17 replies to this topic

[Xaositect]

Hi everyone,

I know there have been discussions about running a multiple monitor setup before, but I was curious to know who is running one, what graphics card(s) you're running, what monitors you use, and what average framerate you get. I have three 24" 1920x1200 monitors running on a single Radeon HD 7970 (center monitor connected with DisplayPort, other two monitors connected with DVI; there's only one DisplayPort jack on the card), and a while back I tried using Eyefinity to have it treat the three screens as one big 5760x1200 screen; it worked for a bit, with a not-so-great framerate (40ish), but whenever there were a lot of particles on the screen, typically the result of a lot of explosions close up, the framerate dropped to the single digits and, even after the explosions were long gone, never recovered, making it utterly unplayable. I emailed MWO support the other week and they said that they have no plans to support multiple monitors in the MWO client, and that CrossFire support, while it's being worked on, is presumably not going to be added any time soon. I do have a second Radeon HD 7970 that I tried to get working with hacked CrossFire in MWO using some config file settings people suggested, but I could never get it to work.

I was thinking about getting a new video card soon, and was wondering if a single Radeon HD 290 or 290X or a single GeForce 970 would be enough to run MWO well on three 1920x1200 monitors like this, or if I'd need to run a couple of NVIDIA cards in SLI for it. Any suggestions? If it makes any difference, my platform is an ASUS P6T7 WS SuperComputer motherboard running a Xeon 3680 (six-core 3.33GHz, the Xeon equivalent of the Core i7-980X Extreme) with 24GB of RAM on Windows 8.1 64-bit.

[Goose]

http://www.tomshardw...round,3985.html

[Xaositect]

Thanks, but I don't need a budget card- essentially, I'd like to know if anybody has a video card setup that lets them run 60fps (or something close to that) with three monitors and if any tweaks were involved.

[QuimMorius]

I use 3x 24" on a single HD7970 Matrix Platinum 6048x1080 with Bezel Correction using the Eyefinity manager. Quality is set to medium overall running 60 fps on average, dropping to 30 ish when you have a little to much going on in the view. This is for normal public games though.

No tweaks and no overclock above the "stock" overclock. Matrix Platinum is one of the strongest HD7970 cards though with 3GB memory. Memory is also a big bottleneck when running multi screens on a single card. 3GB i minimum for 3x 1080p on a single card I would say.

CW is a bit heavier on the frame rates, so I just went back to playing on a single monitor on very high settings to keep the FPS up there.

Edited by QuimMorius, 15 December 2014 - 04:10 AM.

[Worm Seraphin]

My 7850 cards in crossfire run three monitors averaging 35 fps (20-60) but at low to medium detail.
Crossfire was pretty easy to set up, I would give it another try.

[Bill Lumbar]

I have a XFX 7970 with 3gb, and at this time have one 30" hanns-g 1920x1200 16:10 monitor. I have always wanted to go three, but with issues always coming up I haven't yet. From the research I have done, and its been a little while, I would say you will really need either crossfired 7970's to push good fps rates with that set up or a single 290x with 6gb. Since we don't have crossfire support, I would say a 6gb card is your only option if you want better then avg frame rates. I believe you will want to make sure what ever CPU you have doesn't bottle neck such a high end card, do your research if you don't already have a CPU that can handle the card with that kind of setup. Some of the higher end Amd CPU's might be able to handle it, not sure, haven't really checked things out lately, but some claim that only the higher dollar Intel CPU's don't bottle neck higher end graphics cards or crossfire and SLI setups. Do your research and go with what you find the best option for you, your needs and price range.

Edit: Looks like you already have the CPU to give it a try. Good luck and let us know how it turns out if you get the upgraded card.

Edited by Bill Lumbar, 19 December 2014 - 11:34 PM.

