7970 vs 680 for WoW multiboxing.

[Knytestorme]

Ok, am about to pull this trigger next week on a 680 or a 7970 in my gaming rig to upgrade from a 6950....used for dev work and gaming including 5-boxing WoW, which is where the question mostly comes into play.

Looking at the difference between a 2Gb 680 and a 3Gb 7970 (looking at direct cu2 for 6 monitors but can still run 5 on 2 monitors so that's not a major point) and got into a discussion on if the extra speed on the 680 is worth it over the extra framebuffer on the 7970.

It seems to me, that in essence while I'm only running WoW in 1920x1080 I am still running 5 of them at that res at the same time and so the memory usage and total pixel count will be a lot more than running a single client at 2560 or even running 1080p eyefinity/nvsurround so the extra memory would be of more benefit than a slightly faster card but I'm not sure, hence asking here for advice.

 

[Yuriman]

I used to run multiple clients of EVE, and found that I had better performance in general with 2x 3850's (not crossfired) than with the single 4870 that replaced them. You might be happier with two cheaper cards.

 

[RavenSEAL]

Wouldn't vRam be more important in this case?

 

[Subyman]

Ok, am about to pull this trigger next week on a 680 or a 7970 in my gaming rig to upgrade from a 6950....used for dev work and gaming including 5-boxing WoW, which is where the question mostly comes into play.

Looking at the difference between a 2Gb 680 and a 3Gb 7970 (looking at direct cu2 for 6 monitors but can still run 5 on 2 monitors so that's not a major point) and got into a discussion on if the extra speed on the 680 is worth it over the extra framebuffer on the 7970.

It seems to me, that in essence while I'm only running WoW in 1920x1080 I am still running 5 of them at that res at the same time and so the memory usage and total pixel count will be a lot more than running a single client at 2560 or even running 1080p eyefinity/nvsurround so the extra memory would be of more benefit than a slightly faster card but I'm not sure, hence asking here for advice.

Are they all across multiple screens or do you alt tab between them? In general, the GPU only renders what is shown on the screen. If only two are shown at a time, then I wouldn't worry about the extra vram. The 680 is faster in wow though:

 

[Knytestorme]

Are they all across multiple screens or do you alt tab between them? In general, the GPU only renders what is shown on the screen. If only two are shown at a time, then I wouldn't worry about the extra vram. The 680 is faster in wow though:

At the moment it renders one on my main screen and then 4 others on a second monitor, but they are also running at full-res just with the window scaled down to fit into each quandrant. They are rendered at 1080p so that switching which one is on the main screen is instantaneous but if I went with the 7970 they will be rendered 1 per screen.

@Ravenseal that's pretty much what I'm thinking atm, and what I found going from a 1Gb 460 to a 2Gb 6950 last year but I'm not sure if the 680 has more memory bandwidth, or if it can use it's memory more efficiently (especially once pci-e 3.0 is out), in a way that would negate the extra vRAM difference.

 

[railven]

Can tell you right now from experience through a grind-a-thon I decided to have:

HD 5870 2GB - I could 2 boxes all settings high, 4xMSAA, to get the third box I'd have to drop AA to 1x, to get the fourth box I'd have to reduce my quality to High or just disable shadows.

Sold that card used a 9800 GTX+ in the interim:

Playable framerates at Ultra with 2xAA, 2xbox had to drop to in-game High, 3-box+ had to use Good settings.

Got my HD 7970 I've successfully 4-boxed all settings on high, with 8xAA and the main screen (active one) wouldn't flinch.

Not sure on GTX 680, can try that out for you Mondayish, but HD 7970 can handle it fine. This is across 2x1080p monitors.

EDIT: Oh yeah, I set the in-game render limiter to 30FPS for Windows in the background, so only my active window gets the full 60 FPS. I never tried with the limiter off. But since I'm only really watching one screen, I don't think that would matter much.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

You aren't attempting to max the settings out on each one are you, because I just don't see the point and at 1080p wow will use over 1GB of vram maxed out.

If you wanted to max out the main box, and then reduce the other to lower settings, I believe wow using at most 1.1GB of vram at 1080p maxed out, and will use as little at 180mb at 1080p on the lowest settings.

 

[Knytestorme]

Got my HD 7970 I've successfully 4-boxed all settings on high, with 8xAA and the main screen (active one) wouldn't flinch.

Not sure on GTX 680, can try that out for you Mondayish, but HD 7970 can handle it fine. This is across 2x1080p monitors.

EDIT: Oh yeah, I set the in-game render limiter to 30FPS for Windows in the background, so only my active window gets the full 60 FPS. I never tried with the limiter off. But since I'm only really watching one screen, I don't think that would matter much.

