't make it as-is, you can flash to the ASUS 580 BIOS or have your BIOS modified to give the card a maximum voltage bump to 1.212v, though you'll need some added cooling to go along with it. Was your card originally running at 1.025v? Seems to be the typical good clocker starting voltage...

 

My card default voltage is 1.013v. Indeed, it seems 900mhz 1.1v is pretty much standard overclocking setting.

Running at stock though. Personally don't see the point of overclocking when I am CPU limited in 3Dmark11. Apart from Crysis, every game can be played without problem. Also have no plan of flashing a new bios, I feel that's asking for trouble, except for the wonderful dual-BIOS on those 69x0.



I get a feeling typing on iPhone gives incoherent response, if so, apologies for it.

 

Perfectly coherent response on my end.

Gotcha, yeah I've heard both ways, that lower than 1.025v should clock better and should clock worse. Seems to be 50/50 overall. 900/1.1 is pretty much standard.

I didn't notice being CPU limited in 3Dmark11, though I wasn't paying too much attention while the testing was going on (was looking for fireworks on my screen). As for BIOS flashing, it's hard to brick the card, and they're all reference design... The ASUS (or a modified version of your own) BIOS shouldn't have any issues flashing. I'm planning on flashing my MSI after I put everything under water, though if I can't sell my 5870's, it's gonna be a while before that happens. After upping the voltage, I'm gonna try for the magic number of 1000MHz core.

The dual-bios on the 6900 series is pretty win. Props to AMD for it really... Seems like they're catering to us tweaker folks! Not to mention you can successfully flash the 6950 up to a 6970 if you've got a card capable of running the extra shaders without blowing up.

As for overclocking the 580 in general... When playing EVE, running two clients without an overclock resulted in a frame drop that, while not significantly lower, still added a bit of stutter when playing spinny ships in station. The overclock removed all traces of the issue.

On top of that, running Batman AA I was averaging about 42FPS with various drops in framerate to the point of being jittery (dropping the AA in game didn't seem to make one bit of difference, exact same framerate with AA on 16xQA and 4xAA). After testing again with the overclock, the jitter was gone (though this may be that PhysX can take better advantage of the clocks than the rest of the game).

I'm honestly not a HUGE fan of benchmarking software (such as Vantage or 3Dmark) because it doesn't give you a real-world scenario when gaming. The inclusion of in-game benchmarks like Stalker, Crysis, HawX 2, Just Cause 2, etc. is much more useful in my opinion. I've noticed a considerable framerate jump with the overclock in the tests I've done. Plus you get to say that you've got a 772MHz card at 900MHz. Sheesh, I remember not too long ago when getting a 250MHz overclock on a processor and a 50MHz overclock on a graphics card was considered good. Gotta love technology...

 

I suppose there's always the option of running a pair of 570's in SLI. According to the benchmarks, this would offer only a minor decrease in performance to running SLI'd 580's and would be considerably cheaper.

I do like the idea of having a pair of 580's though, haha. They're just not in stock anywhere.

 

I would buy a single 580, and see if it's enough for you. Unless you plan on going multiple monitors, I suspect you won't NEED a second card.

Or, if you're dead set on getting two cards, two 6970's in CrossfireX scale incredibly well, in some tests beating the GTX 580 SLI setup, and are much cheaper. Plus you can run more monitors off of a single card (with more output options to start), and they've got the BIOS recovery switch if you ever decide to flash a new BIOS for heavy overclocking.

After having twin cards myself and running in CrossfireX, I'd prefer running the single GPU where possible. Now if they can figure out a way to make the Lucid chip into software so I can use my 5870's along with my GTX 580, then I'd consider throwing all three of them in my system XD.

 

Yes I expect this is most likely what I will end up doing.

Since my board is based on the 980a chipset, it doesn't support Crossfire (not that i'm aware of anyway). I have heard about this "hack" that can be done to enable boards designed for one multi gpu setup to support the other type. However I'd rather not attempt that and I'm not even sure if it's possible with my board anyway.

 

I just had a look over Pete J's homegrown benchmarks and the single 580 does seem to struggle a bit at 2560 x 1600. I don't like the look of some of those minimum FPS scores.

 

Remember that the settings I ran the tests at are quite ludicrous - e.g. 16xAA. A bit of tweaking, overclocking and compromising and you'll be laughing.

 

That's because he absolutely maxed every setting in every scenario. The main FPS killer in his tests is AA, which you can turn down without much of a drop in quality. Honestly, I can't tell much of a difference running above 4x, and the games that I CAN tell in, I'm not doing anything fast paced... At all.

I found a direct comparison between the GTX 580 (including overclocked) to CrossfireX 5870's...

http://www.overclock.net/graphics-cards-general/890010-gtx-580-vs-radeon-hd-5870-a.html

Some of the tests the 580 wins out, some of the tests the 5870's win out, but the 580 is a single card solution, and it plays smoother than the 5870's. If you're going to say that the GTX 580 isn't powerful enough to run a 30", then you had better also say that CrossfireX 5870's aren't powerful enough to run a 30". The fact of the matter, is that it does run, and it runs just fine.

I really am getting annoyed with everyone saying that cards don't have enough power to run a 30"... I've run this 30" since 2007, originally on an X1800XT 512MB without any issues in game, then to a 5870 without any issues in game, then to twin 5870's without any issues in game (to reiterate, the only reason I added the second card was for higher AA in games, which turned out not to be worth it), now to a single GTX 580 once again without any issues in any games.

