Video card questions - dual 4k displays + 10 boxing + streaming

I'm looking at building a new PC and wanted to get some advice on graphics cards. Apologies in advance if the questions I have are stupid - I'm not terribly great with hardware and what I've been able to find through the googles has been wildly conflicting and confusing as hell. And, of course, none of the general discussion about video cards on the internet takes into account things like multi-boxing (which I don't know, would that have an effect? I would think boxing is more CPU intensive)

Right now I have 2x 4k displays and a single GTX 780 with a single display port. One screen runs at 60fps (and I have my 5 toons on it), and the other screen gets used for my browser. If I set it up to have my leader on the one screen and my followers on the other, overall performance goes completely into the toilet - I'm lucky to get 30fps on the main screen, at "good" settings with the followers set to "fair" in WoW. Otherwise, have 16GB RAM, i7-4790 cpu.

My goal is to be able to box 5-10 toons across 2 4k displays and also handle streaming at the same time. I might throw a 3rd normal HD display in there to be used for the browser. So, any solution would need to handle 2 4k displays running toons on them with "good" settings as well as a 3rd display for browser etc, and streaming.

I'd been thinking about getting 2x 970s and running them not in SLI. Is this sensible? Or would running them in SLI be better? Or would there be another solution that I'm not aware of that would be better still?

Advice? At least for the graphics card part of this, I'm trying to keep the cost about the same as 2x 970s would run, if that helps reduce the number of options.

Edit: I'm also willing to wait a bit - I'm seeing something about Pascal cards that some people seem to be raving about, and the liklihood that those will come out in the next few months.

Thanks!

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Originally Posted by kate

Edit: I'm also willing to wait a bit - I'm seeing something about Pascal cards that some people seem to be raving about, and the liklihood that those will come out in the next few months.
Thanks!

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I would wait. The next gen graphics cards seem to be the largest leap in tech ever. I'm waiting for them as well. i was going to add a second 980ti..but i dont really need it now. I plan on investing in a lot of VR tech next year, so i will be upgrading for sure.

Pascal is likely to be presented in April at GDC. General availability may or may not be around the same time. If it is, it will probably be the "new" titan, but you never know.

I struggle to run 1x 4K display on a 6GB 980Ti in some games. There just isn't enough GPU power for it, like its at 99% all the time. Memory usually runs at about 5GB so that side is OK. If you are running multiple games at 4K then that would be hard work for a single, or even a pair of 970's.

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Originally Posted by kate

I would think boxing is more CPU intensive

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It all depends on the game. With WoD, Blizzard changed up the game engine which shifts more resources over to the GPU than previously. There are still times when CPU is the bottleneck, but the GPU can easily be the bottleneck these days, when it hasn't been an issue in the prior expansions.

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Originally Posted by kate

Right now I have 2x 4k displays and a single GTX 780 with a single display port. One screen runs at 60fps (and I have my 5 toons on it), and the other screen gets used for my browser. If I set it up to have my leader on the one screen and my followers on the other, overall performance goes completely into the toilet - I'm lucky to get 30fps on the main screen, at "good" settings with the followers set to "fair" in WoW. Otherwise, have 16GB RAM, i7-4790 cpu.

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I'm not sure I'm understanding this correctly:

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Originally Posted by kate

2x 4k displays and a single GTX 780 with a single display port

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How are you hooking up two displays off of a single display port? A splitter or something? Displayport only has so much bandwidth that it can handle through the cable—this is a limitation of the standard—so, you might be overloading something by trying to force so much data through it. You might think this isn't the case, but I certainly wouldn't rule it out until you know for sure.

Also, people have reported that 16GB of RAM is cutting it close for 5-boxing these days because the game client eats up about 2GB of RAM on its own. So, I think you're going to to be looking at 32GB of RAM if you want to follow through on 10-boxing and streaming.

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Originally Posted by kate

I'd been thinking about getting 2x 970s and running them not in SLI. Is this sensible? Or would running them in SLI be better? Or would there be another solution that I'm not aware of that would be better still?