If you could run the 680 test I'd most appreciate it. The 680 is $699 here and the DirectCUII 7970 is $679, was hoping to order on monday or tuesday.

Also thanks for reminding me that I keep forgetting to set limit on background clients, been wondering why I had such lag lately doh

[EDIT]

Balla, nah I run max distance, min shadows and ground clutter, high sparkles, 1aa, 2af and switch around water, shafts etc as I need to. I really need to setup the IQ setting macro's to switch from high to low as I bring a new client to the main screen rather than all running middling settings.

 

[railven]

If you could run the 680 test I'd most appreciate it. The 680 is $699 here and the DirectCUII 7970 is $679, was hoping to order on monday or tuesday.

Also thanks for reminding me that I keep forgetting to set limit on background clients, been wondering why I had such lag lately doh

No problem, I'll give it a whirl. The system will be a tad different (Intel i7 930 @ 3.6ghz vs Intel i5 2500k stock) but I don't think that should be too much of a "OMG what happened" issue haha.

I'll post when we get the card and after she goes to bed I'll mess around with it haha.

 

[Knytestorme]

No problem, I'll give it a whirl. The system will be a tad different (Intel i7 930 @ 3.6ghz vs Intel i5 2500k stock) but I don't think that should be too much of a "OMG what happened" issue haha.

I'll post when we get the card and after she goes to bed I'll mess around with it haha.

Heh well I'm running a 930 @ 3.6 atm so at least one set of figures will be appropriate for now and the others for when I do the IB upgrade

 

[Obsoleet]

This place isn't going to really know the answer to this. The guy who used to multibox Eve has what is probably the best advice. Everyone else is going to say which brand has better performance in the game itself, or simply suggest fast cards..

Go to a WoW specific forum, where people have already done all the testing for you with the various hardware and the game.

 

[Knytestorme]

This place isn't going to really know the answer to this. The guy who used to multibox Eve has what is probably the best advice. Everyone else is going to say which brand has better performance in the game itself, or simply suggest fast cards..

Go to a WoW specific forum, where people have already done all the testing for you with the various hardware and the game.

Actually I'd believe you're wrong on this one. I am a member of the biggest multiboxing community already and we have had this discussion in regards to boxing specifically but then it came to thinking about it in a different way and the knowledge base here is more than appropriate to find an answer.

When taken out of the context of "I want to run 5 x WoW @ 1080p, which is a better card" and into the context of "I want to run a resolution of 1920x1080x5, which is the better card" then it's about the underlying power of the cards and how many pixels they can push effectively at high framerates in exactly the same way it's possible to question which is the best card to run 5780x1080 @ 2AA/8AF.

Just because the application changes in how it deals with the underlying base element (ie pixels) it doesn't change how we can work out which is the better option between speed and vram for pushing them most effectively.

 

[Obsoleet]

That's fine, you're one exception along with the other guy who has done Eve multiboxing. My entire statement still stands though. You'll do the OP more justice linking him to your "biggest multiboxing community" than anything else.

 

[Knytestorme]

That's fine, you're one exception along with the other guy who has done Eve multiboxing. My entire statement still stands though. You'll do the OP more justice linking him to your "biggest multiboxing community" than anything else.

I have already linked OP to the community. Given I am actually the OP I'd say I can ignore your opinion on the entire matter as you obviously have not paid any attention to the thread and will just wait for railven's results, hopefully in the next day or two.

 

[Timorous]

I decided to re-write this as I originally wrote it in a rush and I wanted to make sure what I put was accurate.

I use ISboxer to play 5 characters using a laptop and it works fine. Main window gets 60fps in dungeons and the background windows are capped at 15. I use mostly low settings but I do turn up draw distance and spell effects and I do not change IQ settings on the fly as I want to be able to switch windows quickly without introducing anything that might cause a delay.

Nvidia has always had an advantage in WoW with regards to performance and I am not sure that the extra memory on the 7970 will enable higher settings across all of the windows because it has worse performance than even a GTX580 @ 1080p. As you add extra clients the performance will decrease until you hit the minimum acceptable performance. I think with the 680 vs 7970 that will happen on the 7970 first because it will hit the limit that it can process before the 680, and I think the processing limitations will come before the Vram limitations.

Of course when railven posts his finding we will actually have some hard data so I would do as you have said and wait for his results.

There is a difference though between running 5x wow at 1080p and running 1x wow at 5x1080p. In the first case 95% of the time all of your toons are facing the same direction which means the scenery is roughly the same, now I do not know if the memory saving logic is smart enough to realise that it is actually storing most of the same textures 5x over and so can store one copy of each required texture and apply it to each frame as required (regardless of which window) or if it does indeed store all of the textures for each window independently consuming 5x the Vram. In the second case the view of the world is much larger so you have more unique textures taking up more memory but not 5x more.

