Triple SLI or Triple Graphics Card for Triple Monitor Setup?

[JZA70twntrbo]

I'm trying to get the absolute best gaming performance out of my triple monitor setup. My first setup was 3 22'' monitors all connected to a single GTX 760 4GB video card. It ran alright, but in my most frequently played games it lagged a bit and halved my framerates. My current setup is the same three monitors, but running on a dual GTX 970 4GB SLI configuration. It runs great on almost all games, but the two most frequently played games (AC: Unity and FFXIV) are both having SLI issues and one is still lagging in certain area's (this is specific to FFXIV). I'm running 16GB of RAM, an i7-3770k overclocked to 4.4GHz, Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo cooler in a push/pull configuration, 7 case fans, 1000w PSU, and game is running from a 256GB SSD drive.

I'm now considering adding a third video card and instead of running SLI I would run each monitor from it's own dedicated graphics card. There are expenses involved in this addition that I am prepared for, I'm just tired of having a system that falls on it's face while on paper it should easily run AC and FFXIV at maximum graphics. I don't run anything in the background and keep my running processes to the absolute minimum.

 

[Entomber]

I don't believe that the bottleneck here is your GPU setup, but it may be you don't have a truly beefy processor.

 

[TechyInAZ]

You have to use SLI if you want to use all three at the same time for gaming. hooking up three separate monitors to three separate GPUs (even if they are identical) will disable NVidia surround (correct me if i'm wrong).

 

[Jonathan Cave]

2 x 980's all the way

i run 3 x 24" with 2 x 970's (like you) The more CUDA cores on the 980's is the best you'll get.

 

[bystander]

You have to use SLI if you want to use all three at the same time for gaming. hooking up three separate monitors to three separate GPUs (even if they are identical) will disable NVidia surround (correct me if i'm wrong).

You are wrong. There was a time that was partly true, but starting with the 600 series, that changed. The 500 series and older just needed 2 cards, the max any 1 card could do at the time was 2 monitors. That is no longer the case.

 

[JZA70twntrbo]

You have to use SLI if you want to use all three at the same time for gaming. hooking up three separate monitors to three separate GPUs (even if they are identical) will disable NVidia surround (correct me if i'm wrong).

Nvm

 

[bootcher]

2x 980in sli will be better than 3 970's, because sli doesn't scale up that well.
Also 3 separate cards running each monitor not in sli will result in gaming with only 1 videocard/monitor. Using all 3 cards for 1 game requires SLI.

What resolution are you running at? 3 monitors can start to eat video memory, so maybe you are running out of video memory since in sli the video memory still remains as much as the lowest amount of memory one card has.

 

[JZA70twntrbo]

2x 980in sli will be better than 3 970's, because sli doesn't scale up that well.
Also 3 separate cards running each monitor not in sli will result in gaming with only 1 videocard/monitor. Using all 3 cards for 1 game requires SLI.

What resolution are you running at? 3 monitors can start to eat video memory, so maybe you are running out of video memory since in sli the video memory still remains as much as the lowest amount of memory one card has.

I'm currently running 6000x1080 bezel corrected. Without the correction, it would be 5760x1080.

 

[JZA70twntrbo]

I don't believe that the bottleneck here is your GPU setup, but it may be you don't have a truly beefy processor.

So what are you thinking? Go from the Ivy Bridge to the Haswell? I've always been curious on the i7-4790k.

 

[Jonathan Cave]

I don't believe that the bottleneck here is your GPU setup, but it may be you don't have a truly beefy processor.

So what are you thinking? Go from the Ivy Bridge to the Haswell? I've always been curious on the i7-4790k.

I disagree the CPU is not the bottleneck here in my humble opinion as an experience tripple monitor gamer.

Unless you want to use HT applications, the i7 is a waste of money.

AC: unity is a total garbage port to PC from console. It's documented wildly over youtube/forums it doesnt matter what you throw at it, its performance is garbage!

FFXIV - i dont have knowledge of this game to be able to offer you an explanation but could be an API issue?

Have you used EVGA Precision X to ensure the game is utilising both cards?
Have you tried using Nvidia Inspector for a custom game profile?
Are you running W7 or 8.1?

 

[Mousemonkey]

Run two monitors from one card and the third from the other or one from the Primary and the side monitors from the secondary. I do the latter and run 3 screen surround just fine thanks.

 

[JZA70twntrbo]

I don't believe that the bottleneck here is your GPU setup, but it may be you don't have a truly beefy processor.

So what are you thinking? Go from the Ivy Bridge to the Haswell? I've always been curious on the i7-4790k.

I disagree the CPU is not the bottleneck here in my humble opinion as an experience tripple monitor gamer.

Unless you want to use HT applications, the i7 is a waste of money.

AC: unity is a total garbage port to PC from console. It's documented wildly over youtube/forums it doesnt matter what you throw at it, its performance is garbage!

FFXIV - i dont have knowledge of this game to be able to offer you an explanation but could be an API issue?

Have you used EVGA Precision X to ensure the game is utilising both cards?
Have you tried using Nvidia Inspector for a custom game profile?
Are you running W7 or 8.1?

I've been hearing that a lot about Unity. I'm muscling through it just because I've been a fan of the franchise since the first one.

I have not tried either EVGA Precision X or Nvidia Inspector. Quite honestly, this is my first SLI setup so I'm not sure exactly how to configure SLI. As for Windows, I'm running 8.1.

 

[Jonathan Cave]

I've seen alot of people having issues with SLI in W 8.1

Download Precision X here: http://www.evga.com/precision/ - Install.

Set up the OSD as follows:

This will show an on-screen GPU usage e.g.

GPU 1 80%
GPU 2 80%

this demonstrates both cards are running in 'SLI' correctly.

If it shows

GPU 1 99%
GPU 2 1%

You know the game is only using 1 x GPU.

From here you can download Nvidia Inspector, and use a custom profile to enable SLI if the drivers havent. http://www.guru3d.com/files-details/nvidia-inspector-download.html

Report back your findings

 

[JZA70twntrbo]

Ok, set up Precision to display GPU stats on the LCD of my keyboard so I can track it during my games and the percentages were either very close to each other or equal to each other. So I would say that SLI is working for the most part. However in Unity I saw that the game almost used up 100% of both cards. Kind of strange. Where can I find a custom profile for Nvidia Inspector?

 

[chenw]

FF14 has its own SLI profile, but based on my experience with FF13 (which runs on the same engine), the driver SLI profile does not seem to work, and there are a lot of performance issues on FF13 (I have checked my system usage at 4k with ff13, GPU #1 load tops out at 60%, gpu #2 doesn't go above 20%, VRAM is barely above 1G, System RAM is less than 6GB, highest CPU usage is around 60%, installed the game on SSD, but the game lags to 30fps in certain areas that even running it at 720p won't elimininate completely).

Take this with a sea of salt, I don't have personal experience with FF14, I am simply extrapolating my experience with FF13 (which uses the same engine as 14).