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4K is a beast of a resolution, but TechPowerUp shows that a single 970 should be able to maintain just over 60FPS in WoW @ 2160 when using Ultra settings—unfortunately, I have no idea where they're performing their test. With lower settings, I'd assume 80-90 FPS is probably what you'd see. However, you could look at how many FPS, overall, you're expecting to push out of your GPUs. If you run 60/30 while 5-boxing, then that's ~180 FPS that need to be rendered at any given time. 60/20 drops that down to ~140FPS, which still can be considered to be a lot for 4K, and requires some juice to run.

SLI is nice to have available, but you rarely get 200% performance out of SLI (probably never in WoW). Splitting the load between GPUs/displays, while better for overall performance, also comes with its own drawbacks, perhaps even more-so at 4K.

Also, capturing the game client at the 4K-ish resolution that you're going to be running is going to be more intensive than if you were capturing 1440, or 1080, so there's that to keep in mind.

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Originally Posted by kate

Advice? At least for the graphics card part of this, I'm trying to keep the cost about the same as 2x 970s would run, if that helps reduce the number of options.

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You're in uncharted territory, so you're kind of on your own. I don't know of anyone multiboxing at 4K, and trying to stream it, so, unfortunately, no one has those numbers.

A 980Ti is a powerhouse, but it costs as much as two 970s and may not be as powerful as them in SLI.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by kate

Edit: I'm also willing to wait a bit - I'm seeing something about Pascal cards that some people seem to be raving about, and the liklihood that those will come out in the next few months.

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Beyond some marketing slides from nVidia, there is nothing that tells us anything about first-generation Pascal (not even a release date), and just like every new generation of GPU, it's likely going to be better than what we've got now by the typical 10-15%. This is especially true with brand new GPU architecture, and the good stuff is never out until the node has matured, and the engineers have had a lot of time to play with it and refine how they utilize it.

Yeah, I meant to say "and the other display is connected via HDMI, which limits it to a hard 30FPS max regardless of how much video card I have."

With my 780 and only a single client, I was able to run Ultra and *usually* stay at 60 FPS, though when there was a ton of action, that would drop down to 45ish FPS.

Thanks for the feedback, MiRai - good things to think about and know. I hadn't really been considering the impact of a 4k stream on performance - I've got to think about how to handle that, and it will take some experimentation.

I also got similar feedback about waiting for the next gen cards - namely that we have no idea what will happen and anything really performant will likely be the Titan equivalent, and I can always resell 2x 970s if something compelling comes along. So, with that said... Yesterday I went and got my parts and here's what I built:

Corsair 540 Air case (thing is freaking huge, but the airflow is delicious and cable management is a non-issue)
ASRock X99 Extreme 4 mobo
i7-5820k CPU (6 cores, 28 PCIe lanes vs. 16 - lets me run 1 gpu at 16 lanes, 1 at 8) + better cooler
32GB Corsair Ballistix Elite RAM
2x ASUS Strix 970 GTX
EVGA SuperNova 1000 watt PS
1TB Samsung EVO 850 SSD
Windows 10 Pro

Once I finished putting it together and sorting out a few configuration snafus, it's been running like a dream. I haven't set the cards up as SLI. I'm still trying a few tweaks to performance, but if I'm just running a single instance, it stays at 60fps in ultra settings, and when 5boxing, I lower the settings for my main screen a bit (good to high) and get 60fps consistently and the followers all stay capped at 30fps. I'm hopeful with a few more performance tweaks I'll be able to get my main screen back to ultra - my guess is that there's a CPU bottleneck since the GPU is entirely divorced.

Still haven't messed around with streaming, but that's next.

Just make sure you go green. Red team (AMD) doesn't support SLI in windowed mode. I'll replace my 4x290x with a few Pascal's when it comes.

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Originally Posted by kate

Yeah, I meant to say "and the other display is connected via HDMI, which limits it to a hard 30FPS max regardless of how much video card I have."

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That's exactly the problem. Running two displays at different refresh rates and trying to game across them; with the 970s this obviously won't be an issue (unless your display is older and only capable of 30Hz @ 2160).

They are now both connected via displayport, and it's pretty great.