 

[Grooveriding]

Much better place to ask this question is here http://www.dual-boxing.com/forum.php and here http://multiboxing.com/forums

Those folks are hardcore into this and will give you the best idea of what will function and deliver the best experience for what you are trying to do.

 

[railven]

I'll try to have something for you today, unfortunately UPS never updated their tracking site so I wasn't expecting my package yesterday so I ran some errands, got home kind of late and to my surprise the card was there.

It's installed and ready to go, so today before the GF get's comfy I'll load up three or four accounts and see how she handles.

 

[Knytestorme]

@Timorous yeah, I'm running 5 on IS with a 6950 and it's fine but it's feeling the strain under a few other games such as BF3 or even running good settings on all clients (eg I have particles, liquid, sunshafts and view distance all on high on all clients so I can quickly look for sparklies without switching clients and need at least 4AA on main as it's a 42" lcd so text becomes a little difficult to read) so figure upgrading won't see the clients really run any better but I'll be able to run better QoL settings on all clients without degrading performance.

@Grooveriding yeah, the discussion started in the hardware section of dual-boxing and we couldn't come to a consensus without having the hardware to test so figured more hardware-minded folks here could offer a better perspective.

@railven sounds good, thanks again.

I'm mostly decided on the DirectCU 7970 just for the extra vram and the 6 monitor output, feel having one client per screen at full-size will be more fun (and the extra real-estate will be awesome while coding and composing) but if the 680 is a better card then for the same price I have to seriously consider it.

 

[railven]

Okay, here are my findings:

GTX680 "stock" (no increased Offset for GPU Boost, as is straight from the box) using the latest WHQL drivers on nvidia.com (WHQL 301.something)

I opened up 4 accounts, all ingame settings on Ultra with background frame limiter to 30. 1920x1080 resolution. DX11 mode, nvidia control panel default (no forces.)

Unfortunately, I only had one screen to play with so I did a cascade setup. The other screens were still visible enough to see if any of my toons fell off auto follow while I roamed around.

I took a stroll around SW without issue, occassionally the main screen would drop to 55/56 but I figured that was more of texture fetching than GPU issue.

Casting spells was fine, I know with AAA spell casting can cause some lag (it does on my HD 7970) so clearly nVidia has an advantage here.

I ran myself through a quick dungeon without issue (only spell casting as pointed out.)

Here is what might interest you. Because I was doing all this before our raid, I didn't close all the windows. And with Windows 7 you don't get a new taskbar icon for each window, just the little line text to the icon. Anyways, my GF didn't notice I had 3 other accounts going, and when she switched over for the raid (and me on my computer) she still had two toons just idling in SW (Trade District, probably the busier part of SW) and the giant DW at the log-in screen. We did all of DS and she didn't report any lag or hitching issues, said it ran smoother than ever before (again she's coming from a GTX 460.)

While this isn't a super stressful test, it's probably more stressful than grinding on some toons unless you're hardcore and multi-toon raid haha.

Hopefully that gives you some idea of what to expect. I own an HD 7970 in my system and I'd have to say the GTX 680 felt smoother (most likely that AAA option) but then again I forced 16x AF through my CCC. I know at least for WoW that produces a performance hit + the AAA (or I'm running wrong drivers or something on my Radeon.)

I can try to tinker with the GPU Boost feature. Oh also, her temps didn't get high (68c) and her card was never "loud." It was audible, but not more so over the CPU fans.

Her system:
GTX 680
Intel i7 930 @ 3.6ghz w/ Corsair H50 push-pull fan setup (louder than the GTX 680.)
ASRock X58 Extreme
3x2GB G.SKill DDR3 1600 CAS 9
Some Hitachi HDD I had as a back up after her primary drive failed (this is her biggest handicap, and probably the loudest actual component in her computer when it starts spooling, I need to replace this ASAP.)

I don't think you'd have any issues to worry about if you go GTX 680. Happy gaming!

EDIT: The AAA option I just started tinkering with recently, through CCC, I set my AA Option to MSAA+AAA, if I turn that back to MSAA+AAA I don't have the lag issue with spells (and overall the game looks the same) - I should really make a profile for WoW since I was playing MW3 before I noticed the little FPS drop in WoW (no performance drop in MW3.)

 

[Timorous]

I'm mostly decided on the DirectCU 7970 just for the extra vram and the 6 monitor output, feel having one client per screen at full-size will be more fun (and the extra real-estate will be awesome while coding and composing) but if the 680 is a better card then for the same price I have to seriously consider it.

If both are the same price then the question is what do you want more. The extra performance of the 680 in wow (7970 oc vs 680 oc in other games is fairly close) or the extra utility that 6 screens provide and only you can answer that.