Widescreen Gaming Forum

Despite everything, PLP setups are a small market, and the only combination that really makes sense now is 20" Portrait, 30" Landscape, 20" Portrait method. Which means that you're probably dropping something in the region of $2000 on the 30"er. When 1080p screens can be had for a tenth of that, you're taking an already small market (Surround gaming) and making it even smaller (prohibitive cost). Until relatively recently, that was one of the reasons why widescreen gaming was unpopular among developers - their most vocal supporters (often kids) didn't have widescreens so it was "cheating". When widescreen started, you were looking at $1500 for a 24" monitor.

Given that it has taken quite a bit of effort just to get triplewide working when all three monitors are the same res etc... you begin to see why mix 'n' match monitors (in terms of resolution) isn't high on their list of things to support. Getting EyeFinity and CrossFireX playing nicely together is tough enough. ;)

It's capital expenditure vs. capital return. They'd need to dedicate several people to work on it, I'm sure... and that's time and money that could be used to fix other issues, which affect everyone and therefore get a lot of negative exposure. It only takes something minor for the critics to come out of the woodwork and start repeating the old "ATi drivers suck" mantra. :lol:

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Yes, you only need to worry about the amount of VRAM one card has. CrossFire/SLI work like RAID1 - each card 'mirrors' the contents of the other, which is why it's important to make sure if you have one 2GB card that you don't pair it with a 1GB card, or you end up with just 1GB of usable VRAM.

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If you look ATi... sorry, AMD-wards, look at the 2GB cards. Either the 6950 or the 6970 (although the 6950 should be reflashable to a 6970, it's not something I would recommend to someone new to tweaking PCs, as reflash with unsupported video BIOS = void warranty.

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Major differences between AMD and nVidia cards? Depends on the card. The GTX470 and 480 ran hot and sucked a lot of power while doing it. The 460 is a lot more efficient (redesigned chip). The GTX560, 570 and 580 are all very good cards that run cooler and faster than their 400 series equivalents. SLI is generally better supported than CrossFireX, but when it doesn't work, games break in style. AMD cards are, by and large, slightly slower than their nVidia competitors, but usually cost a lot less in the process. The current AMD top end, the 6970, is a cool £100 cheaper than the GTX580, the nVidia top end, and £200 cheaper than the only GTX580 I would actually buy, which has 3GB of VRAM (but I want that for Surround). They perform well in different games, depending on the engine. Your best bet is to go on a few sites like Anandtech, HardOCP and TechPowerUp and read a few reviews.