Question 1

I realize this isn't the intended purpose, but seriously, how is gaming on this card?  Would it be as good or better than a Titan X or AMD R295x2?

I'd really like a 6 monitor configuration for work but I play intensive games on my work PC (I work from home).  Does this fit the bill, is it overkill, etc?

Thanks.

Accepted Answer

I attempted to build a system, in hopes to do a multi-user racing simulator on a 2 to 4 CPU 6386se Opteron server. In the hopes that it would have been cheaper then buying 12 or more smaller computers. In this use, this card as proven unnecessary, it is pretty much a $4000 video splitter, but that is only because I have not gotten around to installing a VM with Pass through to make use of the GPUs or the cards 16gb of ram, not even sure I can do that with this card yet, even though it is SUPOSE to do it. After all AMD decided to change their mind about if this cad had FreeSync or not, it no longer does, as they decided not to support it on this card, and I am having issues with drivers on WinServer 2012 with this card, all the more reason I need the passthrough to work.

However while messing around I have used it to play Planet Side 2 directly on the main OS, in maxed out settings, on a 3440x1440 Acer monitor. I typically get 30-50FPS, and I can usually see most players actually walking instead of blinking... even when there are 200 players in the same base. The game is also using about 8 to 12 of my 32 Opteron CPU cores though. I actually have 2 of these cards, adding in the second, had no improvement. The PCI ex on my server board is only 2.0.

This system was to also double as a CAD station while not being used as a game system, which it would have been used fore more then the games.

Question 2

What will I lose, if I have to use this with PCI 2.0 instead of 3.0?

Accepted Answer

If you will use this card for gaming or CAD applications (in other words - if you are not a developer of some low-level rendering or image processing algorithms), or if you do not really need the top performance at the level really close to 5Tflops - you probably would not see any difference. On the other hand, this card is a huge investment, so why to compromise, especially if the new motherboard with PCI-E 3.0 is probably less than 10% of what this card costs?

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