Should I sell 2x GTX 680 Lightning to buy 2x R9 290 or R9 290x, for 5760x1080 gaming?

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mglushed

mglushed

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I have a 1 year-old GTX 680 Lightning, selling at $350 (bought for $725), and a 20 days-old GTX 680 Lightning selling at $450 (bought for $500). At my place, the price of MSI R9 290 is $500, and R9 290x is $680.

After buying the second GTX 680 Lightning for playing Battlefield 4 at 5760x1080, I found it has a serious lack of VRAM for such resolution, and the Nvidia's Surround is buggy, as it doesn't let me to maximize my windows to one screen, it always feel 3 screens (if I only enable 3 screens it works properly, but if I enable the fourth, a TV, as an accessory screen it will get bugged, and I need my fourth).

I heard the 290 and 290x have this technology called "Mantle", allows the games to access hardware better, thus makes better performance. Specially the titles I play: Battlefield 4 and Star Citizen. Also I play Tomb Raider which uses TressFX, Nvidia cards get a very bad performance hit if I enable this.

My questions are:
- Should I sell these 680 Lightning's?
- Should I get R9 290's, or should I get R9 290x's?
 
Solution
babernet_1
I'd sell the 680's, their 2GB RAM is not good for triple displays.

I'd also get two R9 290's. I have heard of people flashing them into 290X's. Either way, two R9 290's would be quite sufficient for your triple displays. Make sure they are new R9 290's with custom coolers. Do not get the original coolers boards, they run hot and noisy and throttle themselves down.
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babernet_1

babernet_1

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I'd sell the 680's, their 2GB RAM is not good for triple displays.

I'd also get two R9 290's. I have heard of people flashing them into 290X's. Either way, two R9 290's would be quite sufficient for your triple displays. Make sure they are new R9 290's with custom coolers. Do not get the original coolers boards, they run hot and noisy and throttle themselves down.
 
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Solution
mglushed

mglushed

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Thank you. At my place there is no custom cooler R9 290's yet. Should I grab these original ones and patch them up with waterblocks later? 95c as "normal" temperature sounds scary.
 
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chugot9218

chugot9218

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To game at 5780x1080, the video card combines the screens to emulate a single 5780x1080p screen and the game scales it's video to that resolution one way or another, it does not divide its content into 3 different pieces of 1080p content. I do not know how it works with AMD, but the NVidia control panel has options to Enable All Screens which is what you would want for enabling multiple monitors.

Star Citizen isn't even out, and no one in the public has used Mantle yet. If VRAM is your issue you should have gone for 4gb cards. You could switch them for more VRAM but it's not like you are all of a sudden not going to have any other issues and performance is going to be stellar, each maker has their own twerks. 2 680's have plenty of power. I ran BF3 without hitting my 2gb VRAM ceiling (although right up there, I will be going for more than 2gb VRAM on my next cards) on 2 670's at 5760x1080 at max settings no problem.
 
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babernet_1

babernet_1

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Sure, only you can decide on the trade-offs of waiting vs installing water blocks.
 
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mglushed

mglushed

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I'm afraid BF4 is quite different somehow, I didn't check before, but I just did now. Even running on 1 monitor with 2way SLI 680 Lightning, the VRAM always cap at 2GB. I tried to put everything at lowest, and it stays at 1.7 - 1.8GB. So I did a search and found other people reporting it's even reaching 3GB on these 4GB cards, running on 1 monitor. People also confirmed that on the lower VRAM cards, it will automatically cap itself to use less VRAM, but that doesn't mean it is having its optimal amount of VRAM to fully operate. The lack of VRAM doesn't decrease the frame rate, but it makes spikes, every time it needs to render "too many" of something new, like when you rotate your character quickly, the VRAM does not get free up fast enough, so you will see it spikes/pauses for a brief moment, just about 100-200ms, but that does ruin your experience of smooth gaming.
 
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