If you want some numbers, give me some links to benchmarks you'd like to see run with decent settings... In the mean time, I'll throw in some screenies from EVE Online and BFBC2.

Click on any of the pictures to view the full size image. Be aware that they are approximately 4MB a piece.

EVE Online... Flying a Curse, sitting in station:

0xAA Max Details


2xAA Max Details


4xAA Max Details


8xAA Max Details


8xQA Max Details


16xAA Max Details


16xQA Max Details


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Battlefield Bad Company 2... Start of the first mission:

1xMSAA Max Details


2xMSAA Max Details


4xMSAA Max Details


8xCSAA Max Details


16xCSAA Max Details


16QxCSAA Max Details


32xCSAA Max Details


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Now tell me honestly you can see a notable difference above 4xAA, and I'll be impressed. Once again, I run BFBC2 at 4xAA maxed details... Zero framerate issues.

For a close to direct comparison, look at 4xMSAA vs 32xCSAA on BFBC2... Images are pretty similar as far as the guys' positions are concerned, and it's what I run versus max.

 

Ok thanks for that and apologies for going on a bit. It's just that If I'm going to be shelling out such high premiums, I'd rather be sure that it's for an adequate cause. Looking at those screen shots, I can totally see your point. I believe AA is less important on a 30" monitor anyway.

I very much appreciate all the help that people have been willing to give and I'm sorry if you've found this to be annoying.

 

No worries... It just bugs me that people who haven't even had the experience of using a 30" monitor go on and on about how much power you need to run the thing. It's not at all as bad as people try to make it out to be, and the GTX 580 is a powerhouse.

Honestly, the pixel density is so high, and you sit far enough away from the screen (have to in order to see the whole thing), that AA makes little difference when actually playing the game. It's nice to have some AA running (as I said, 4xAA) to smooth out any little spots here and there that might be large enough to see, but aside from bragging rights telling everyone you run at 32xAA in all of your games, there's not much gain in going over that.

Sorry for going off the handle, just very frustrating. Basically it'd be like me telling you that you need to buy a Ferrari to get from point A to point B on a road within a certain amount of time though a mess of traffic, when in reality you can drive a Ford from point A to point B within that same amount of time if there's not as much traffic to maneuver through. In this case, point A to point B would be the FPS from the game to the monitor, the road would be the GPU's processing power, and the traffic would be the extra levels of anti-aliasing.

If you drop the total data coming into the GPU (lower the anti-aliasing), there's less to process though the GPU, and you get higher framerates.

 

Yeh I see exactly where you're coming from. It's just that having had no experience with gaming higher than 1920x1200 with a gtx 295, it was very hard for me to understand exactly what would be required to power the extra pixels. But this thread has proved most useful. As soon as the 580's come back into stock, I'll pick one up. Until then I'm gonna be stuck with the 295.

 

Jared, I take issue with your car analogy. A GTX 580 is *NOT* the equivalent of a Ford, unless you're talking about the Ford GT ofc

 

It is the equivalent of a Ford when you're looking at a triple GTX 580 setup as the Ferrari. There are plenty of Ford models that are 1/3rd as fast as a Ferrari.

Glad I could be of some use, and hopefully put some of the critics to rest.

 

Idk, the 295 is still a beast of a card in terms of FPS IMHO, but I guess if you really feel the need and have money to burn then why not. Though I have no experience of the GTX295 cooler while I did have a chance to listen to the 580 in a Raven02. If the 295 is as loud as some claim then the noise reduction might be as nice as the FPS increase.

I'm with Jared on AA. It's a terrible resource hog and gives relatively little return for the muscle required. I'd still expect to run 99% of games on a GTX295 at that res wit high settings and 2-4AA. I'm not saying the 570/80 are bad cards, but your current GPU is not exactly slow. Similar situation to a 4870X2 against the 6970. The new cards are nice, but if you have something so high end is it really worth the 400£? I guess it depends how dear 400£ is to you. Does your card really struggle with any game except Metro at max settings and 4AA? And I don't even think Metro is a good or good looking game, a mediocre shooter with a badly coded resource hog of an engine suddenly seems to be a benchmark for way too many people.

 

I fully agree with you - 4xAA is perfectly adequate and is the sweet spot for eliminating jaggies. A 580 will also wipe the floor with most games bar the usual suspects.

The one thing I will say is that your pictures are a little misleading assuming you originally took them at 2560x1600. When you uploaded them, they've been reduced to more than a quarter of this resolution and so will have the equivalent of 4xAA added, hence 0xAA will be 4xAA, 4xAA will be 16xAA etc. This is simply nitpicking though - as you say, the difference between 4xAA and 8xAA is barely noticeable (you have to take screenshots to notice the difference); a human cannot tell the difference between 8xAA and 16xAA*.

*This is me making a statement based on my own experiences, but seriously, if someone tells you they can see the difference, punch them in the face for lying!

 

Pete, click on the images... They're links to the full images @ 2560 x 1600. Ignore the forum's auto-resizing. I manually resized them to make smaller images to post here. Posting up 14 images at 4 MB a piece wouldn't be a good idea, so I hyperlinked them.

 

@ JaredC01...
Now you need to just go kill them two guys with that knife you're holding....

I wants me a 30" ultrasharp so bad it hurts!!!

 

I tend to stick to multilayer to be honest. Hadn't played in a couple months and jumped on the other night, ended up number two in the first round and first in the second. Haven't even unlocked magnum ammo on the character I was playing last night either, and 3:1 k/d ratio while I was at it!