5 boxing with gtx 280

[BobGnarly]

Hi all,

I was wondering if anybody had any experience with this video card, especially running across 2 monitors (but any input in appreciated).

I'm currently running an 8800gtx, and while it's pretty good, it could be better, and I'm all about better. :)

What I'm wondering, though, is if I'm just constrained by XP in dual-view (hor span really isn't an option without gimping the hell out of my 30"), or if I could see decent improvements stepping up to the 280.

Anybody?

[-silencer-]

I'm in the same situation. 8800GTX, Win XP w/dual view.. considering a GTX 280 as well.

I'm actually thinking of just going Vista and adding a separate card for my other monitor.

[aerows]

Yes for asking a great question!

This is a question I have myself. I am interested in the responses, too.

I wish I had the cash to lay out, because I am lagging with a tri-window set up on an 8800GT/Quad 3.2/4GB and I'm pretty sure it is going to get worse, since Shattrath is a lagfest no matter the resolution.

[Hakaslak]

I can attest that the GTX 280 is a massive upgrade from an 8800 GTX 512

Before I would barely average 30-34 fps in shatt on the main window at 1920x1200, and the clones around 20-26 at 960x600x4. With the GTX 280 I usually cap the main at 60 and the clones at 30 fps each. All in game settings are maxed out, with no antialiasing though. The GTX280 (and all other video cards it seems) has crazy artifacts with more than one D3D app running antialiasing. I would asume that having a second GTX 280 and enabling CSAA would improve the framerates if you enabled MSAA in the game settings, but not sure

The biggest benefit of running the GTX280 is that there is no micro stuttering at all - like how the whole mouse movement will seem to lag when you turn to look behind you, for example.

I run the GTX280 with a Q9450@3.8ghz and 8GB DDR2 PC8500, with the fsb at 475mhz, with 5-5-5-15 T2 timings, and 2 24" 1920x1200 monitors. Win Vista Ultimate x64

[Carnage]

Nice, might have to get one soon ;)

[Jezebel]

for the price of a gtx280 you could have bought an average second PC with say.. an 8600GT, 2.4g dual core and 2gig of ram.

no matter how good your PC specs are.. multiple PC's is always superior to a single PC running multiple clients.

[zanthor]

for the price of a gtx280 you could have bought an average second PC with say.. an 8600GT, 2.4g dual core and 2gig of ram.

no matter how good your PC specs are.. multiple PC's is always superior to a single PC running multiple clients.The thing is it's like microwaving burrito's...

Having ONE huge ass computer inflates your e-peen by 12"...

Having one average computer inflates your e-peen by 6"...

However, when you add a 2nd average computer, you only gain another 3", because it's still just average...

And you know, it's all about the e-peen!

[-silencer-]

no matter how good your PC specs are.. multiple PC's is always superior to a single PC running multiple clients.
Not when you factor in HEAT. I'll stick to the lower heat output and simplicity of running 5 WoW instances on one machine. When I turn on my media server, even at idle, it's a noticeable increase in heat output. The only way I'd even consider 5-boxing on multiple machines is if I put the boxes in another room..

[Hakaslak]

I play Source and other games as well, so it's not like I wasted the GTX 280

Some of us play more demanding games than just WoW ;)
for the price of a gtx280 you could have bought an average second PC with say.. an 8600GT, 2.4g dual core and 2gig of ram.

no matter how good your PC specs are.. multiple PC's is always superior to a single PC running multiple clients.

[Nitro]

I'm in the same situation. 8800GTX, Win XP w/dual view.. considering a GTX 280 as well.

I'm actually thinking of just going Vista and adding a separate card for my other monitor.

I actually tried this out awhile back. Threw in 8gb of ram, vista 64 bit, and 2 x 9800gtx cards. I got no gains at all. Went back to xp with just one of the 9800gtx cards spanned accross both monitors and i worked better tbh.

[mikekim]

here is some info similar to what you requested

using a GTX 260 (so lower spec than a 280) I can run 4x instances on 2x 22" screens at between 40-100fps depending on Area (details set to medium 1x Multisampling) each client running 1050x840 (monitors turned through 90' - Quad core 6600 4gb ram)

[BobGnarly]

OK, thanks everybody. It sounds like it would be a decent upgrade, so I think I might have to look at getting one. They're approaching $400 at newegg.. :thumbsup:
for the price of a gtx280 you could have bought an average second PC with say.. an 8600GT, 2.4g dual core and 2gig of ram.

no matter how good your PC specs are.. multiple PC's is always superior to a single PC running multiple clients.Well, I'm not sure I could buy it for $400, but even if I could, this route gives me a faster computer for other games as well.

Even given that, I'd disagree that multiple PCs are better than a single. There are pros and cons, but PiP alone is enough to sway me personally.

[Carnage]

Posting in this thread because its similar to the OP, Im planning on getting a new graphics card - Was just wondering if anyone is / was 5x boxing with a ATI HD 4870, If you have could you share some of the details? FPS in shatt, ironforge / solo and things like loading times or stutter?

Thanks in advanced, Carnage - Wonx

[Mac]

I'm a noob at this kind of stuff, so just asking the question...

If the OP has one 8800gtx graphics card that is pretty decent, could he just add another 8800gtx for less money then what the gtx280 would cost and put one monitor on one card, and the other monitor on the other card and get same / better performance?

Note: I have one 8800gts and went to shatt for the first time this week. I have had pretty good performance with XP and 4 gig ram running 5 on two 24" monitors, but in shat, my fps went into the 1-10 range from the 40-50 range, my ram usage went to 99%+ My alts where breaking follow all the time and the windows where siezing up. So I will have to do something...

[Dhamage]

I can now give some good advice regarding multi-boxing on one computer. 5 accounts, 5 unique directories, using keyclone 1.8k.

