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My personal Feelings About nVidia Surround.
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Author:  suiken_2mieu [ 31 Jan 2011, 10:01 ]
Post subject:  My personal Feelings About nVidia Surround.
So, I just kinda realized how bad a solution nVidia Surround is for surround gaming. Theirs a lot of things that they are doing wrong.



1. First and Foremost, NOT ENOUGH VRAM. Their card hit the wall in a lot of test, and i would never think of going nVidia until there's a card that has 2GB of VRAM or more. 12MP is a lot to render folks and it still need AA.
--I'm aware of the new 560's with 3GB of VRAM. But I'm sure it's gonna cost out the butt for them. I'm just poor so bleh.

2. It Takes AT LEAST 2 Cards in SLI to work. There are a lot of games that don't like SLI. Basically when SLI doesn't work, it really doesn't work. But when it does, it works well. But it's not gonna work well with a lot of obscure games. On top of that, the frame issue I though up. With having 2 cards, you have to cut each frame after they are rendered and send it to the correct card where then it maybe cut again and sent to the right port. This will create lag as to make sure each monitor is in sync with each other. Dumb. If the card could handle at least 3 monitors per gpu, then the only thing that would be needed is a transfer of the frame and then a clean cut and then out the ports. Done. No real syncing required.
--I'm aware of the 295, but that's not 3 screens per gpu, it's 2 per gpu, but there are two gpu's...DUMB.

3. The lack of different configurations. It's 3 monitors in landscape or portrait. Or 3 projectors in landscape. Or 3 3D monitors in landscape. All require 3 displays. Wtf?
--There's nothing to say about this except that they do allow for a 4 monitor to be extended while on the desktop, not a fullscreen game. DUMB.

So in summary I want nVidia to get serious about surround on their next GPU line. Make 2GB the baseline, allow for more display lanes per GPU, and Allow for more display configurations. (I mean why cant we have 2 screens?)

Rant over. Questions? Comments?
Author:  tepescovir [ 01 Feb 2011, 01:34 ]
Post subject:  Re: My personal Feelings About nVidia Surround.
nvidia does have issues, just as ati does.

nvidia needs 2 cards, ati dosent.
nvidia vram is genrally lower compared to ati,
ati has better profile managment and more monitor options.
nvidia dosent need digital port adapters. ati does
vsync works on nvidia, dosent on ati most of the time in eyefinity.

i used ati and nvidia. and stuck with nvidia because it works best for me as the vsysnc issues were completly unaceptable to me.
Author:  Hydralisk_X [ 01 Feb 2011, 01:44 ]
Post subject:  Re: My personal Feelings About nVidia Surround.
I never use vsync so that's something I really couldn't care less about.

In terms of flexibility, since I have DP monitors already, ATI is more flexible since I don't need 2 cards.

That said, it'd be great if 2 cards (SLI / xfire) worked as flawlessly as a single card for ALL games and not just the big titles. Based on my experience with my current setup and my roommate's gtx 480 sli surround setup, I'm heavily leaning towards a single card solution next time around. It's hard for me to justify the $$ on the second card in hindsight.

To put things in perspective though, I've been documenting just how well xfire / eyefinity works for all the games I've played (and it's quite a list of over 65 games right now). After inspecting what I've documented so far, it doesn't look like xfire is all that bad, perhaps the bad apples are the ones that really stick out in my mind as "damn xfire sucks for this game, better off using 1 card". Either way, I do like the option of running with 1 card if dual cards ends up not scaling or providing a worse experience.

I think the bottom line is that even when SLI / xfire work well, did I need that second card? Was it worth the price premium? When asked that, there's a very very short list of games that are a 'yes'.
Author:  EvilEngineer [ 01 Feb 2011, 07:12 ]
Post subject:  Re: My personal Feelings About nVidia Surround.
My testing with nVidia surround has basically made me decide i'm going ATI.. oops AMD for my next surround setup.

Having to get 2 cards that are IDENTICAL and 3 monitors that are IDENTICAL... in order to get nVidia surround to work meant a lot of extra $$$ to be shelled out. It was also a pain the in the butt to setup and troubleshoot that I don't want to repeat.
Author:  matrices [ 01 Feb 2011, 16:52 ]
Post subject:  Re: My personal Feelings About nVidia Surround.
Do the monitors with Surround have to be any more identical than the monitors with Eyefinity? Thought that it was AMD that was less flexible about this when you want bezel correction.
Author:  nmanley [ 01 Feb 2011, 17:06 ]
Post subject:  Re: My personal Feelings About nVidia Surround.
Your memory concerns fixed. http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/1024-cuda-Cores-GF110-dual-GPU-Geforce-GTX-590,news-34914.html
Author:  thales100 [ 01 Feb 2011, 17:08 ]
Post subject:  Re: My personal Feelings About nVidia Surround.
Nvidia Surround is great imo, running 3 way SLI of GTX 480, btw the GTX580 3Gb cards will simply decimate any ATI eyefinity setup, wait and see. :D
Author:  Paradigm Shifter [ 01 Feb 2011, 17:11 ]
Post subject:  Re: My personal Feelings About nVidia Surround.
No, nmanley, that is not memory concerns fixed. Memory concerns fixed is the 3GB GTX580; the dual GPU cards may say they have 3GB of RAM, but that is 1.5GB per GPU. In SLI/CrossFire, VRAM is shadowed across each GPU... so the VRAM doesn't add up, like HDD space does in RAID0... it 'mirrors' like in RAID1.

matrices - monitors can be anything as long as they share a common res (easy to get) refresh rate (ditto) and sync polarity (more difficult, as no manufacturer advertises what sync polarity they use...) so on that last point it's a case of try it and see.

As for 3GB 580 decimating any AMD setup... sure... as long as it's not a game that doesn't support SLI, in which case it'll be a complete mess.
Author:  thales100 [ 01 Feb 2011, 17:21 ]
Post subject:  Re: My personal Feelings About nVidia Surround.
As for 3GB 580 decimating any AMD setup... sure... as long as it's not a game that doesn't support SLI, in which case it'll be a complete mess.


Sure, and what about games that dont support crossfire ? Its really hard to find a decent title that doesnt support SLI tbh. :wink:
Author:  Skid [ 01 Feb 2011, 17:29 ]
Post subject:  Re: My personal Feelings About nVidia Surround.
Minecraft supports SLI ;) OK so I had to force the NVIDIA drivers to run javaw.exe in 4 way alternating frame rendering but it worked, 2000FPS on the default size, graphics cards don't like doing that though, they make a disconcerting noise (they buzz), so I forced VSync on as well via the drivers and all is good in fullscreen 5040x1050.
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