Multiboxing Hardware Science!

[MiRai]

Excellent news, would be very interested in your opinion whether it's worth getting a second GTX580 3GB, my initial idea was to go up to 3 monitors with 1 GPU running my main and the second one 4 slaves.

I, personally, have mixed feelings about more than 2 monitors per computer for multiboxing. So far, it would
seem that I'm alone when I say I take a performance hit and my FPS becomes "spikey" if more than 2 monitors
are hooked up to my system while multiboxing. This had been true for me for well over a year and it only went
away after I built my second system and used my old system to house my 3rd and 4th monitors. The only
things that were not changed out in an attempt to troubleshoot the issue were the monitors (they're all
identical) and GPU manufacturer (nVidia). If I had different monitors or an urge to buy an ATi card I might try
and troubleshoot the issue again but, I was so tired of dealing with it that when I built my new system I just
kept my old one instead of selling it off.

I had experienced this performance loss using 2x GTX 260's / GTX 260 | GTX 460 / 2x GTX 570's -- All non-SLI
configurations. After that I RMA'd one of the 570's (the other one is wasting away in my old system), picked up
the GTX 580 3GB, and never looked back. If this second GTX 580 proves to be worthless for multiboxing or
other games like Crysis 2 / Civ 5 with DX11 on super ultra settings... then it's going back as well and I'll just
wait for 28nm GPUs.

But...

Please don't take what I've said as a deterrence to try out what you're wanting to do. Like I said, it seems I'm
the only person that has ever reported this issue before and I've not heard anyone talk about such an issue in
the 2+ years I've been around (if they did... I don't remember). I mentioned it to Lax awhile ago and we were
never able to sort anything out even though I figured it was probably hardware all along.

You have the Palit version?

I'm a loyal EVGA fan.

[MiRai]

I've been thinking of the list of "benchmarks" I'm going to go through with for this weekend and here's what
I've come up with:

5-Boxing World of Warcraft

CPU Usage Tests [2600K]

• Hyper-Threading VS No Hyper-Threading
• 3.4GHz Stock VS 4.4GHz OC

Since WoW is CPU intensive I will cycle through all the available video setting presets (Low - Ultra) on all five
clients and find where the average CPU usage lies for each one in each of those categories. I am going to throw
my custom window swapping macro into the mix as well so we can see how much of a benefit something like
this gives versus having all clients on the same settings. I believe the GTX 580 3GB GPU will not be a
bottleneck until around High/Ultra so it should initially put a lot of pressure on the CPU.

FPS/GPU Usage Tests [EVGA GTX 580 3GB]

• Total VRAM Usage With Each Built-In Preset / My Custom Preset(s)
• Main Window FPS / Alt Window FPS
• SLI VS No SLI [Windowed]
  
• An Attempt To Split Loads Between GPUs

I plan to head to either Stormwind or Orgrimmar during peak play times this weekend to conduct testing. Since
I've re-RaF'd I'm dealing with lower level characters and can't reach anywhere else that might be useful at the
moment. I don't feel that testing in BGs or Raids will give a good average amount of FPS results, although, it
may give results for minimum FPS in heavy situations. I would say it's a trade off between View
Distance/Environmental versus lots of Particle Density. With 50 - 100 players and NPCs in view in either major
city at peak times on Kil'jaeden, I feel that it should give enough stress on Particle Density as well as View
Distance and the environmental settings. Raids have "spikey" Particle Density hits depending on who is casting
what spell and all of that, when a city will have more of a constant flow of Particle Density.

The above tests might sound a little confusing to some of you at the moment but they make sense to me and
are a baseline for what I'll be touching on. If anyone has anything they'd like to see tested just post in this
thread and let me know (you've got 48 hours). Also, if you believe I'm completely retarded with anything I've
mentioned here, again, let me know and perhaps we can come to an agreement on what situation is best for
testing (although, I cannot guarantee that I will be able to test it out).

[Tonuss]

So far, it would seem that I'm alone when I say I take a performance hit and my FPS becomes "spikey" if more than 2 monitors are hooked up to my system while multiboxing.

