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

[MiRai]

I would think boxing is more CPU intensive

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.