ATI CrossFire and triple monitors: any caveats?

[lordzed]

very nice temps and setup. btw what case is that ?

[wumpus]

Corsair 600T. Best case I've ever used, by far, I recommend it unconditionally.

see

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/201...rebooting.html

and

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/201...deo-cards.html

[Brad Grenz]

I'm suspicious of Tom's Hardware's findings regarding CPU performance. They're using a pretty short segment in the single player game where most things will be scripted or canned. I can imagine the dynamic mayhem of the multiplayer would be more demanding on the physics simulation, but that's not a repeatable, easily tested scenario. To get something I'd trust for comparison purposes you'd need to basically record performance over a very long time in multiplayer. But I don't see them playing for 6 hours with each CPU on an active 64 player server.

[Fishbreath]

If they want to loan me their Crossfire 6990 rig and Battlefield 3 for a little while, I'd be more than happy to play for six hours to get them a data point.

[wumpus]

Brad, I agree. The reports are that multiplayer is a *LOT* more CPU intensive, which makes total sense.

For example on my i7-2600k, overclocked to 4.0 Ghz, I see peaks of 50% CPU usage in multiplayer. But to be honest I almost never see it higher than that. So this means you'd need a 2.0 Ghz quad core CPU to be safe in multiplayer, perhaps?

(I am using the Logitech G510 keyboard with an awesome live perf monitor on its little LCD display, LCDSirReal so that's how I know rough CPU perf while fullscreen, etc.)

You know, I should log CPU usage while I play multiplayer. I'll do that.

[wumpus]

Here's some CPU usage playing a few rounds of 32 player Rush. Maps were Kharg, Canals, Caspian.

- Data was captured with Everest logging

- CPU is a 4.0 GHz Core 2600k with HT enabled, 16 GB RAM

- video card is dual ATI 5870 in Crossfire



GPU and CPU temps in the same time interval:



I took the average load of all 8 "cores" to get the CPU load, and the average of all the GPU temp sensors (there are three per GPU) to get the GPU temps.

[Brad Grenz]

I'd be curious to see results from a 64 player server, too. I mostly took umbrage to the suggestion on Tom's Hardware that you could get by with a single, hyperthreaded core just fine. I doubt that's even true of the single player if you look at more than just that 90 second sequence they used.

[wumpus]

Same specs as above, 64 player servers on Seine Crossing (2 rounds) and Firestorm (1 round). note that this is on all HIGH settings with shadows at MEDIUM, so I am not sure how having anything on Ultra would affect it.



So.. yeah. Spiking up to 70% of a quad core 4.0 GHz CPU is no joke, looks like 64 player servers is where you want to be calling for a quad.

For completeness, CPU and GPU1 / GPU2 temps as well:

[wumpus]

Much longer series of play, 64 player maps on a particular server, much lesser populated towards the end