Noir (or other nvidia knowledgeable people)

Alsmack · Post by **Alsmack** » Wed May 08, 2013 4:21 am

I'm interested in moving up to a 3 monitor setup, but I don't want to SLI video cards.

It seems the GTX 600 series can support 3 monitors on a single card. I will have three Dell 24" UltraSharp LCDs that are 16:10 (1920x1200).

The majority of the time, my gaming will happen just on one screen; the three screens is just for work. But I'd also like to three screen my X-Plane 10 flight sim, if at all possible.

My google-fu is failing to find if a GTX 680 is powerful enough for this task.

I have a ASUS P8P67PRO motherboard so I only have PCIe 2.0, and I can only run one slot at the full 16x. If I go dual, it's x8 per slot.

Any gut feelings if this is juicy enough or would I need to get dual or triple SLI to support 3 and run X-Plane?

Post by **Noircogi** » Wed May 08, 2013 7:01 am

The 680 is a fill-rate monster. I went from a 1920x1200 monitor to 2560x1440 and haven't noticed any slow-down at all. You can run 3 19x12 just fine.

Alsmack · Post by **Alsmack** » Wed May 08, 2013 3:39 pm

I'm worried without the extra bandwidth of PCIe 3.0 (vs my 2.0) and the incredibly demanding X-Plane graphics will just melt it. I'm sure it will run 3x 1920x1200 monitors just fine in most scenarios, but my primary reason for upgrading my video card along with adding a third monitor is to enable three screen x-plane =)

Also, it's $1000 investment between the monitor and video card so it's a bit hard for me to swallow on my limited budget atm.

Alsmack · Post by **Alsmack** » Sat May 25, 2013 12:30 am

Okay well, I thought my GTX 570 was going bad, so it's now replaced with a GTX 690. Turns out, I was wrong.

That's what I get. I have been getting this intermittently for at least a year. Driver versions irrelevant. I've seen artificating primarily in EQ. I've seen weirdness on my 570 once in Starcraft (which, since it wasn't limited to EQ, made me think I had bad video RAM or something and I replaced my card).

I don't know what is going on, but it's frickin annoying.

Here's what I know:
-It happens when I play only Alsmack
-It happens when I multibox.
-It does not happen every time.
-Driver versions don't seem to matter
-Monitor doesn't seem to matter (I had 2, now I have 3, can happen on any one of them)
-Two different video cards, happened on both.
-I do run the game inside Innerspace.
-It can happen outside of Innerspace as well
-It can happen on a fresh boot
-It can also not happen for weeks on end with no reboots.

My setup:
-Windows 7 64bit, up to date always
-No antivirus / spyware stuff, but I'm clean.
-ASUS P8P67 PRO
-Intel i7 2600k
-16GB RAM
-nVidia GTX690

Any troubleshooting help would be appreciated at this point.

If I had a consistent way to reproduce the issue, it would be trivial for me to troubleshoot. But I don't. So I have to try one fix, and then wait a couple weeks, and that's not a definitive that it's fixed because it will be fine for 2-3 weeks easily, then go apeshit on me.

Post by **Rapitiss** » Sat May 25, 2013 1:05 am

Have you run Memtest86 for 8+ hrs? (maybe but not likely)

Re-download EQ in case its a file problem. (unlikely)

Alsmack · Post by **Alsmack** » Sat May 25, 2013 1:24 am

Rapitiss wrote:Have you run Memtest86 for 8+ hrs? (maybe but not likely)

Yes. Memory is fine.

Rapitiss wrote:Re-download EQ in case its a file problem. (unlikely)

I did this probably about 6 months ago and it didn't help. I might try it again though.

Post by **Kyreth** » Sat May 25, 2013 2:29 am

Ok so this is not helpful in the least since I can't be specific, but just throwing it out there anyway! When I had graphics problems that messed up my whole computer (pretty much only resulting from playing EQ), the only thing I found to fix it was to turn off some of the settings in the advanced graphics menu within EQ. I couldn't tell you exactly which settings without looking, and I am tired, so I am not logging in to look right now. I do know I turned off the fancy sky settings. And turned some other stuff down. And unchecked some boxes. Theoretically, my graphics card shouldn't have had problems running the game on all high settings, and it would be fine for a while, then I would get little squares all over everything and my computer would crash and not even turn on unless I left it off for a few days. I have had zero problems since changing those in-game settings, though.

Gecko of Desire · Sat May 25, 2013 4:35 pm

That's annoying. I get something that looks like that when I do a find path in EQ, but it's the same color as the regular, "stink trail." When it gets that large my computer crashes and automatically reboots.

Post by **Noircogi** » Tue May 28, 2013 7:10 pm

That sort of artifact most often happens if your GPU is overheating.

Alsmack · Post by **Alsmack** » Tue May 28, 2013 7:13 pm

Noircogi wrote:That sort of artifact most often happens if your GPU is overheating.

I've got really good airflow in my case, and none of the fans/heatsinks are dusty. In fact, the GTX690 is brand new. I'll find some software to track temperatures and keep an eye on it. Recommendations welcome, also good operating temps if you know them off the top of your head.

GPU-Z reports 30% fan speed and 42C on each of my GPU cores when idle (just web browsers and some terminal windows open)

Alsmack · Post by **Alsmack** » Wed Jun 05, 2013 4:37 am

Problem reoccured tonight after raids and raiding for a while and what not.

Temperatures were fine. GPU core 1 was at 54C, core 2 at 43C.

I also used the NVIDIA control panel to set "Multi-display/mixed-GPU acceleration" to "Single display performance mode" seems to have gotten me a lot steadier framerates.