[Xaositect]

Thanks for the replies, everyone. For those of you using CrossFire, what did you do to get it working correctly with MWO? Granted, it's been some time since I tried it, but I got no framerate increase and all it did was make the MechLab screen flicker. Maybe I'll try putting the second 7970 back in as the newer Catalyst drivers and more recent MWO version will have changed things, but I am assuming I need to do something to set up a CrossFire profile for the drivers to use with MWO.

[Howzer]

see this thread:

http://mwomercs.com/...age__p__3203694

As others have said and I found to be true, Crossfire only works when you are full screen, not windowed. I had tremendous flickering, but once I made the registry key changes mentioned in the thread, everything worked as advertised.

[Blood Legacy]

I'm running 2 24" Asus monitors with a 20" in the middle and works great.
System Specs:
AMD FX-8350 OC'd to 5Ghz
8GB DDR3-1866
Corsair SSD
2 HIS Radeon 7950s in Crossfire.

With latest drivers Crossfire works fine for me in MWO without any tweaking. Used to get massive flickering and lower framerates, now no flicker and higher framerates. I get framerates from 40 to 140 with an average around 80.

You also may want to play with the field of view setting in the config file for MWO for the best multi-monitor experience.

[Xaositect]

Howzer, on 01 January 2015 - 12:54 PM, said:

see this thread:

http://mwomercs.com/...age__p__3203694

As others have said and I found to be true, Crossfire only works when you are full screen, not windowed. I had tremendous flickering, but once I made the registry key changes mentioned in the thread, everything worked as advertised.

Thanks, I'll take a look at that thread and give it a spin. Blood Legacy, I'll try the field of view setting in the config file too, that sounds helpful.

[Dark DeLaurel]

I just upgraded to 3x Asus ROG SWiFT monitors. Even with 3-way SLI with GTX 680 4GB cards, I am unable to run native resolution (4320x2560 portrait mode as I don't have enough desk space for 27's in landscape), but G-sync is doing its job and has made things a lot smoother than my old 3x Dell U2410's (5760x1600).

They are stupid expensive monitors but seem to do the trick for MWO, haven't had an issue with other games other than WoT which just crashes on resolution change lol.

[Xaositect]

I did put the other 7970 back in, and as far as I can tell, CrossFire is working- at least, it's not hurting. I can't tell that there's a framerate improvement, but with one monitor, it was usually getting close to 60fps most of the time anyway.

Now, regarding using multiple monitors, I've only found frustration. The new Catalyst Control Center seems to have changed some things with how it handles Eyefinity groups. Before, I was able to create an Eyefinity group with all three monitors, no problem, and it treated them all as one big screen. Now, though, although the monitors are hooked up in the exact same way (all three to the primary video card: center (primary) via DisplayPort, right via DisplayPort, and left via DVI), and it acts like it's combining them into one when I create the Eyefinity group, it doesn't- all it does is change it so that I have mirrors of the same 1920x1200 desktop on all three monitors, which is pointless. I can go into the Windows display settings and fix this by getting it to span the desktop across monitors again, but that just gets me back to where I started. I remember with the older CCC there was a way to remove an Eyefinity group, but that functionality seems to have disappeared, as I don't see an option for that now. I tried deactivating the side monitors in Windows before creating the Eyefinity group too, but that still had the same result: a mirrored single desktop. Does anybody know what I'm doing wrong?

[awdwikisi]

I have a couple of questions, what model is the 7970, and what CCC and driver version are you running?

Edited by Fightin the 3rd, 09 January 2015 - 02:54 PM.

[Xaositect]

Fightin the 3rd, on 09 January 2015 - 02:42 PM, said:

I have a couple of questions, what model is the 7970, and what CCC and driver version are you running?

The 7970s are a matched pair of Diamond cards, specifically, this model:

http://www.diamondmm...phics-card.html

While I don't think it makes a big difference, I did just notice after looking in GPU-Z that the BIOS revisions on each are different: one (the original one I bought new) has the original BIOS, but the one I bought used from someone on eBay last year has a newer BIOS revision. On that subject, does anyone know how I can flash the BIOS on my older card to the newer revision? Diamond's support and downloads list for that card does contain any BIOS updates. For what it's worth, the BIOS version on the original one is 015.012.000.004.000346 (113-C3860100-100), while the version on the eBay one is 015.021.000.003.001364 (113-C3862000-X01). I don't know if the one I got from eBay was ever overclocked but I've never overclocked the one I bought.