Not sure if this is related, but I have had a performance issue with dual video card/monitor setups. The setups I have tried were:

Dual Radeon 5850 cards, each connected to one monitor.
Single Radeon 5870 card connected to two monitors.

I would use either keyclone (early on) or pwnboxer (later on) to put the main WOW on one display and the rest on the second display. Whenever I was focused on the primary display, it would slow to 30 fps max, but it could run at 60 fps if I was interacting with one of the characters on the second display. The cards are powerful enough that running 30 fps was generally smooth and playable, but it was annoying to know that the minor stuttering that I would see was not due to the card being underpowered.

My current system still uses the 5870 with a single monitor, so it won't be an issue. I plan to try IS Boxer whenever I get back to multiboxing and perhaps I'll have an opportunity to test a multi-monitor setup in the future. But by then I hope to have one or two of those 3GB 580s, so that might skew the totals.

[MiRai]

Not sure if this is related, but I have had a performance issue with dual video card/monitor setups. The setups I have tried were:

Dual Radeon 5850 cards, each connected to one monitor.
Single Radeon 5870 card connected to two monitors.

I would use either keyclone (early on) or pwnboxer (later on) to put the main WOW on one display and the rest on the second display. Whenever I was focused on the primary display, it would slow to 30 fps max, but it could run at 60 fps if I was interacting with one of the characters on the second display. The cards are powerful enough that running 30 fps was generally smooth and playable, but it was annoying to know that the minor stuttering that I would see was not due to the card being underpowered.

My FPS spikes were pretty severe. All 4 or 5 windows would get locked at about 10-15FPS and monitoring the
GPU's usage via GPU-Z would show that the GPU load would just shoot up to 100% at random times and it
wouldn't matter whether I was in a main city or in lonely Redridge. There was no method to the madness
what-so-ever which is why I could never pinpoint the issue and I assumed it was hardware, although, I do
remember that decreasing View Distance to a very low value seemed to remedy it for the most part but not
entirely (it would just happen less frequently). At this point though, I do like having 2 computers... one for
gaming/video editing that I can keep clean while I clutter up the second one with browsing/IRC/whatever else.

My current system still uses the 5870 with a single monitor, so it won't be an issue. I plan to try IS Boxer whenever I get back to multiboxing and perhaps I'll have an opportunity to test a multi-monitor setup in the future. But by then I hope to have one or two of those 3GB 580s, so that might skew the totals.

You will definitely not be disappointed with ISBoxer one bit... or a few 3GB 580's for that matter (assuming
your CPU can handle it).

[Kekkerer]

I don't think that I've seen you mention what your FPS limits are for main/slave windows, may just have missed it though. Might be worth playing around with that as well, I run my slaves at 15 fps and main 60.

[MiRai]

I don't think that I've seen you mention what your FPS limits are for main/slave windows, may just have missed it though. Might be worth playing around with that as well, I run my slaves at 15 fps and main 60.

Were. This is all in the past since I've switched to 2 computers and split my monitors between them The FPS
problem went on for over a year and of course I tried everything from swapping hardware to limiting FPS to
adjusting video settings to whatever else I tried. I just ended up having to push through it like a boss.

[remanz]

sorry for hijacking the thread a bit.

Did they add new graphics changes with recent patches ?

My machine used to handle Org valley of strength ok upon cata lanuch (40-50 on main , capped at 30 fps on slaves). I was ok all the way until 4.1. Then valley of strength got pretty bad. My framerate dropped to 15-20 on all windows of wow. My hardware config did not change, nor the graphic settings.

Another obvious example is at the gundrak's snake boss chamber. With all those little snakes crawling on the ground, my framerate dips dramatically. It wasn't the case when I did it in 4.0.x

I am thinking about upgrading to GTX580, currently using the mega fail GTX 295. But I was monitoring the GPU usage with afterburner. It never exceeds 60% on both GPUs, even when my framerate is struggling. Does it mean the card never operates at full capacities ? If that's the case, would upgrading the card help at all ? Or this is more CPU bound.

[MiRai]

sorry for hijacking the thread a bit.

Did they add new graphics changes with recent patches ?

My machine used to handle Org valley of strength ok upon cata lanuch (40-50 on main , capped at 30 fps on slaves). I was ok all the way until 4.1. Then valley of strength got pretty bad. My framerate dropped to 15-20 on all windows of wow. My hardware config did not change, nor the graphic settings.

