Single 7970 vs 7950 crossfire for eyefinity

A

ahimoth

New member
Okay lads so this is it. I want to game in eyefinityI'll be going out a purchasing a three screens within the next few weeks. My 660TI has served me well for the four months I've had it but I need more from my rig and the 660ti just won't cut it :)

Here's the build.
Silverstone KL04B
Silverstone Strider 750w
Asrock Z77 Extreme 4 M
Corsair Vengeance 8Gb 1600Mhz
Antec Kuhler H2O 920
Galaxy GTX 660 TI 3GB

Great little $1000 rig.

Budget $1000-$1200 (MAYBE 1300)
Resolution will have to be 1920 * 1080 because that's all I can afford.

Options: Any ~$600-$700 card
Card in mind:
Sapphire Radeon HD7970 GHz Edition 6GB Vapor-X Edition
+ High stock clocks
+ Decent at overclocking
+ High memory to support three screens
- expensive
- can buy two 7950's for 580-680
- Will be water cooling in 6 months therefore wasting money on such an expensive after market cooler.

Sapphire Radeon HD7950 3GB Vapor-X Edition
+ High stock clocks
+ Decent at overclocking
+ Cheap
- not enough memory for 3 monitors have to buy another
- Will be water cooling in 6 months therefore wasting money on such an expensive after market cooler.

List of 7970's

List of 7950's
 
Ehm... Few things first:

1. Two 7950's will easily out-perform one HD 7970.
2. You really don't want to be running CrossfireX at this point in time. There are a lot of issues with scaling and runt frames. Look it up on Google.
3. Having a 3GB card and then adding another 3GB card won't give you 6GB of videocard memory. You'll only be using the memory on the first card, so you'll still have 3GB.
 
1. Mm yeah I know the raw performance will be better
3.Ah okay. But I thought the way Crossfire worked was that you had two or more cards working at rendering the parts of the image and then come in and out rendering the next sequence together in a sequential order. So no one card has to render the whole image, meaning one 3GB card only renders half the image and the other, the other half. Or is that completely not the case?

Edit: Actually thinking about it, it sort of makes sense considering you plug all the monitors into the one card. So I guess all the second card helps with is the rendering not taking the load off of the other card. IE sharing the memory load.

More I read up on it the more it seems to suck.
 
Last edited:
Nope.
frames are like this in Xfire/SLI
Card 1:1,3,5,7,9,11,13,15,17,19,21,23,25,27,29 etc..
Card 2:2,4,6,8,10,12,14,16,18,20,22,24,26,28,30 etc.

Each core renders every other frame. Memory is not stacked. Core 1(or sometimes card 1) will have it's own memory stash while core(card 2) will have it's own stash. If you use 2gb of Vram without Xfire/SLI then in Xfire/SLI you will still use 2gb of vram just with around 80-100% FPS count.
 
It is just a problem in AMDs drivers at the moment. They'll fix it at some point, but I personally wouldn't wait for that. If you go single card, grab the highest end single core AMD card, or GTX Titan/780. Though I must admit that eyefinity works better than Nvidia surround at this point in time.

If you're set on running 2 cards, you'll have to go Nvidia because they don't have that many issues with their drivers when it comes down to SLI. I'd suggest something like GTX 660 Ti, GTX 670 or GTX 770 (just pick the best you can afford). They all come in versions with 4 GB VRAM so you don't really have to worry about your massive resolution.
 
660ti is out of the question for multi-monitor/high res. With a 192bit bus with just high AA it struggles to compete. Get a 7950/70 or 770/780 for multi monitors or just high resolution.
 
NeverBackDown said:
660ti is out of the question for multi-monitor/high res. With a 192bit bus with just high AA it struggles to compete. Get a 7950/70 or 770/780 for multi monitors or just high resolution.
Click to expand...

This is such a head desk operation!

I can afford every GPU on their own but only one screen.

Example $600 GPU + $450 for three screens.

Or $800 GPU and a nicer $250 screen

or $1000 GPU and I sell my body for a screen xD

Point is I have a budget that I can spend but even the Titan at 5760 X 1080 tanks it at games. So it seems no matter what I do no card will be able to perform well at that resolution in max detail. Example of a game I play a lot Shogun 2 Total war which just mounts the Titan and goes to town on it.

I'm sort of upset about all of it lol, I can afford two GPU which combined can handle the task but don't work well together or blow $1000 on a gpu which shits itself at those settings if I ever decide to get three monitors in the future.

Btw this is in the wrong section, who would I have to talk to about getting this moved?
 
Last edited:
Feronix said:
Ehm... Few things first:

1. Two 7950's will easily out-perform one HD 7970.
2. You really don't want to be running CrossfireX at this point in time. There are a lot of issues with scaling and runt frames. Look it up on Google.
3. Having a 3GB card and then adding another 3GB card won't give you 6GB of videocard memory. You'll only be using the memory on the first card, so you'll still have 3GB.
Click to expand...

I have NO issues with CF at all. Maybe some silly people where running into problem, because they been constantly updating drives to all beta driver available...
 
2x 7950. Some single 7950 are on par with 7970 when both overclocked. Anyway, you shouldn't have issues with 7950 CF, there was a lot of issues in the past with this setup and AMD made sure it was fixed.
 
ahimoth said:
Point is I have a budget that I can spend but even the Titan at 5760 X 1080 tanks it at games. So it seems no matter what I do no card will be able to perform well at that resolution in max detail. Example of a game I play a lot Shogun 2 Total war which just mounts the Titan and goes to town on it.
Click to expand...

Shogun 2 is easy to run dude.. my 7950 gets over 80fps with everything maxed at 1080p.. A titan can easily max it out at 5760x1080p.
 
NeverBackDown said:
Shogun 2 is easy to run dude.. my 7950 gets over 80fps with everything maxed at 1080p.. A titan can easily max it out at 5760x1080p.
Click to expand...

Benchmarks I've seen say otherwise. GTX Titan at 22 fps on max detail 5760 X1080 8xMSAA only on no MSAA is it playable at 43 FPS.

Link to article: http://www.itproportal.com/2013/03/...x-680-vs-radeon-7970-face-off-at-5760-x-1080/

The way I see it is if a card on it's own gets X on one monitor it will possibly do three times worse on a three monitor set up meaning. 180 FPS is the target on max settings for a three monitor set up and 120 is the minimum.
 
Ok i was wrong; didn't realize it was that stressful on a card. Either way though at 5760x1080p AA isn't needed as much. Plus in Shogun2 using MLAA will give you a huge performanc boost and it's similiar to 4xmsaa. There's a tip:)
 
Suggestion: Drop the triple monitor set up and go for a 1440p/1600p screen and a 780. That's would I would do, anyway. Triple monitor always seemed sort of gimmicky to me.
 
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