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How many displays do you have on your desk? If the answer is “more than two,” then the graphics card equation shifts more towards AMD.
Right now, I’m running three 30-inch displays on my desk, all connected to a single Radeon HD 6970 graphics card. Of course, not everyone needs or wants three or more monitors on their desk. If you do, and you want an Nvidia-based solution, you’ll need at least two graphics cards – unless you’re running the dual-GPU GTX 590.
Nvidia’s GTX 590 can drive more than two displays, but needs two GPUs to do it.
AMD offers robust support for the latest DisplayPort 1.2 standard. That’s not all that useful today, but by mid-2011, we’ll see LCD panels with DisplayPort 1.2 connectors, as well as hubs. What this means in a practical sense is the ability to daisy chain multiple monitors off one DisplayPort connection. That will substantially simplify cabling. Even today, all AMD 6000 series GPUs can run three displays, with some models supporting five or more.
On the other hand, Nvidia’s support for stereoscopic 3D, whether in gaming, movies or 3D photographs, is much more robust than AMD’s. Some display makers are even making the necessary 120Hz refresh rate displays with embedded Nvidia 3D Vision sensors in them, like the Acer HN274H. And if you have serious Nvidia GPU horsepower, you can even have your stereoscopic 3D gaming spread out over three displays – but you’ll want high end SLI at a minimum and three-way SLI is even better. Stereoscopic 3D gaming is one the greatest performance hogs you’ll find in modern PC gaming, so the more GPUs, the better. It’s no wonder that Nvidia is pushing 3D Vision so hard – it looks good and sells more GPUs to boot.
This 27-inch Acer display has a built-in Nvidia 3D Vision sensor.
You’ve got one of the latest 27-inch monitors, complete with rich, saturated colors and fast response time. You’ll want as much GPU horsepower as you can to drive your spiffy display, right?
Well, not really. Odds are, that display is a 1080p monitor: 1920x1080 pixels. If you’re lucky, maybe it’s 1920x1200. There are a handful of near-$1K 27-inch displays that run at 2560x1440, but those are as rare as teeth on a chicken.
In fact, most users often have smaller displays, running at 1080p or even lower resolutions. A good, midrange GPU, like the Radeon HD 6950 or Nvidia GTX 570, can run your games at 4x anti-aliasing and never even break a sweat. So if you’re really running a single 1080p display, you may not need multiple GPUs or even the highest end single GPU card.
Let’s say you’re totally sold on the idea of those shiny new DirectX 11 games, with spiffy features like hardware tessellation and SSAO lighting effects. You want to run them in all their DirectX 11 glory, and are ready to plunk down cash for a new graphics card.
You want SSAO, HDR lighting and tessellation? You won’t get it on Windows XP.
If you’re running Windows XP, forget all that eye candy goodness. You’ll definitely get a performance bump with a current generation graphics card, but you won’t get DX11… or even DirectX 10, neither of which is supported in Windows XP.
Once, a long time ago, I stood in an electronics retailer and watched a buyer come up and check out the aisle of graphics cards. He had a magazine clenched in his hand. I realized the magazine he was holding had one of my graphics card roundup articles. I watched him as he looked at the magazine, looked at the shelf full of cards, looked back at the magazine, and then finally picked up the cheapest card he could find and headed for the checkout stand.
Most of us have limited resources, and have to juggle what’s important and what’s not when it comes to managing our budgets. So no matter how much you may yearn for a badass, liquid cooled, six core fire breathing game system running triple SLI, your bank account and credit card limit may have other opinions.
It all goes back to the balanced system. You ultimately need to look at your application needs, your system specs and your display. Factor in how much money you can spend, and that will ultimately determine what you can buy.
The cool thing is just how much graphics card you can get these days for under $300. The performance of some of the newer midrange GPUs is nothing short of amazing, and absolutely smoke the $600 GPUs of a few years ago. So while games are adding more graphics features, it’s very likely you can still get superb graphics and a terrific gaming experience without sacrificing the down payment on a new car.
Comments are closed on this article
Grimdrix
October 25, 2011 at 6:15pm
Choosing the chipset has never been the difficult part. That takes zero expertise and about 5 minutes of googling. The difficult part is choosing between the fifty different incarnations/brands of that chipset. OC'd, not OC'd, different fan/heatsink setups. They benchmark differently. They operate at different noise levels and temps.
Telling someone what chipset GPU to get is like telling someone looking for car buying advice "get a sedan, say, under 20k." I guess it's a start...
alex_dh9
October 03, 2011 at 1:29pm
I want a card that will play games perfectly. I want Crysis 2 maxed out and I want BF3 maxed out. I need to do this on a single monitor, probably 24-27". What GPU should I get? Will the GTX570 do this for me? Would the 580 be overkill on a single monitor?
DR_JDUBZ
December 05, 2011 at 9:16am
570 isnt powerful enough at full, and nvidia cards are terrible at antialiasing. you either need a 580 or for 150$ less a 6970 to do it at full. though thats for crysis 2, bf3 needs way more power. a 6970 will run it at high but not ultra or max, or 580 at ultra for 150$ more. if your motherboard supports crossfire 2 6870 will do bf3 at ultra or for 50$ more 2 560 ti 1gb in sli will do a little better
hope this helps
BonzTM
May 26, 2011 at 8:42am
Good read.
For HTPC users, I suggest AMD HD5xxx or HD6xxx series. The low end ones (5450/6450) are very cheap and can decode full Bluray as well as bitstream TrueHD/DTSMA. They are nice cards.
I don't know how the new i3's are with Home Theater, but AMD's Zacate is a HTPC in a box essentially. You get all the HTPC goodness of the 6xxx gpus in 1 package. For most HTPC enthusiasts, bitstreaming HD audio is a must... Zacate will take care of that. Don't get me wrong, I'm an intel fanboy at heart, but AMD takes the cake with everything Home Theater.
