Awful FPS on Thief with 2x GTX 770 in Nvidia surround

[skgtheblij]

I have been an AMD gamer for a long time, and for the past two years my setup has been an older Phenom II hex core and a AMD Radeon 7950. I have a beautiful triple monitor setup, and have been playing pretty much every game in Eyefinity. I was able to get a pretty consistent 20-30 FPS no matter what, and much more on lower powered games. 20-30 isn't great though, so when I got the money I decided to upgrade.

I initially went with two R9 280x's, which are a bit cheaper, but one was defective, and I was fed up with AMD driver issues, so I decided to cross the isle.

My new rig has:
1300W PSU
i7 4970k (4-4.4 ghz, 4 physical cores)
2x GTX 770 2gb
8gb ram

Thief isn't exactly a fantastic game, but it is pretty demanding and is one I go to in order to stress test performance. The rig does just fine with ultra settings in 1920x1080, but as soon as I threw it into surround, it became completely unplayable. I would get 50-60 fps just walking around slowly, but terrible stutter whenever I tried to turn around or make sudden movements. Going from one area to another would cause the game to completely freeze up, even after the standard loading (I would see my character, but it would move at about 0.2 fps for perhaps 20 seconds, and then I'd be back up to 50.

If I hadn't been playing eyefinity for years, I might have accepted this, but even my old solo 7950 could put out CONSISTENT 15-25 fps on ultra. I don't care about sitting at 50 fps when doing nothing if I'm going to hit 1 fps ever.

Am I missing something, or might there be one key setting in the game that I am missing, or is Nvidia surround inferior to eyefinity?

I'll probably see how it goes on a couple other games, but if performance is no better, I'll probably switch back.

Though my twin R9 280x's ended up crashing constantly since one was defective, they did spit out a 3dMark score over 100 higher than the twin 770's, so I'm tempted to go back.

Really interested to hear any opinions from anyone who has experience with both eyefinity and surround.

Before anyone asks, yes, I have the latest drivers. I'm also not overclocking, and my GPUs both seem to be right around 60 deg at full load, peaking up to around 75. CPU heat is not an issue.

I recently got fed up with the consistent driver issues on my

 

[skgtheblij]

So I did clear out the old drivers with Display Driver Uninstaller before switching over, which should have cleaned everything up.

I ended up just going back and exchanging for a single R9 290. So glad I made that decision. I'm pretty sure the 2gb wasn't enough, as the issues I was seeing seem to have been consistent with memory issues (in and out of swap, etc)

In Watch Dogs, I was getting 45-50 FPS on normal with the two 770's, but I would get some freezes that practically made driving around unplayable. With the 290, and its 4gb of ram, I'm getting 40-45, but rock solid, very playable. My total memory availability now is the same as it should have been with the SLI implementation, but I know there are some inefficiencies there.

I don't know if it was the lower memory of the 770s or that eyefinity is just superior to surround, but I can game with my triple monitor setup better with the 290, even though it is $250 cheaper and theoretically less powerful. My logic also is that with two 770s, there isn't much room for growth, but I could always add another 290(x) if I find another $400 lying around. Driver issues haven't bitten me so far this time around, so it looks like I'm an AMD man again and I will need a damn compelling reason to switch.

A recap if anyone's keeping score:


2x R9 280x - $600. 3dmark score: 12195. (one card bad, returned both)
1x R9 280x - $300, 7291 (tested with 1 R9)
2x 770 - $650, 11084 (terrible nvidia surround performance, returned both)
1x R9 290 - $410, 8463 (Good enough for me, I'm gonna keep this one I promise)

I do regret not trying one of the 770's alone to see how that went. The 770 is supposed to be just a little worse than the 290, but it got destroyed by 280x's in crossfire. Does SLI not scale as well?

 

[skgtheblij]

That's probably it. Didn't know memory wasn't additive in SLI, thanks.