The driver version I'm using is 501.1003.0 (Catalyst 14.12), CCC version 2014.0704.2133.36938. Again, I was able to span the monitors properly with a single card on an older version of the Catalyst drivers and CCC (maybe a year ago or so) with the same OS installation, so I can only assume something changed with the newer driver and/or CCC version.

[awdwikisi]

ok

I am unsure how the bios differences in the 2 video cards will play out.
about flashing the bios for the cards, check google.
Have never got crossfire to work in MWO, but I have not yet tried shamous13's method

chasing 60+ frames on or near 4k is either for the super rich or ultra silly.
but IF crossfire works...that would help a bunch
but wait and get a whole new system if that is your true goal

I have a semi-similar setup and get 40-55 frames steady so you should get around the same.
OC your 7970 to 1000 core clock and 1400 memory clock.
IF you have room, get 1100 core clock, this will help the most.
check into OCing the cpu to as close as you can get to 4.0ghz,
this helps stabilize the frame rates
settings to use
motion blur @ off
dx11
damage glow @ off
effects/object detail/particles/post processing/shading/texturing/environment @ medium
shadows @ low
anti-aliasing @ off

the newest driver/CCC is acting weird but I have not experienced any major problems such as yours
unplug all your monitors, then plug them in 1 at a time starting with mini-display ports then dvi
see how windows arranges them, make either of the outside monitors the Main display in windows (preferably NOT the dvi).
then attempt eyefinity and see what happens. checking my CCC there is an option to disable the eyefinity group, may mean the driver is some how goofed.
IF it does not work, unplug all but 1 monitor(prefer a mini-display port) and then completely uninstall the ati drivers. then with that preferred outside mini-display port monitor re-install 14.12driver/CCC. this should fix it.

one last thing, eyefinity does NOT like mini-display port /HDMI/DVI combination,
that combination outside of the sapphire FLEX models it is flaky at best.
either 2x mini-display port + hdmi OR 2x mini-display port + DVI OR 2x DVI + mini-display port

hope this helps and report back as to the results

Edited by Fightin the 3rd, 18 January 2015 - 04:33 PM.

[Epikone]

I run 3xdell 2412 at 5760x1200. By adjusting things like AA I run at 45-50 normally, with massive action dropping below 30.
I run a sapphire 6gb 7970 ghz model. The extra memory helps with the large amount of pixels, but talking only single digit percentages.
The new drivers with windows 8.1 at least broke the handy way you could you use windows-p to switch eyefinity on and off. Trick is have is in the duplicate screen mode then create an eyefinity group. Extended desktop breaks the ability to go eyefinity, weirdly.
Though I'm waiting for what the next card from big red is, I could probably upgrade - some of the benches on the 290x look good, and the 390x will have better memory which should extend the benefit at high resolutions.

[Xaositect]

I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers, and that did allow me to create the Eyefinity group as desired. However, using maximum quality settings, the framerate is fairly bad- 30s at best, down to the 20s and below with any sort of action, and I'm sure it would be worse in an actual drop (I just used Caustic Valley testing grounds). It doesn't seem that CrossFire is having any benefit, since it's slower than it was months ago when I was trying it (with, I think, the same video quality settings) with just a single 7970. I might have to try some of the tweaks and turn down performance options (AA in particular), I'll see what happens with that.

[Tumbling Dice]

I run 3 HP 23" monitors in surround portrait mode at 3240 x 1920 fullscreen. I have a Zotac GTX 970, slightly overclocked, and a i5 4690k oc'd at 4300/core. I run at or near 60 fps and rarely dip into the 40's even in intensive situations.