Nvidia GTX260 and 8800GT, 5 box, expected FPS?

[Jafula]

Hello all,

I just got bought a GTX260 card and added to my machine to sit next to my 8800GT. I have 2 monitors, a 21inch plugged into my GTX and a 19inch plugged into my GT. I am running Vista 64bit, 4GB ram, Q6600. I have Nvidia 178.24 drivers.

My main runs on the 21inch at 1680x1050 and my clones all share the 19inch. All wows are in windowed mode.

With my main by itself, I get about 80fps. What I am finding is that the mains fps gets really low (about 20) when I load the clones up.

Can anyone explain to me why this is happening? What is vista doing? Is this FPS to be expected for such a system?

Thanks in advance for any responses.

[pengwynman]

Hello all,

I just got bought a GTX260 card and added to my machine to sit next to my 8800GT. I have 2 monitors, a 21inch plugged into my GTX and a 19inch plugged into my GT. I am running Vista 64bit, 4GB ram, Q6600. I have Nvidia 178.24 drivers.

My main runs on the 21inch at 1680x1050 and my clones all share the 19inch. All wows are in windowed mode.

With my main by itself, I get about 80fps. What I am finding is that the mains fps gets really low (about 20) when I load the clones up.

Can anyone explain to me why this is happening? What is vista doing? Is this FPS to be expected for such a system?

Thanks in advance for any responses.You say the main runs at 1680x1050... are the clones running at 1680x1050 as well? You might want to set them to ~800x600 and limit the background fps.

EDIT: all instances of WoW render on the primary display, so using that second card doesn't help. in fact, it would actually lower performance in most cases.

I have a similar comp-- Q9550, 4GB ram, GTX 280... i have 4 clones on secondary monitor set to 800x600, fpsbk set to 15, maxfps 45 and i do fine unless i'm in a city, but i'm on 32-bit vista right now so i think the ram is a huge factor there. upgrading to 64-bit this week, and getting another 2 GB of memory too if all goes well. the funny thing is... having a gtx 280 on a 32-bit OS actually DECREASES performance in some areas because it has 1GB of memory... meaning the max system memory the OS can address is 3GB, shared between 5 WoW's and OS services, etc. I'm actually surprised that I get the performance I do considering haha

[phara]

You are using dual view (windows sees two seperate monitors), and you will never get "good" FPS in dual view for any directx app on any OS. Horizontal span is the only way to get great FPS on both monitors, but in this mode windows sees one giant screen. Search the forums for "dual view" or "horizontal span" and you will find all kinds of threads about performance experiences from both. Horizontal span is NOT available in vista, but is in previous windows versions.

Dual view was "improved" with vista such that if you run great hardware it's possible to use but won't be great. In XP and previous OS's it was so bad it's not possible to use. My personal experience with dual view vs horizontal span from another thread:
With the same hardware, 2 instances of <any directx app> running under dual view monitors, I got max ~5fps in xp and ~20fps in vista on the second monitor.

Same hardware under xp with horizontal span - with FIVE instances running, I can get 60 fps on any window. Note that some users have reported better performance under vista using dual view; these are just my experiences with an 8800 GT.

Edit: just re-read your post and see you say your "main" window is the one that slows down ... is your mains window in the primary or secondary monitor (according to windows)? With dual view it is the windows secondary monitor that would be slower, the primary windows monitor will still perform OK.

[Jafula]

EDIT: all instances of WoW render on the primary display, so using that second card doesn't help. in fact, it would actually lower performance in most cases.Thank you both for your responses. The above must have been the problem. Moving to 2 monitors hanging off my GTX 260 significantly increased performance (30-80fps as opposed to 10-20fps) with my main effects settings maxed out on shadows and about 3/4 on view distance.

@phara: It was my main that slowed down; Vista 64 - Nvidia control panel gives me single, clone or dual-view, can't see a horizontal span option in there...

So all I can take from this is, unless you are using SLI/crossfire, multi-boxing wow is a 1 gfx card affair. My 8800GT is essentially useless (its now a glorified physics card).

[Crucial]

Welcome to the official video card paper weight club, Jafula.

[Jafula]

Welcome to the official video card paper weight club, Jafula. Heh. Thanks! Maybe some more games in 6 months or so will have PhysX support and it'll be less useless. :P

[Jafula]

Someone describes a "solution" here for others that are interested:

Dual cards/monitors, worse FPS? ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&postID=137782#post137782')

[algol]

Such as it is. WoW is still retarded about display adapters; the workaround will help but not to the point of being as good as if you were only using Display1.

[Jafula]

Yes. I'm just using display 1 (GTX260). The card is powerful enough to handle all 5 wow instances and given decent fps with full shadows on main at 1680x1050. The workaround is too fiddly for me.

As for horizontal span, it is not available in Nvidia's control panel for me (Vista 64), I assume because a) it was removed or b) my monitors have different native resolutions (i.e. horizontal span would not work for me anyway - link ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&postID=90811#post90811') ).

[daviddoran]

I have the same video cards (older processor though) and run 4 monitors. I have 6 accts, and can run all 6 on two screens hooked to the GTX 260, but as soon as i put one window on either of the other two screens, the FPS on everything slows to a crawl. My second video card slot is only 4x electrical, and I'm not sure if that's my problem (I suspect it's part of it) but prior to the 3.0.2 patch, I got ~20 fps on all the alts, when run on the secondary video card.

What speed is your second slot? If you have a 8x or 16x electrical, it would seem that it's a vista limitation. I read that windows only renders 3d games on the primary video card, even if the video is being displayed on another video card's output.



Anyone know of a way to get more than 2 monitors running with decent FPS? I have different resolutions, so the Matrox Dual head to go wont work for me.

[Jafula]

I have two x16 slots. Basically for best performance in wow (vista), you want to hang both monitors off your GTX260, and use Dual View in the nvidia control panel. Well that seems to work best for me. Putting the second monitor on my 8800GT caused very bad FPS. Turning Aero off helped my performance as well.

I'm pretty sure, that games can enumerate adapters (video cards) and choose which adapter to render to. (Supreme Commander supports multiple monitors for instance.) I'm assuming from my reading that Wow only renders to the primary adapter, so that is why one video card is best (unless you do some hacks like I linked to in the post above).

Dual View lets you have the two monitors at different resolutions.