Widescreen Gaming Forum

Hi im just about to finish building my new rig but have not decided on graphics cards yet as i want surround gaming. i was thinking maybe 2 x Palit GeForce GTX 560Ti 2GB in SLI, would this be enough to drive 3x 23" monitors with resolution of 1920x1080 each so 5760x1080 combined,

i would like to be able to play games like BFBC2, and upcoming BF3, MW3 at high to maximum settings would these cards be enough? any other recommendations? (only looking to go Nvidia)


Thanks


BTW my PC specs

Case: Antec Dark Fleet DF-85
Mobo: Asus P6X58D-E
CPU: Core i7 930 @ 4ghz
CPU Cooler: Corsair H70
RAM: 12GB DDR3 2000MHZ Corsair Vengance Ram
HDD: 500GB Spinpoint OS Drive / 4x 1TB Spinpoint in Raid 10 (storage)
ODD: Bluray rewriter / DVD rewriter
PSU: Antec CP850
GFX: ????

2GB GTX560Ti's is the cheaper alternative to 3GB GTX580s. For Surround, the more VRAM you can give, the better.

I think I'm running two 1.5GB GTX580 cards, also by Palit. Can't even remember if more VRAM was available when I bought them (they were reference design), but it seems to manage BC2 fine. What should I expect to see if it wasn't enough?

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Rig 1: Intel i7-4790K Devils Canyon | ASRock Z97X Killer Intel Z97 Socket 1150 | Noctua D15 cooler | 16 GB G.Skill TridentX DDR3-2400 | 500GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD | Corsair AX1200i | 2x EVGA GTX980 4GB ACX2.0 (SLI)

Rig 2: Intel i5-2500K | ASUS P8P67 Pro Intel P67 LGA1155 | Corsair A50 cooler | 4GB G.Skill RipJawsX DDR3 RAM @1600mhz 6-8-6-24 2T | 128GB Crucial RealSSD C300 SSD | Corsair AX1200 | 2x Palit GTX580 1.5GB (SLI)

If you run out of VRAM, you'll see framerates nosedive as the cards first start swapping to system RAM (this will knock anything from 33-66% off the framerate, then to the pagefile on the HDD, which will usually make framerates tank into the sub-5fps region.

However, some games are a lot less vulnerable to it than others - for example, Half-Life 2. That barely blinks unless you've got the Cinematic Mod installed.

You certainly won't get "maximum settings". You'll get serviceable performance, i.e. medium to high settings at 45 to 60 FPS, with two 560 Ti 2GB in SLI FOR 1080p x 3. I ran that setup for a couple days myself. Personally, though, I'd rather get two 580s, as they're about $400 - $450 now if you look around, and you could buy a second for $380 from EVGA B-stock.

The truth is that 1.5 GB is enough vRAM for 1080p x 3 in almost everything, all sensationalism aside. A lot of people falsely conflate vRAM being maxed out with a vRAM bottleneck. And most important, the horsepower of two 560 Tis is nowhere near enough to drive performance at the high AA levels that would choke 580 1.5 GB anyway. Matter of fact, 580 3 GB Tri-SLI is not enough to drive performance at the AA levels that would choke the 1.5 GB variant nine times out of ten, because 1.5 GB cards only choke beyond 2-4x MSAA, and nothing is worthwhile after that other than supersampling AA.

The only exceptions I ran into or saw evidence for (showing 1.5 GB not being enough at 1080p x 3) are Metro 2033 (can do AAA but not 4x MSAA), and *maybe* Crysis 2 with everything at Ultra.