Triple Monitor Gaming on a Budget

With 2022 delivering the manufacture'due south start 28nm GPUs from both AMD and Nvidia, we enjoyed watching the biting ritual of one-upmanship as the titans scrambled to earn your cash. After a year'south worth of staggered releases, price cuts, sectional deals and driver updates, the dust finally settled enough last November for us to run a generational comparing betwixt the Radeon HD 7000 and GeForce GTX 600 series.

Based on pricing and performance at the time, AMD'south HD 7850 was the best $150 to $200 pick, while Nvidia's GTX 660 Ti was the best solution when spending $250 to $300. Those parting with $400 and up were all-time off with the Hard disk drive 7970 as it matched the GTX 680 in terms of performance only was about $100 cheaper -- a stark contrast from our original findings if yous care to revisit the GTX 680'south review.

Because next-gen cards are still months away, we didn't expect to bring any more GPU reviews until the second quarter of 2022. However, we realized there was a gap in our electric current-gen coverage: triple-monitor gaming. In fact, it's been almost two years since we pitted the HD 6990 and GTX 590 against each other to see how they could cope with the stress of running games at resolutions of upwardly to 7680x1600.

Showcasing triple monitor resolution:
Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Crysis, Culture Five, Dragon Age two, and Mafia 2...

We're going to mix things up a little this fourth dimension. Instead of using each campsite's ultra-pricey dual-GPU card (or the new $999 Titan), we're going to run into how more affordable Crossfire and SLI setups handle triple-monitor gaming compared to today's single-GPU flagships.

On AMD's side, nosotros'll test a pair of HD 7850s (~$360) and an Hd 7970 (~$430), while Nvidia's corner volition feature two GTX 660 Tis (~$580) and the venerable GTX 680 (~$470).

Nosotros also take a pair of the new HIS Radeon HD 7850 iPower IceQ Turbo graphics cards in house, which are the first 7850s with 4GB of memory. The extra retention buffer is designed to aid at loftier resolutions and when using loftier levels of anti-aliasing, so it'll likewise be interesting to meet whether the 4GB cards can justify their ~fifty% price premium over the standard 2GB models when playing at resolutions such as 5760x1080.

Examination Setup and Organization Specs

We tested with three Dell 3008WFP 30-inch LCD monitors that back up a native resolution of 2560x1600. Once the monitors were continued to the graphics cards, creating a grouping configuration was easy. Both AMD and Nvidia drivers automatically added extra resolutions such as 7680x1600, 5760x1200 and 5040x1050 (our tests were only performed at 5760x1200 and 5040x1050).