Eyefinity problems. Do I need to add another 6950?

[nachosgrande]

My rig: 2500k, 6950 2gb, 8 gb 1866. Used to be able to max all games at 1920 x 1080. Decided to add two more monitors and now I'm lucky if games run at medium settings. Do I need to add another 6950 in crossfire, or is there another solution?

 

[Herr_Koos]

You are effectively asking the card to push triple the amount of pixels, so yes, a single 6950 is probably not enough.

 

[marney_5]

Yes you do

 

[vvhocare5]

You nailed it - you need an additional 6950 to run triple monitors

 

[cromedome]

I would buy another 6950 (reference version of course), then flashing both cards to 6970 using the 6970 BIOS or the modded 6950 BIOS. You will see major improvements.

 

[nachosgrande]

Thanks everyone, even though I was hoping for a patch. I just unlocked and overclocked my card, but it didn't make a noticeable difference.

 

[cromedome]

Thanks everyone, even though I was hoping for a patch. I just unlocked and overclocked my card, but it didn't make a noticeable difference.

I'm sure if you run some benchmarks you will see a bigger difference.

 

[nachosgrande]

I'm sure if you run some benchmarks you will see a bigger difference.

Oh, I'm sure there's a difference, just not enough to handle those other 2 27s.

I just wanted to get a consensus here because I'd hate to shell out another $300 and not have it fix the problem.

 

[wolfram23]

This is why research is important. If you thought a single 6950 would max out games with triple monitors, you're dreaming. Especially 3 1080p monitors. You could get a nice FPS improvement by going something like triple 1680x1050 flipped sideways or even 1440x900... 3 1080p screens is a LOT of pixels.

It's even more extreme than 1920x1200 to 2560x1600, but here's some examples of what happens:

As you can see the FPS drops quite a bit. Crossfire 6950 should handle it well.

 

[nachosgrande]

Thanks Wolfram. After looking at those charts I think two 6950s might not even be enough. Those charts show going from 2 million to 4 million pixels and I'm looking at over 6 million. I'm out of my league here I think.

 

[wolfram23]

It would work out ok. At that high res the scaling is quite good.

So yeah, literally you will double performance. So if you're at medium with good FPS you will be able to probably push high settings - but probably not Very High and probably not much AA

 

[BeCoolBro]

I think you'd be much better with a 6950 trifire setup.I'm not sure that 6950 cf will give you playable framerates at games like metro without sacrifices.Even the 2560x1600 benchmark is barely playable.The same can be said about crysis.Also you will need a highly overclocked cpu with those if you don't want to be bottlenecked (although that problem is much worse at lower resolutions).

 

[cromedome]

^It would be 5760x1080 by the way. He's adding monitors horizontally so only the width increases, not the height.

 

[nachosgrande]

^It would be 5760x1080 by the way. He's adding monitors horizontally so only the width increases, not the height.

Wait, so the number of pixels doesn't matter as much as whether or not they're horizontal or vertical?

 

[wolfram23]

Wait, so the number of pixels doesn't matter as much as whether or not they're horizontal or vertical?

The number is the only thing that matters. Horizontal vs vertical won't change performance.

 

[nachosgrande]

The number is the only thing that matters. Horizontal vs vertical won't change performance.

That's what I thought. Thanks everybody, guess I gotta go back to one screen or shell out some more dough.