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- Date:
- Thursday , July 08, 2010
- Author:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
NVIDIA GTX 280 SLI 3D Surround Experience
Take your 2 year old GTX 280 video card and pair it up with another 2 year old GTX 280 and what do you get? You get an NVIDIA SLI system capable of delivering huge multi-display NV Surround gaming resolutions with the latest games.
Article Focus
If you are one of the folks that will want to travel down the GTX 200 SLI NV Surround gaming road, you will want to be sure your system can do one thing, and that is supply you with a 3x1 gaming experience in the resolution native to your displays. In our system we have three 22" 1080P displays giving us a 5760x1080 total NV Surround resolution. If you have 5760x1080, you don't want to be running at lesser resolutions. Why build a high resolution NV Surround 3x1 system if you are not going to use it? So what I want to do is share my NV Surround gaming experience with GTX 280 SLI at 5760x1080. Do we have to back so far off the Image Quality that it ruins the high resolution gaming experience? That is what we want to find out.
Now while you could surely go to an even bigger resolution, I feel comfortable with 5760x1080 being the largest "budget" resolution you are going to get to. If you have a ton more money to spend, don't waste your time reading this and go buy a GTX 480 or HD 5870 SLI/CFX setup with 30" displays.
Please keep in mind these are my personal experiences playing the games covered here. Your mileage may vary, as you might be sensitive to downgraded quality settings that I find easily tolerable. I do have considerable experience playing most of these games with all the quality sliders set to maximum, so I do have solid gameplay comparisons to build on.
The screenshots below are in the original resolution. The file size has been optimized to allow for easier downloading, but many screen shots are in the 500KB range and some bigger. The optimization has somewhat impacted quality, but overall I think the images are very true to the experience provided. Most of you will not be able to see the entire screenshot. I suggest dragging the screen shot onto your desktop then view it using a picture viewer that will size it to your display(s).
Detailed GPU stats are available in the corner of the screen shot thanks to MSI's Afterburner software which I highly suggest. GPU temperatures, load percentage, memory loads, and framerates are noted along with whether the game is using DX9 or DX10.
Just Cause 2
Just Cause 2 is one of the newer titles that you can play that will surely let you know what you just spent all that money on. Once you get to playing JC2 in NV Surround, you will swear it was made with multi-display gaming in mind. It is simply an incredible experience. I see a lot of folks turn their noses up to the gaming experience after a short time with the game, and I did the same thing. Since I am "required" to play the games we report on, the more I played, the more fun it got. Once I realized I did not have the "follow the path" set out by the challenges and just set out on my own, the game got 10X more fun.
Our quality settings, while certainly not turned up, are not scale all the way down either. With 5760x1080 resolution we were able to move forward with High Texture Detail, Medium Shadows, Very High Water Detail (which is beautifully done on NVIDIA GPUs) and 4XAA. Objects Detail was set to low and V-Sync on gave us a smoother gaming experience.
You could scale back to 2XAA on this game and pick up a 15% to 20% FPS increase but JC2 is very tolerable to lower framerates due to its great use of motion blur. I played JC2 for a long period of time and the GTX 280 SLI gave me solid and enjoyable gaming performance. This game will give a little bit of Fisheye, but it is not bothersome at all to me. I would rank the gameplay here an 8 out of 10 for Just Cause 2 on our GTX 280 SLI system.
Batman: Arkham Asylum
Batman: AA was an NVIDIA posterchild for PhysX last year so it was given a full court press by NVIDIA when it came to press relations. I think to most of ours' surprise, the game turned out to be tremendously entertaining to play. If you have not played it yet, I highly suggest you pick it up as it has gotten fairly inexpensive and is a great gaming experience. An even better experience with NV Surround.
As you can see above, we have all our eye candy turned on with the exception of 4XAA. We had to scale back to 2XAA as 4XAA was simply eating up too much of video memory giving us waves of sluggish gameplay. On the PhysX front you could turn on PhysX either to Very High or Normal and get framerates that would dip into the mid-30s. Batman: AA is not forgiving about this in my experience. When PhysX is turned on, it keeps the game from scaling across both video cards. Turn off PhysX and your FPS will magically launch to the 60 level with v-sync on and pretty much stay there.
When you examine the screen shots you can see that you can be impacted by some bad Fisheye effects in this game, but in-game I do not find them to be an issue whatsoever, but Fisheye generally does not bother me in-game, so maybe I am just not sensitive to it.
I would have to give the Batman: AA experience a 9 out of 10 on our GTX 280 SLI configuration. I would have like to have been able to push into 4XAA and even run AA on the transparent art objects like fences and such, but that was not possible. Still it is an incredible NV Surround gaming experience.
Splinter Cell: Conviction
This is the first time I have personally played this game and it was "not nice" to our 280 SLI. I did not have any issues getting the game up and running this time, like I did in our initial NV Surround review, and the fact that the menu is inside a 3D scene that is rendered can tell you quickly if you have pushed past comfortable framerates in-game.
Turning Environmental Detail down to Low gave us some more frames which made the game feel crisper in battle, but it was also just ass ugly. I was just very disappointed with the visuals. It still played well at the settings shown though.
As you can see Splinter Cell: Conviction just does not look good at the quality settings used. It can surely look at lot better, but that is not going to happen at 5760x1080 resolution with our GTX 280 SLI. The game is still playable at these settings, but just barely. In fact playing Splinter Cell: Conviction at these settings reminded me that "mushy" and "ugly" are two things I don't like when it comes to games or girlfriends. After seeing how beautiful and playable Batman: AA and Just Cause 2 are on our 2 year old video cards, I walked away from SC:C thinking, "The guys that produced this game suck and need to go console only." They would be more at home there considering the quality of their work and the fewer pixels they need to fill.
I give it a 4 out of 10 for playability on our NV Surround setup, but I get the gut feeling that no blame lies with the hardware.