WoW: Ideal 3s (Ultra settings) GPU question

[MadMilitia]

Right, so lets get to the system specs as they are today.

Case: Antec 900 ATX Mid tower
CPU: i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40GHz
RAM: 16 GB DDR3 dual channel
GPU (Current) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 2GB
DISK: Intel SSD 120GB
PSU: Some thermaltake 1100 watt I believe.
MB: Asus P8Z68-V
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate


My GPU question:

I want to add an additional monitor to expand my desktop from 2 * 1920 x 1080 to 3* 1920 x 1080. I also want to be able to run my 3s team on something higher than fair settings. High if possible, ultra would be great but I realize that may be an issue. I have zero interest in adding more WoW instances. 3 will be all I run anymore.

What is the best GPU for this? Something high in vram I assume but does it need a lot of calculation power? I did at a time run 2 of these 460 GTX cards but I gifted one of them to my brother for the holiday (he also plays games) so I'm looking to replace the card but want to be sure that I'm spending wisely. My budget? I could do about 500USD for just the GPU. I'm just going to get a standard 60hz 1920 x 1080 to complete my screens at another time.

[MiRai]

I've only used nVidia over the last 3 years, so that's all I can comment on, but $500 will get you a GTX 780 which is going to blow the GTX 460 out of the water.

[MadMilitia]

Ok so weird issue. I replaced my GTX460-4GB with a GTX780-3GB just now and the frame rates are horrible on 3s! Hovering around 15-20 FPS with low settings on all three boxes.

I checked the GPU and its sitting at 22% power utilization. The CPU is 27% utilized and the ram is 30% utilized.

The drive is an SSD. Not sure where the bottleneck is here but something is screwed up now.

[MadMilitia]

Ok so looking again it seems that the cpu utilization is the problem. Round robin results in one of my primary driving instances running off two logical cores. I changed that and now the single instance running utilizes as much as it can while ultra settings are enabled. Frame rates are solid.

Gonna try 3s again in a bit. Just gotta play with the CPU settings I guess to find what works for me.

[MadMilitia]

Happy!

Master gets all cores. The others get a distribution of the 8 cores. The others run on medium settings. The master on ultra. No problems.

[MiRai]

I couldn't get back to this sooner, but I was going to say that it was probably the CPU affinity (as you already figured out). Honestly, you could probably just let every instance of the game use all available cores and never have to worry about it again.

[MadMilitia]

I couldn't get back to this sooner, but I was going to say that it was probably the CPU affinity (as you already figured out). Honestly, you could probably just let every instance of the game use all available cores and never have to worry about it again.


That may work. I am going to try it with the slaves at half FPS and see if there is any noticeable dent.