Eyefinity E6 5870 + 5770 low fraps!! strange??

[kalniel]

No worry about long explanations - they're good!

Having a weak CPU might be limiting you a little, but I wouldn't have thought it was a massive effect - if you don't mind overclocking you can do an experiment to find out if the CPU is bottlenecking.

I'm not at all an expert on multi-display set-ups, you might want to have a look at a widescreen gaming forum for more help, but I'm guessing that this extended desktop might actually be the cause of some slowness - games tend to need to be run in fullscreen mode to get the full advantage of GPU acceleration. If you're running them in a window on a subset of monitors then that might reduce the acceleration and cause frame rate slow-downs.

If you can, test with your 3x22s as a grouped eyefinity 3 setup, with just the 5870, and see how close you can get to the reviews fpses. That should allow you to establish if there's any further underlying problem (like CPU or whatever) before you then scale up to 6 monitors.

[scaryjim]

So - to confirm I've got this straight - you're running games across 4 separate monitors, which are *not* set up as an eyefinity group?

My guess is it's slow because you're not using eyefinity. The card has to break down and render 4 separate sub-frames for each actual frame you see, then pipe them to separate monitors. The whole point of Eyefinity is that it's not extended desktop; it's a single large surface as far as the OS and the graphics card are concerned, so it can render a single hi-pixel-count frame.

Generally, it's not the actual job of displaying pixels that slows a graphics card down: in pure pixel-fill-rate terms a single 5870 could theoretically push 60fps to a 453MP display! Or in sensible terms, it could refresh a 2560x1600 monitor 6640 times per second. It's the setting up and rendering the polygons that need to be displayed on the screen, clipping them appropriately, applying texturing etc. that takes the compute power. If you're not using eyefinity, I'm pretty sure your graphics card has to do that for each monitor separately, then send the right bits of the scene to the right monitor.

Once you get your new monitors, set up an eyefinity set on your 5870, and a separate extended desktop display on your 5770, and you should be fine.

[Vimeous]

Hold on the impression I get is 4 monitors attached to the 5870 using eyefinity and 2 monitors attached to the 5770 also running eyefinity creating 2 virtual monitors on your extended desktop.

Your plan is to eventually have 6 monitors attached to the 5870 also using eyefinity while the 5770 deals with an additional flatscreen tv.

Sounds quite simple.

Questions:
- Have you disabled the 5770 and run the fraps test and got the same slow results (and vice versa)?
- Is your second PCI-Express slot a x16?

If the fraps result improves without the 5770 you might be looking at a bottleneck elsewhere. It'll be interesting when the remaining screens arrive.

[eyefinity6]

oops, forgot to mention, sorry guys, If I want to play games I enable a 4 screen desktop on the 5870, thats where my problems start with regards to fraps, if i want to watch a film, i disable the 2 screens on the 5770, then enable the HDMI output to go to the tv.

I will try later on with regard to running 3 screens on the 5870 and report bak fraps.

I too thought that the cpu wouldnt affect the gpu's a great deal.

Another post had this right, yes I want to run eyefinty 6 through 6 x 22"'s, and then solely run hdmi out from the hd5770, thus in total 2 seperate desktops.

On day to day running because of the wonderful range of monitors I have I use every monitor as extended desktop, there for having one taskbar on one screen and the rest as usable area.

sorry about the mis-understanding there folks.

As you guessed, I have to do a lot of screen changing depending on whether I am watching a film, or playing a game, the latter not very often at the moment.


cheers for the posts guys, making interesting reading.

Hopefully I can get the other 3 x 22's soon, and update you as to the progress, I am wondering if there is anything else I need to be aware of when final monitors come,

I'l be upgrading the ram to crucial ballistic tracers over the next day or two.

[eyefinity6]

by the way, yes both pci lanes are pci-e 16, the cards arn't crossfired as there's no need at this stage.

@ Vameous:

Yes your exactly right on the set up there. Thanks, but theres no eyefinity groups enabled on either card, they're all extended desktop's at the moment as grouping them wouldn't work because I don't have minidisplay port active adapters, and the card needs a minimum of 4 out of the six signals to be displayport enabled, meaning 4 active displayport adapters need to be purchased, hoping this would work, otherwise it means down sizeing the monitors all to P2210 dp enabled monitors at 21'5" each, when I want to run 22's!

[eyefinity6]

update:

Alrighty then, so far I have purchased an active Sapphire Displayport to DVI adapter. ( Ebay £12 Bargain!)

Now I need to purchase a mini displayport to full size display port to use with the above adapter .

and I need to buy is one more of each of the above, and hopefully..... everything should be there for me to run eyefinity 6 from the 5870, meaning I can test the card when its running all monitors the right way as rewiring all the monitors at the moment is becoming a ball ache.....

I'l keep you guys informed as to progress...

cheers for the advice guys, will see how it goes.

I'l hopefully post some pictures too, as you then can see where I'm going with this set up progress wise...

[eyefinity6]

update:

Hey folks, I have now reconfigured cards and monitors as follows.

I have the HD577- running to the 3 top 22" Dells in an Eyefinity group , and have the HD5870 running the 2 x 19's and 21.5 Dell also in an Eyefinity group.

I can run games now across the lower 3 screens, until I purchase a further couple of adaptors so that all 6 monitors will be running from the HD5870.

I have ran FRAPS while playing games on the lower 3 monitors, and the results vary between 25fps to 80 fps on F1 2010 and Hawx respectively .

So far so good..

Temps I am reading are 83c on the HD5770 and 66c on the HD5870 ( These readings are NOT while playing games).

I seem to feel that the HD5770 is running high temps or am I wrong?

AMD overdrive is enabled on the 5770 & 5870 GPU clock @ 850Mhz & Mem clock @ 1200Mhz.

Now I don't know if this is anything to go by but I have a couple of desktop gadgets which provide me with desktop info on the cards I have installed such as temps,loads etc etc, and have noticed that the Pci-e link width is reporting at : X8 !!!, isn't this supposed to be X 16 , as both cards are in a Pci-e x 16 slots??????


any ideas folks, or is this just an oversight on the desktop gadget?

[eyefinity6]

@ scaryjim.

Yeah, your right, I probably should wait till the rest of the screens turn up.
That won't be for another few weeks now, so I have just set up 2 groups, 3 monitors on each card at the moment, seems to be ok, but not perfect.
Cheers

[eyefinity6]

Well well.

Success, I have received, and fitted halfway through the night, my new active adapters.

And, as a result I have a successful Eyefinity 6 desktop currently running at 4320 x 1800 due to my 19" monitors, as and when I purchase my 22's I should be at 5040 x 1050.

everything's running great so far, and have seen fraps increase dramatically and I can also run full screen savers with smooth transitions with some reporting 200+fps looking absolutely fantastic whereas as before they struggled at even giving 25fps .

I'l report back game play and screen shots soon.