My first computer setup:
ASUS PB5 motherboard
nVidia 7300 GT 256Mb
2.0GHz Core 2 Duo
2Gb RAM
1 SATA Hard drive (3Gb/s transfer rate)
2x NEC 1770VX LCD monitors
350W power
Windows Vista Business (its my work computer... yes... I frag at work... self-employment rocks)

Results: Game ran, but man was it slow. I could get it running but I could not do that much outside of the starting zone because of the number of players being rendered. All graphics were turned down to minimum, with only my main's terrain range being set to middle. I wasn't getting anything better than 15 fps in each one.

My second setup:
Moved my 4 alts over to my server which has a raid setup. I think any improvements I saw were mostly psycho-sematic (i.e. in my head). SATA's transfer rate is so high its near impossible for 5 versions of this game running at the same time to trip it up. This isn't your dad's 600Mb IDE drive anymore...

My third setup (upgrades):
Quad-core Q6600, 2.4GHz
4Gb RAM
500W power

Keyclone affinity that worked best:
CPU 0 (nothing... leave for system)
CPU 1 Alt, Alt
CPU 2 Main
CPU 3 Alt, Alt

Results: Game ran considerably better and had a better time keeping the frame rates up. However, I still didn't get anything better about 24fps, and if there were a lot of people around or if I hearthed or went into a town it was near unbearable. Hard drive was doing a lot of work and since I knew the harddrive could handle the games them selves my only conclusion was that the graphics card was pushing a lot of work to the harddrive.

My Final setup (upgrade):
Gigabyte nVidia GTX280 1Gb RAM

Results: HO.. LY... CRAP! Keeping the graphics turned down on my alts, and turning up some of mains graphics I am getting 50+fps on my main and about 45+ on my alts. I can actually fly on all 5 mounts at the same time (from fly points) and it will still render all 5 windows! Insane! I don't have to wait 2-3 minutes after all my toons land to get moving again... maybe 45 seconds. I could run through Undercity with no problem, engage mobs without fear of a hiccup... proof that you can run 5 instances on 1 computer effectively. According to the Windows Experience Index calculator, the bottleneck is my RAM now at a 5.6 score, followed by my CPU at 5.7, and the graphics card and harddrive are 5.9. So unless they increase the speed of RAM significantly or Blizzard starts writing their code in 64-bit this is as optimum as its going to get.

UPDATE: Be careful getting on the boat or zeplin... i just continuous lagged between the two zones until i got booted.

Oh, and to crush a myth... World of Warcraft is a 32-bit game, so running it in a 64-bit operating system will not improve things. Even if you run 8Gb of RAM, the 32-bit emulator only seems about 3.2Gb of it. I got this from my computer builder who designed most of the systems many coal plants use here in SW Pennsylvania... unless you actually work for Microsoft, I'm going to take this guys 25+ years of expertise over anyone here.

[wowphreak]

Its a lil more complicated then that, with 4 gigs vista needs to page more stuff out to the hard drive more often especially when yer running 5 games at once.
With 64 bit yeh get a performance hit from running emulation buts its made up by the fact yeh dont have to page out to hard drive as often because yeh have lots of memory.

Any time a computer has to page something out to the hard drive its a serious performance hit consider hard drives are an order of a magnitude slower then memory.

32bit emulator is limited to 4 gigs of memory no matter how yeh slice but the problems is that each apps is limited to 2 gigs unless it was specifically compile with /largeaddressaware then yeh need to use the /3gb switch to allow it to use 3 gigs of memory. One app= one instance of wow considering wow dosent use more the 500 megs this is a non issue.



Oh, and to crush a myth... World of Warcraft is a 32-bit game, so running it in a 64-bit operating system will not improve things. Even if you run 8Gb of RAM, the 32-bit emulator only seems about 3.2Gb of it. I got this from my computer builder who designed most of the systems many coal plants use here in SW Pennsylvania... unless you actually work for Microsoft, I'm going to take this guys 25+ years of expertise over anyone here.

[Dhamage]

Interesting... that makes sense... if I leave all my background apps off though I don't seem to have any stuttering issues (i.e. harddrive is getting tagged).

[HPAVC]

Oh, and to crush a myth... World of Warcraft is a 32-bit game, so running it in a 64-bit operating system will not improve things. Even if you run 8Gb of RAM, the 32-bit emulator only seems about 3.2Gb of it. I got this from my computer builder who designed most of the systems many coal plants use here in SW Pennsylvania... unless you actually work for Microsoft, I'm going to take this guys 25+ years of expertise over anyone here.The engineer is stating that Wow32 isn't faster emulated, in and of itself, he is not stating that the box that is emulating it isn't faster (which it is) and has more resources to throw at the Wow32 emulation (which it does). While Wow32 is "emulated", much of the issues Wow players have with performance are offloaded to the underlying OS and its hardware which is the same for emulated or non-emulated. So when Wow32 or Wow native hits the driver mated hardware resources its doing so natively via emulator or natively.

So in the end, emulated Wow32 bangs 64bit mated hardware as a 64bit machine would. The exception would be huge addressing limits -- but Wow doesn't reach these since the requirements for the game are quite small.

Using the knowledge that a higher order card slot provides more performance opportunities for graphics cards for example on a machine. An old skool 32/64bit PCI card versus a >=128bit AGP card for example. Of course we have drivers and underlying hardware to give access to and perform properly with these infrastructure. The 32bit OS has a driver which can bang on the 256bit graphics card. The 32bit app does this without knowing or caring about the existence of such things ... and thank god its that way.

Slightly related, sadly getting something to run on 64bit doesn't mean its mated and this does suck, unclean drivers can introduce all sorts of issues which negate everything you have worked for as any early adopter will attest to.