Setting the three-screen scene
Just yesterday Sapphire released what 'it believes to be' the world's fastest single-GPU graphics card. Going by the name of TOXIC and equipped with a 'Lethal Boost' button, we found it to be plenty quick. Our benchmarks had it, on average, to be a hair faster than a partner-overclocked GeForce GTX 680.
Sapphire went to town on the TOXIC by also equipping it with a 6GB framebuffer - yup, 6GB of super-fast GDDR5 memory on a graphics card; I can remember when 6GB hard drives were considered large! Anyhow, our standard suite of benchmarks takes in 1,920x1,080 and 2,560x1,600-resolution settings, as found on 22/23/24in and 30in monitors, respectively, so the next step in the TOXIC's evaluation is to see what effect, if any, the super-sized framebuffer has when gaming on three screens.
There's little point in providing the TOXIC's three-screen results in isolation, so we have re-benchmarked a Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition and a Gigabyte GeForce GTX 680 OC on the same trio of BenQ monitors, to see which card really is the top dog.
Test system
GPU comparisons |
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Graphics card | GPU clock (MHz) |
Stream processors |
Shader clock (MHz) |
Memory clock (MHz) |
Memory bus (bits) |
Graphics driver | |
Sapphire Radeon HD 7970 GHz TOXIC (6,144MB) | 1,200 | 2,048 | 1,200 | 6,400 | 384 | Catalyst 12.7 beta | |
AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition (3,072MB) | 1,050 | 2,048 | 1,050 | 6,000 | 384 | Catalyst 12.7 beta | |
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 680 OC (2,048MB) | 1,072+ | 1,536 | 1,072+ | 6,008 | 256 | GeForce 304.48 beta | |
HEXUS high-end test bench |
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Processor | Intel Core i5-2500K (3.30GHz, 6MB smart cache, quad-core, LGA1155) | |||||||||||
Motherboard | Intel Desktop Board DP67BG | |||||||||||
Memory | 8GB Corsair Vengeance (9-9-9-24 @ 1,600MHz) | |||||||||||
Power Supply | Corsair AX750W | |||||||||||
Monitor | Dell 30in 3007WFP | |||||||||||
Disk drive(s) | Crucial RealSSD C300 (256GB) | |||||||||||
Chassis | Corsair Graphite Series 600T | |||||||||||
Operating system | Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit, SP1) |
HEXUS high-end benchmark suite |
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Aliens vs. Predator | DX11, 1,920x1,080, 5,760 x 1,080 resolutions, 4xAA, 16xAF, very high quality | |||||||||||
Batman: Arkham City | DX11, 1,920x1,080, 5,760 x 1,080 resolutions, 8xMSAA, extreme quality | |||||||||||
Battlefield 3 | DX11, 1,920x1,080, 5,760 x 1,080 resolutions, 4xMSAA, 16xAF, ultra quality | |||||||||||
Crysis 2 | DX11, 1,920x1,080, 5,760 x 1,080 resolutions, 4xAA, ultra quality | |||||||||||
Just Cause 2 | DX10, 1,920x1,080, 5,760 x 1,080 resolutions, 4xAA, 16xAF, very high quality | |||||||||||
Total War: Shogun 2 | DX11, 1,920x1,080, 5,760 x 1,080 resolutions, 4xMSAA, 16xAF, high quality | |||||||||||
Notes
We're to show benchmark results from running a single full-HD screen (1,920x1,080-resolution) and then on three identical screens software-joined together by either AMD's Eyefinity or NVIDIA's Surround technologies. Running in accordance with previous methodology employed when using three screens, we are going to examine the average framerate, per-second framerate and per-frame rendering times. All will become clear as you see the graphs, folks.