Insane Eyefinity Surround Testing - 10320x1440 Resolution - Part 2
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2015-05-07
·
1,814 words · ~9 min read
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now in my first video about this configuration the one in front of me
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which you can check out here i talked about the media consumption experience
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and the productivity implications of having literally
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eight feet of monitor in front of you
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then i committed to follow up with you guys with a part two video where i just
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dug into the gaming performance of this bad boy of a setup it took a while just
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like part three of mineral oil which i promise is coming next week so make sure
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you're subscribed so you don't miss it but at long last i took some advice from
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you guys some advice from skip over at widescreen gaming forum and i found a
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nice cross-section of games from different genres to throw at it to
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investigate the performance of our system at this mondo resolution and how games
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react to being stretched in some cases over three times wider than they were
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ever intended in fact in most cases over three times wider than they were
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intended
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the cooler master neptune 240m features an exclusive pump design and their new
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celencio fans to provide impressive near-silent performance click now to
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learn more 14.86
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megapixels that is the pixel count of
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our triple surround curved 34-inch monitor setup from lg we're talking
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about a surface here that is just slightly harder to drive than even the
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brand new 5k imac retina display
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kajigger thing that apple recently released and when you consider that even
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high-end gaming pcs these days are only really designed to operate from about
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1080p up to 4k at the max expecting them
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to not to buckle when we throw seven times the resolution of 1080p at a
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gaming rig it seems a little unreasonable so we needed more than just
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a high-end pc we built the autobahn hammer equipped with a core i7 5930k
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at 4.7 gigahertz aio liquid cooling a
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1500 watt power supply and 32 gigs of dominator platinum ddr4 RAM from Corsair
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an ASUS rampage 5 extreme motherboard and the centerpiece three sapphire
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vaporex r9 290x 8 gig graphics cards
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running in crossfire why 8 gigs you might ask well when you scale raw GPU
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power by adding more cards you are still stuck with the amount of RAM of a single
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card so the only way to kit out our three-way setup with more RAM was to use
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cards that have more each in the first place
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so let's start with the games that deliver a great ultra wide screen
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experience dirt showdown is almost the perfect poster child here for how
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awesome this gaming setup can be the
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resolution just shows up in the menus it
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runs great averaging 52 FPS at ultra with two times msaa and while it doesn't
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render the game with multiple cameras to eliminate stretching on the side
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monitors it handles this better than most single camera games with only the
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outside 15 or so where you'll rarely be looking anyway being unpleasantly
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distorted the next one is iracing the popular online racing sim this one could
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earn poster child status too if not for the small rendering errors in the
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protective cage on the left and the harnesses on the right menus were
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perfect field of view adjustments are handled with a simple hotkey in game and
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being surrounded by the cockpit with a very wide field of view legitimately
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makes it feel more like you're in a vehicle it also ran very well at around
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80 FPS at max with mirrors enabled uh
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2048 by 2048 textures and all the RAM sliders cranked
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the next game type and uh games where you sit in a cockpit being good for
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surround is definitely a pattern at this point that can benefit from our surround
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setup is star citizen but as we discovered it's and whether it's
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an optimization issue a bottleneck elsewhere in the system or just the
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sheer demand of running it at this resolution star citizen ran at 8
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FPS in the racing module at low and then curiously ran at 8 FPS at very high the
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game isn't released yet so they've got time but while the menu system wasn't
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perfect at least everything was visible on screen which is an excellent starting
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point our next game is civilization beyond earth and this is a bit of a
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unique one in that it's the only top-down view game that we're running and it's a
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mantle title and that it also features an unusual crossfire mode thanks to the
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way that mantel allows game devs to leverage the GPU or gpus more directly
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than has been possible in the past so instead of each GPU rendering
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alternating frames the gpus divide up the workload and each renders part of
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the same frame neato the game looks beautiful and runs at just over 30 FPS
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at medium settings in the worst case scenario built-in benchmark with a
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massive amount of terrain visible on screen and that's fine for a turn-based game
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but the experience really wasn't that great
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to actually play it because ui elements
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are so spread out to the left and the right that i found myself getting very
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frustrated this could be addressed with a patch though and not all top-down
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games will have this issue our second
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mantle game i mean you got to try to leverage those 290 x's somehow right is
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dragon age inquisition third person view games tend to handle widescreen better
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than a lot of other genres and even though dragon age inquisition renders
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from only one camera angle causing stretching on about the outer half of
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the outside monitors it ran at about 31 FPS at high with ultra textures using
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the built-in benchmark it kept all the ui elements on the center monitor where
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they can be more easily accessed and it makes a reasonable case for widescreed
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gaming one of my favorite games to test with
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well anything is tomb raider 2013 and it
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handled this setup really well as well as another third person game it required
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no fov adjustments it leverages multi-GPU configurations extraordinarily
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well man that game's well optimized so the game was playable at around 48 FPS
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at very high with tres fx enabled and
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other than the usual single camera issue of objects appearing to be nearer to you
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than they actually are in your peripheral vision it ran flawlessly
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shadow of mordor i threw in just as an interesting case study it allows me to
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demonstrate some of the issues that can occur when trying to run games in any
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multi-monitor setup let alone a super ultra megawide one like this because
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even with the brilliant flawless widescreen utility by hayden the game
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itself runs okay but the menus are completely impossible to navigate and uh
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the other cool thing about this game is that it's super easy to create a very
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demanding scenario for GPU vram with their ultra texture pack so running
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shadow of mortar at whatever settings i was running at that
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one time i got it working with ultra textures i i i have no idea i mean it
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was spent across the monitors it looked really good frame rate was balls around
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30 FPS and average performance was over four gigs
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of vram per GPU the only time that happened where we would have actually
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needed more than a four gig GPU um i i
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wasn't able to verify anything because i couldn't navigate the menus so
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yeah i only ran one FPS game because frankly
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first person shooters are not a great genre for this kind of setup in general
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and they're just mostly not made for it too valve games are about as seamless an
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experience as you can expect to have with launcher arguments available to
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force a given resolution and field of view adjustments available through
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simple commands in the console but given how hectic and disorienting the
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first person view can be compared to third person when you're moving around
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quickly even under normal circumstances having objects appear to move towards
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and away from you as you turn is only going to make matters worse so while it
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ran extraordinarily well at over 200 FPS maxed out
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portal 2 was just not that great of an experience
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so i guess it's conclusion time what is what is this whole thing what's it
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really like to use well when it works it's really cool when it doesn't work
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which is more often than not like like
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vastly more often than not most of the games i selected are from widescreen
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gaming forums silver or gold certified games list because they have relatively
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few issues with field of view heads-up display elements and menu navigability
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um when it doesn't work it's absolutely
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infuriating i think the worst ones for me are the ones like beyond earth where
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the experience is really cool but then it gets crippled by one glaring
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oversight like if i want to use mouse look for moving around the view of the
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map i'm going all the way from the left to the right edge and back and back and
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forth like that so the big question is would i invest the
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six thousand dollars required for three
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eight gig gpus and three 34-inch monitors for myself
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no while more vibram is cool i think we
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demonstrated that unless you're actually playing modern titles at resolutions
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beyond 4k where even our triple 290x
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crossfire setup that pulled a massive 800 watts from the wall in games
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struggled it's not the kind of thing that you'll need at the moment but maybe
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that was the point of this video just building something no one will buy
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because they know better just for the sheer spectacle of it am i right
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guys thank you for watching like this video if you liked it dislike it if you
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three massive monitors to put on your desk or your huge desk your 8-foot desk
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