Quote Originally Posted by Noids View Post
Just to clarify Zappy, do you mean that you would get better performance on your single 30" monitor using a single 580GTX for WoW than using 2 in SLI.

I have 2 x 295GTXs in quad for my 30" and the lack of graphics quality really annoys me sometimes. Just wondering if it is worth changing to a maxed single card setup...
I can't speak for dual 580s just yet as one is still on back order, but my experience from running tri 280s was that sli kills performance. I recently decided to level my rogue from 70 to 80 playing solo and was trying various tests on him. In full screen mode, max options, I would see a solid 60FPS - trisli or not, but running in windowed mode is where you really see the performance difference. The gameplay was not as smooth, and frames would jump down to 35FPS all the time with SLI enabled.

Aren't the 295s already SLI'd by default? Is so, I don't think you'll ever get smooth performance until they decide to add better SLI support for WOW. For multiboxing, I would always run my 280s with SLI disabled and a single 280GTX was more than enough to power 5 instances with a few lower graphics settings (lower AA, low shadows) and I would see a solid 60FPS in most places - dalaran would drop down to 45 sometimes, but that was about it.

I didn't get a ton of time to play last night, but after getting everything setup on the SSD and changing the graphics options around on the new 580, I cranked everything to the max on the main, and set all my clones to run @ 60FPS in the background. In addition I set my configs to run them all in DX11. The difference is night and day. In dalaran, my main will drop down to around 35 at times, but most of the time was sitting at 60. Every place else I went, it won't budge from 60. For having all the settings on ultra, it's quite impressive - not to mention the water with DX11 is amazing.

Another thing I noticed with the single 580 is that my picture swapping (via keyclone) is instant and on par with ISBoxer. I'll probably make the switch one of these days, but I'm very happy with the performance increase.

Sorry for hijacking the thread about SLI talk. Back to the original poster, if you're already on a 480, it depends how much disposable income you have. The 580s are proven to perform faster, and run cooler, and overclock very well, however I don't think the cost to upgrade from a 480 to 580 is going to be worth it.