For mid range gaming, 560ti and HD6950's are great bang for the buck. The 6950 has more RAM and supports 3+ monitors. It's great for eyefinity/multi monitor gaming. Nvidias comparible cards are a little faster, but AMD offers 3+ monitors on a single card as well as HTPC perks on all their cards. I use my gaming PC for both eyefinity gaming and home theater, so AMD is what I went with. But I'm a specific case.
Obviously high end folks aren't looking for bang for the buck. 580(s)/590 or 6990(s) it is.
Kaze
May 26, 2011 at 2:59am
When I'm using the onboard video card on the Z68, can I simply add a Radeon HD and use all the monitor outputs on all cards simultaneously? So, in theory, I could run the 3 onboard outputs and pair them with three additional outputs for a total of 6 monitors?
Fragtastic28
May 25, 2011 at 9:54pm
I run a AMD Phenom II x4 965 BE 3.40ghz,2 Evga Gtx 460 1gb SLI, 8gb DDR3 ADATA 1600 ram. Run all games on 1920x1080 on full settings this things screams like a beast! best 1k i spent ever....now just waiting for a game that i can really test her on....
maleficarus™
May 25, 2011 at 7:09pm
I just finished a full system upgrade from a 3GHz dual core to an i5 2500K@4GHz with the new Asus P8Z68-V Pro motherboard. I also have a GTX460 video card. Every game I play runs smooth as butta in 1680x1050 max deatils 16x AF...I am all set for BF3 and Duke Nuken Forever!!
szore
May 26, 2011 at 10:02am
I just jacked my system up as well: i7-2600K 3.4 oc to 4.6, mushkin 4gb, corsair H70, MSI P67A-GD65, i dropped in a BFG GTX 570 and never looked back... Getting the proc on surprise sale at Microcenter for just $279 made me splurge a little on the vcard, its really nice...
SikeMo
May 25, 2011 at 3:47pm
So if I were to pair an i5-2500 with an ASUS EAH6570, would I be wasting my money? I am going to be building a new micro-ATX HTPC rig in a couple of months and this is what I had in mind. Are the embedded graphics in the i5 as good as the 6570? Anyone have any idea what kind of resolutions I would be able to run with the 6570 on a FPS type game?
loyd
May 25, 2011 at 4:25pm
Depends on what you're doing. If you're gaming, that 6570 will spend some time waiting on the CPU. In that scenario, it will be unbalanced. If it's mainly for an HTPC, then it should be fine -- but then, so will that 2500K just running on Intel HD graphics.
SikeMo
May 25, 2011 at 4:36pm
Thanks Loyd,
This will primarily be an HTPC for XBMC, TV recording, transcoding, and audio recording (guitar via external interface). I would consider spending a little extra $$ for gaming, but that's not my priority. I am really looking for a quiet/low power machine to be paired with a QNAP NAS. I am also considering a mini-ITX box, but I haven't seen a mini-ITX mobo with firewire, which I require for my audio interface. Hmmm, things to consider.
BonzTM
May 26, 2011 at 8:45am
Sike,
That machine looks like a very good build. Mild gaming with focus on home theater and encoding. The 2500 will perform very well.
SikeMo
May 26, 2011 at 11:09am
Hmm, I just found an MSI micro-ATX Z68 board with Realtek ALC892 (which can bitstream DTS-HD and TrueHD). Looks like that may well be good enough for me. Should be a killer combo with the i5-2500K. Perhaps no need for the video card then.
Biceps
May 25, 2011 at 3:15pm
Upgraded recently to a 570 and an Intel Core2Quad Extreme (raging discount on the motherboard and the processor with the i7 coming out). I'm sure I'm missing out a little by going with the older processor, but am quite happy with the setup as a whole. :) Even Metro 2033 plays beautifully on higher settings - though 3D vision isn't usable with that games. Every other game I have I can run with 3D Vision and get very playable frame rates at high or highest settings. YAY!
noobstix
May 25, 2011 at 2:31pm
For me, I can stand to run "mid-range" hardware since I don't use 1080p resolutions (I'm currently running at 1440x900 which is probably a fairly uncommon resolution nowadays). Although I can crank everything to the max and turn everything on in most games out today (without much of a lag in performance), I usually leave AA off completely since the high details can usually focus my attention from the jagged edges from a distance. I normally look for cards that have great "mainstream" performance, has the quality to last for at least a few years (unlike a certain brand), and don't break my cash reserves in the time I need it.
kixofmyg0t
May 25, 2011 at 2:23pm
The GPU I use everyday is Tegra2....
The GPU I use for gaming is a 7800GTX...in my PS3....
The excuse for a GPU I have in my most current laptop is a Radeon HD3200 that I only use to play StarCraft 2, cuz thats the only PC game I care about.
Eventually once I build my next desktop(Waiting for Bulldozer) i'll get a 6870...maybe two. That maybe overkill for Diablo 3 though....
rawrnomnom
May 25, 2011 at 1:30pm
Im running a 560 Ti Currently paired with an i7, previously paired with a phenom 2 x4 and an athlon 2x4, and i can run run any of my games at max settings at 1920 x 1080, Enjoyable playable settings with 4-8x MSAA and 4-8x AA depending on game. thats ~230 - 250. Its more card than i thought when i bought it. I go through quite a few components because I do reviews for a couple websites, and i have friends that plunk down cash for any new thing that comes out, often resulting in me getting some pretty awesome hardware for a pretty awesome discount. Going from a ~200 card to a ~250 card yeilds some extremely noticable performance increases.