Another obvious example is at the gundrak's snake boss chamber. With all those little snakes crawling on the ground, my framerate dips dramatically. It wasn't the case when I did it in 4.0.x

My first guess was going to be that more people came back to the game on your realm and because 10 more
people are in the city on one screen... it's really 50 more people because it's rendering on five screens. But
then when you mentioned the FPS drop in the instance so, my first guess was quickly nullified.

I have not heard of any graphical updates since Cataclysm has been released but, I have been reading about
many, many people complaining about nVidia's 275.33 drivers. People are seeing FPS drops and overall
performance loss (on all games) with them. They're reverting back to 270.61 or even 267.91 and waiting for
the new 280.xx drivers before upgrading again. Might want to give it a try if you're using the 275.33 drivers.
Or if you're not using 275.33... then try upgrading.

I am thinking about upgrading to GTX580, currently using the mega fail GTX 295. But I was monitoring the GPU usage with afterburner. It never exceeds 60% on both GPUs, even when my framerate is struggling. Does it mean the card never operates at full capacities ? If that's the case, would upgrading the card help at all ? Or this is more CPU bound.

First and foremost (which I'm sure you already know) the GTX 295 is a dual GPU card sitting in SLI mode
(unless you've manually disabled it). I might try disabling SLI mode (if you've still got it enabled) just to see
what that does for you. Also, the nVidia 200 series GPUs are only DX10 compatible. While they're able to
emulate some DX11 stuff it's not a true DX11 card, so if you're using DX9 at the moment I would like to believe
that DX11 would help improve overall performance.

You're right in thinking that because the GPU never exceeds 60%, a video card upgrade probably won't give
you any real performance boost besides any gains that DX11 might give. Check those usage numbers again
after you've disabled SLI (again, if its enabled) and see where they fall. Other than that, WoW is definitely CPU
bound so when you're boxing and you see that performance loss make sure you've got your Task Manager open
to the Performance tab so you can see what CPU usage looks like. You can overlay the Task Manager on top of
your game windows if your layout covers all of your monitor(s).

[remanz]

Thanks Fenril.

I will give disabling SLI and reverting drivers another try before I bust out the cash for GTX580. I tried disabling SLI before. Didn't really improve anything, nor degrade anything. So I figure I just left it on. It was just my wishful thinking that one day, all of sudden, WOW would support SLI fully. and with both card running at 90-100%, the game would perform well. and it really bothers me to have my GTX 295 is running as a GTX 260, lol.

[MiRai]

Sooo... about those tests...

The World of Warcraft SLI tests were very disappointing (surprise, surprise) and there is no need to even
post the results. World of Warcraft is just too CPU bound for SLI to really give it anything more than your
processor can already provide it.

SLI acts funny with WoW in the sense of splitting the GPU load amongst the two cards. In all of the tests I
had run, a single GTX 580 would produce less heat, consume less power, and have lower overall load
compared to its SLI counterpart configuration yet, give the same FPS results. Look below...


GTX 580 3GB No SLI ("Good" Video Preset @ 60 Main/30 Alts (~28 In-Game FPS))



2x GTX 580 3GB SLI ("Good" Video Preset @ 60 Main/30 Alts (~28 In-Game FPS))




In the above screenshots we're focusing on GPU Temp, GPU Load, and VDDC Current (if you'd like). This is
how all of the tests looked. The SLI configuration is working harder, consuming more power, and producing
more heat which only helps rise the ambient temperature of my computer room.

Also, the newest nVidia 257.33 drivers were giving me a slight stutter when playing solo with SLI enabled.
Downgrading to the 270.61 drivers fixed that so I conducted these tests with that driver.

Final word on SLI in World of Warcraft (for now) -- avoid it and just get a great single GPU card. This has
been the same advice most people have been giving out for a few years now and nothing seems to have
really changed (blame the game engine). I am going to keep playing around with it from time to time to
see if I stumble upon the holy grail of video settings that change our lives as multiboxers (don't hold your
breath). As for ATi's Crossfire setups, I have no idea and you're all on your own with that one.