Hi team Red I'm considering moving back to team Red from Team Green. For the last few generations ive always had multi gpu setups. I started with Trifire 6970's which i liked the hardware on but became dispirited with the drivers in terms of crossfire support for latest games and ended up moving to team Green with tri-sli 580's (the 1.5 GB ones) Made the mistake of only getting 1.5GB models which didnt like BF3 @ 2560x1600 with 4xMSAA (not enough VRAM- ran into hitching- had to run 2XMSAA)but loved the drivers and support. Then having learnt my lesson on VRAM moved to 3 x GTX 680's with 4GB. Loved the cards and 4GB is useful and used for Skyrim modded and more recently BF4 (prevents the same 'hitching' issue i had with my 580s with 1.5 with BF3) Got a 4th card cheap and threw it in and this allowed Crysis 3 room to breath and work at 60fps maxed. Never saw a lot of those issues driver wise some of team Green have seen recently, i.e. in my experience Nvidia have good drivers and few problems running quad sli. I'll be going 4K early next year and am after something that will handle that. Being completely clear there is nothing right now that i can't max and to be honest the 4th card is really only useful for Crysis 3 max which needs the extra GPU grunt. I know the 4 x 680s WONT have enough GPU grunt to max 4k Crysis 3. I'm looking at the 290x (Trifire to start and later quadfire ) and had a few questions for team Red i'd like to ask as i have been out of that world for a bit. 1. Crossfire support for AAA games. Have the drivers and crossfire profiles to support AA titles been out quicker in recent times than in the old 6970 days? 2. Microstuttering. Is this fixed with the new gen cards and drivers? It used to be pretty bad on SOME titles on 6970s. 3. Per application profiles. In the 6970 days these did not exist, ie global settings only no per game settings in drivers. Does AMD have per game settings like Nvidia does now or still global? Not a deal breaker just something i use quite a bit at the moment. 4. Last but not least and probably too early too tell- however is there rumours of 290x option with 8GB instead of 4GB? I feel (and have some evidence of) that 4GB is not enough for 4k AAA titles like BF4. I tested this on BF4 beta by setting graphic to 2560x1600 to Ultra inc 4xMSAA and then set scaling to 200%, ie roughly equivalent to 4k resolution (8.192 Million Pixels on this 200% setup versus 8.294 Million Pixels that Asus 4k monitor has) After this the game still was not completely GPU bound or CPU bound (tested on a non populated server and quiet scene) BUT it was hitching like crazy (much like setting BF3 on the 1.5GB 580s to 2560 @ Ultra 4xAA = lots of GPU headroom but hitching due to vram full and swapping textures in from RAM) Looking at what Precision X counters were telling me, i had hit full VRAM usage (4096MB) and it was doing things like turning around and seeing new things the hitching would occur (textures being loaded in...) Anyway just sussing it out for now and any thoughts on the 4 points much appreciated. Ecurb
To answer one of your questions. 4k support for Crossfire on AMD is a little strange right now but should get much better. Right now it has microstuttering and has the split screen refresh rate problem. I expect all these things will be taken care of in upcoming drivers though which will introduce 4k framemetering and sync refreshing.
1. yes up to 2560 resolution currently. eyefinity is coming. 2. yes for dx 11, dx 9 games might have some issues still. 8gb might be a 290xt the dual gpu. to early to know yet. as what I can concldue the 290 series will work well with crossfire.
Issue regarding framerate synchronization is only present if dual HDMI are used. MST Display Port have no such issue from 1st day it was introduced. btw Hilbert did 4k asus LCD test and I believe he is able to shine some light into that. Edit: As for 3x R9-290x I really am not sure how well it will do in PCIe 3.0 8x/4x/4x mode. Since GTX680s in 4x/4x/4x/4x mode are already on edge. Having two in 8x/8x should be OK even with all data going through PCIe bus.
Thanks all for the responses. After seeing Hilberts post on the guy running BF4 at 4k+ res (albeit multi monitor) It seems that 4GB is definitely not enough (5.7GB used) and ties in with my own observations with 200% scaling. Imimmfn- I'm not overly worried re price / performance more after something that will do the neccessary, i.e. 4k BF4 / Crysis 3 et al with max IQ @ 60fps Fox2232- I'm running Displayport and that wouldnt change. Re the PCI-E lanes, all good ive always got the PLX based boards usually Asus Maximus so currently the 4 x 680's are running @ PCI-E 3.0 x8 x16 x8 x8 which is loads of bandwidth so no issues there. I didn't go down the x79 route as i'm after the fastest per clock CPU's which currently are Haswell 4770Ks which i OC. I'd think about the successor to x79 IF Intel give the next highest end platform the latest CPU's rather than a gen behind like currently. I don't do content creation, movie editing or anything else so as a pure gaming rig the Haswell platform is the best for me currently. I'm hoping that extra cores will be taken more advantage of with new consoles out and then if Intel bring out the x79 replacement with say 8 core AND best IPC chips i'd swap over then So reading all the comments it seems that AMD has come a long way since the 6970 days. Having said that will need to wait for the 8GB 290x single gpu models to come along which i guess if they are coming will be early next year and running into Maxwell timeframe. 4GB won't cut it for 4K, even 6GB i believe is cutting it too fine. Let's see how those 290x reviews pan out and how Mantle goes- i personally think AMD are onto a great thing with their securing the console market and there will be synergies in PC world to having an AMD based GPU setup going forward over Nvidia. I'm pretty much decided that AMD will be powering my next setup unless something disastrous comes out in the 290x reviews which i really doubt would happen. Heat wont be a problem as they will all be water cooled and hopefully OC well also Ta all for your input, appreciated. Ecurb
Ta Comrade not sure the 7990's would give me the grunt i need and don't have enough VRAM. With all these announcements coming out from AMD and Nvidia recently, i reckon i'll wait and see what happens with Maxwell and 290x (if 8GB model comes out) early next year. So annoying that AMD and Nvidia cant / wont / dont work together on standards, would be great to have a choice of either AMD / Nvidia with all features available, imagine a card with PhysX, Mantle, TrueAudio, Gsync et al along with the base grunt needed to get the job done. I'll keep dreaming Ecurb
