Will a CPU upgrade help with tri-monitor gaming?

explodatron

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I've recently picked up three 1920x1080 monitors for gaming. It runs well in most games except really intensive games like BF3. Currently I have two EVGA GTX 670 FTW 2GB cards with a minor overclock, and i5 2500k at 4.3GHz, and 16GB DDR3 1600.

When I turn the AA off I will average 55 FPS or so on ultra sometimes dipping into 40s or high 30s on big maps, down from 90-100 average with only one monitor. Is that performance drop normal? Would upgrading to an i7 help out at all, or is it purely down to the GPUs?
 

JD88

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Your graphics cards are holding you back here. That's simply a lot of pixels. I don't think you would see a lot of improvement from that upgrade. You might overclock the 2500k a bit more as 4.5 is pretty easy to achieve, but other than that it is still a very viable processor.
 

Valentin_N

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I don't think, at least not if it's gonna be an i7-2600K/3770K; i5-2500K vs i7-2600K shows no big wins, if any at all. I don't know what motherboard you have and how th PCI-express lanes are divided.

I am almost sure that the ram of 670 is the bottleneck - I know that BF3 uses a lot of VRAM. Upgrading the gpu might a better. So the best upgrade would be gpu-upgrade. The only gpu I can think of is Titan or 7970 where its 3GB helps the gpu.

Another alternative is to turn down from ultra to high; From what I have read across forums the difference is minimal.
 

JD88

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The difference is definitely minimal between Ultra and High. VRAM is certainly part of your bottleneck here, but even without that limitation 2 670's can't maintain 60 FPS in BF3 totally maxxed at that resolution.

Titan isn't going to give you better performance than 2 670's SLI. I would say you need 2 7970's that are heavily overclocked or possibly even 2 Titans for entirely smooth gameplay.
 

Valentin_N

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CF is the last option I would use; the rendering frame rate is not very good even if the fps show another thing and a single Titan can give the use 40-50fps with ultra as settings on three FHD monitors. So High should give even higher fps

Titan LE will come out so my suggest is that you save for one or two of them.
 

explodatron

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From that benchmark I'm in the 680 SLI / 7970GHz CF / single 690 territory with ultra settings and AA off. That's pretty interesting.

If I want a solid 60+ FPS with ultra on 5760x1080 I need to drop a few thousand dollars on GPUs. I'll just play on high lol.
 

Valentin_N

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Well you mustn't but if you have high demands then it requires upgrade, how much the upgrade costs is a different matter. At the need of this year HD9000- (AMD has rebanded their HD7000-series to HD8000 for OEM) and 700-series comes out. If rumors are true the incoming Radeon cards will have 2560 stream processing unit. We will see.