Please recommend a pair of video cards that can drive five displays for combo workstation/gaming rig

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foulowl

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May 20, 2011
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Hi folks,

I'm trying to select a pair of video cards that is capable of driving the following displays simultaneously:
1. 3x 22" monitors at 1080p. At least 60 hz. Will be used for gaming and desktop. Plan on using two DVI/HDMI outs from one card, and one DVI/HDMI out from the second.
2. 1x 55" monitor at 2160p. 60 hz. Will be used for desktop and video. I plan on using a display port from the second card. I do need 3d acceleration on this display, for CAD applications.
3. Oculus Rift DK 1, which is 1280x800. I plan on using DVI out from the second card for this one. My plan is to have this mirror the center 22" monitor, although having it as a desktop extension should be fine as well, as long as it works. :) Here's the potential edge case. I want this setup to be somewhat future proof. The commercial version of the OR is rumored to have 4k resolution. I could use the display port on the first card for this. But the real question is would the drivers/hardware support it? In total, I would like to be able to drive 3x1080p and 2x2160p.

I plan on playing the following games:
1. Minecraft across the three 22" monitors. (Windowed mode) Currently I get a pretty good framerate with my 460 gtx on two 22" monitors, but once I throw shaders into the mix my FPS drops down to around 20. I would like to definitely keep using shaders.
2. Minecraft on the OR.
3. TF2 (and other source engine games) across three 22" monitors (if this is possible.) So far I have only tried one monitor. FPS is generally good with the 460 gtx, although I have experienced slowdowns in the past.
4. TF2 (and other source engine games) on the OR.
5. Unreal 4 engine games, since that engine is Linux native. I can run the tech demos at a mediocre framerate with my 460 gtx.

Nvidia is preferred, simply as I have had good luck with their products in the past and would like to stick with them.

Operating system is Debian Linux, but AFAIK the Nvidia drivers are distro agnostic.

Current proc is i5-2500k, which I'm pretty happy with so far. No plans to upgrade there.

Budget is $300 total, although I can be a bit flexible.

Considering two of these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814487024
Or possibly two of these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125502

But I am very interested in recommendations, plus it is nice to get a sanity check from the community. :)

Brand doesn't matter too much to me, whichever is more FOSS friendly I suppose.

Thanks!!
 
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Ah, SLI is needed here? I was assuming that SLI was only used for multiple cards driving a single display.

I would like to drive all five of these monitors, but please note that I don't need 3d acceleration on all 5 at the same time.

Generally I will want one of three possibilities:
1. 3d acceleration on the 3x 22" displays, and the 55" display is showing my web browser.
2. 3d acceleration on the 55" display, and the 22" displays are showing my browser, etc.
3. 3d acceleration on the Rift, and the other displays are just showing my desktop. _Maybe_ mirrored to the 55" display, but this is not a firm requirement.
 
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Do you need all 5 displays plugged in at once, or is that just a convenience thing? Would probably need some active adapters to make that happen, and I doubt the frame buffer can handle all of that at once...

GTX970 would be over budget, but could conceivably do it. But even then I wouldn't really want to do that with the memory issues. At 5760x1080 you might hit that 3.5GB number, and certainly at 4K, though you mention you won't be gaming with that.

R9-290 would be a decent alternative.
 
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Keeping all five displays plugged in at the same time is a convenience thing. It would definitely be nice to have so I don't have to dig under my desk constantly.

If I mirror my 4k display onto the rift (in nvidia display settings) it shouldn't use any extra memory I would assume.

What if I increase my budget to $500?
 
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Also, just an item of note, around a year ago I was driving three 1080p displays with my 6600 and 460 without issue. Granted I was only playing games like OpenArena across all three displays.

A driver update prevented this from continuing to work. And of course, I would love to be able to have that 2160p display as well.
 
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I would just get a strong single card instead of sli... a GeForce titan, gtx 780, 780 ti or gtx 980 are all good options... gtx 970 would work but it has a problem when it goes past 3.5 gigs of vram and dips into a much lower bandwidth pool of vram... so I would just avoid it... you could also go with a higher end amd card but im not too familiar with amd cards...
 
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good luck running games with the 750 ti when using more than one monitor
 
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Definitely down to do a strong single card. I suppose I could use a dvi splitter for my rift DK1 off the central monitor for now, then when the consumer version comes out I could move to doing a displayport splitter off the 4k monitor.
 
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Hi folks,

Just checking in on this again. It's been awhile and of course things have changed.

At this point I'm not so concerned about running 3d acceleration across all three monitors, I would rather just be able to run my desktop on all three monitors and the 4k tv, with gaming on a single 22" monitor.

I'm trying to remember what I was thinking a year and a half ago in terms of being able to physically connect all four screens to the 750 Ti despite it only having three ports on it...how was that going to work?

Anyway, consider the new specs, I only need 3d acceleration on a single 1080p display, what would you recommend at this time?

Thanks!!
 
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Budget still the same?

GTX1060 is about the performance of a GTX980 for around $250, should easily handle a single 1080p for gaming, and allow a decent number of monitors.

Next step up would be the GTX1070 (roughly 980ti performance at $400 or so, depending on model)
 
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Budget is still the same, yes. Awesome! Those look like great cards. I might decide to splurge and go with the 1070.

Can it drive 5 monitors? It has five ports so it looks like it _should_ be possible.

I would like to be able to drive my 3x1080p desktop monitors, my oculus rift dk1, and my 4k tv all at the same time, haha.

Of course, OpenGL/vulkan acceleration on a single monitor only is totally fine, and probably won't be gaming on the 4k.

Here's a really specific edge case type question: if 60 fps isn't good enough on my 4k display, will it be possible to drive the 4k at even higher framerates?

I suppose these are questions for Nvidia now :)

Thanks!
 
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A 4K monitor, with a single exception I can think of, will only be capable of 60Hz. You can certainly throw more frames at it at the expense of tearing, but that isn't something that is going to happen with a 1070 at reasonable settings. An older game though could.

I think the 5 displays was covered pretty well. Not much has changed on Nvidia's side so 4 is probably still the maximum # of active displays. I think the max resolution per display is a little higher.
 
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120hz and 240hz on TVs is marketing and not actual refresh rates of the LCD. Read further here: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2379206,00.asp

Basically the bottom line is that they use the TVs onboard GPU to generate additional frames based on the frame before and after it. It can lead to smoothness(Soap Opera mode), but the panel itself isn't operating any faster.

Your inputs are limited anyway.

Display Port 1.4 (not found on any TV as far as I know) just recently added support for 4K @ 120hz, and the only 4K panel I know that is truly 120hz is a $5,000 dollar OLED screen from Dell.

HDMI 2.0 or even 2.1 do not support an input of greater then 60hz for 4K.
 
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Ah awesome, that makes a lot of sense.

Considering a Vive now vs the DK1.

All that matters now is figuring out how to switch between the Vive and 4k without having to constantly replug the ports.

I wonder if I could use a splitter that mirrors the Vive and the 4k, then just change resolutions when I want to use one over the other.

Or perhaps mirror my center 1080p vs the 4k onto the Vive.

The main issue of course is the difference in resolution. A lower resolution will get stretched to fit a display with bigger native resolution, but can a higher resolution output get shrunk down to fit on a display with smaller native resolution?

I'll have to do research on displayport splitters now.
 
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