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3 Monitor NVSURROUND and GTX780 SLI - Was it worth it?

2014-06-17
what is it going to paly Tech fans J here bringing us some discussion here on something that I'm asked about quite often some of you graduating high school graduating college and you guys have found yourself with a little bit of spending money and you want to know what to do with it well a couple months ago I promised you guys I would circle back and give you my true in depth review on three panels and SLI and whether or not it's right for you so that's we're going to talk about today multiple panels SLI and whether or not is something you should even consider spending your hard-earned or stolen dollars on wherever maybe I won't judge I'm a judging and this is a reward I would I would turn you in like that all right first things first let's talk about the panel's yes I do have three cheapy panels I have never been a panel snob I've been a hardware snob never been a panel snob they're $130 piece less than 500 for all three 1080p five millisecond response time contrast ratio on them is good color rendering on them is okay could be better that's why sometimes I look really yellow or really funky in my videos because some of the color correction or color accuracy of these TN panels are not great now with that said you guys use whatever panels you frickin want to use I don't care I don't care I'm not a panel snob in fact you guys could tell me that you you're using some no-name Korean brand and no I'm not talking about BenQ I wouldn't even care because my god honest opinion is used whatever works for you now with that said let's go ahead and talk about my experience on games and how I really feel about the experience I've created for myself here in this beast especially since I'm getting ready to move this all in to project skunk works or whatever it's going to be called and I've been highly debating putting my third 780 in here taken out of the test rig putting one of these graphics cards up here in the test rig and going with 3-way SLI then I got to thinking you know that's probably quite a bit overkill now the way I see it there are all types of gamers out there but they pretty much fall into three categories as far as I see it you've got your your FPS shooter gamer your simulator gamer and your Oh gamer now there's a lot of other types of gamers out there strategy games card games side scrollers and all that sort of stuff for the most part this video probably isn't even going to pertain to you but let's go ahead address these three types of gamers and whether or not this setup even makes sense for you now we'll go ahead and talk about the FPS gamer clearly I've got battlefield 4 running behind me now FPS shooters I'm going to tell you right now and I knew this going in these games do not benefit whatsoever from having three panels if anything it hurts you in the long run the short run and the mid run and the moment you start playing yeah it's pretty it's beautiful it's a wow factor your friends walk in and go wow he's got that still cool but then people start playing it and you let them sit down they start playing they go this is weird this is really weird many other shooters not just this franchise they're kind of tricking you they make you think you're getting three full panels of rendered gameplay but they're not they're not giving you three panels of rendered gameplay they're giving you two panels stretched over three what happens is the side monitors start to look really stretched out from about halfway across the panel so what they've really done is they've rendered the center center panel and half of each of the side panels and then taking that half and just stretched it across the entire screen so the side screw of the monitor or the side of the field of view no matter how you adjust the field of view all the way up or all the way down I've played with it you know that was kind of oh it's kind of cool I need a 3d camera so I'm gonna start just like throwing things all right back on topic it screws with your vision it screws with your hand-eye coordination it screws you with your little lip it screws with your visual acuity you have a harder time picking out targets you have a harder time identifying your target and you have to learn your hand-eye coordination all over again because you're your brain if you've been playing first-person shooters long enough your brain your hand your mouth they're all in tune and you know you only have to move the mouse two inches three inches whatever to go in any particular part of the screen our human brains are friggin awesome we can calculate in just microseconds how far we have to move our hand to move a little cursor on a screen to hit a certain pixel you start adding all this extra real estate your brain doesn't know what to do see start aiming all the place okay you start to adjust to that but what happens is your reaction time is still crap because you're no longer scanning a sixteen by nine area of pixels that's focused right in front of you so you're kind of tunnel visually visioning term tunnel visual I'm guys I promise I haven't been drinking much I didn't have a liquid lunch so your brain is used to focusing on this one panel and getting everything kind of calculated now your brain is having to deal with movement in the peripheral and so it sees movement your brain wants to look what is that what is that what is that what you're looking all over the place and if you're on the ground shooting like this guy behind me here that can really really screw with you if you're in a vehicle it's kind of nice because in jets and in tanks and all that you've got a wide field of view and let's face it the game narrows your view down so when you go external view and you can see everywhere around you it's kind of fun but if you're the kind of gamer likes to be on the ground this is only going to hurt your reaction time my gamer score in battlefield 4 went from 260 s all the way down to 150 and that I'm attributing it to the panels and the nd surround 100% this is a wow factor this is eye candy it is not competitive and if you take shooter seriously you need to skip and beasts around you need to skip three panels and you need to go with like a 1440p or 1600 P if you want ultra-high resolution or you just want the the best-looking panel that you can skip three panels please I just did you a favor take that money and divert it into a singular like 27-inch 1440p of NQ something like that forget this behind me but if you're a simulator gamer oh ho baby it's a whole different ball of wax simulators highly benefit from that wide viewing angle when I'm doing eye racing and I can see out my left window and I can see out cross my hood and I can see everything happening in front of me as well as a massively wide field of view it is invaluable when it comes to racing and I've got friends who have been telling me I can wait to get multiple panels because that's where it benefits now if your flight simulator it's the same exact thing you pretty much are seeing four super wide viewing angles more like real life I mean we have peripherals we can use those peripherals and in race games and simulator games Nathan game Jimmy I am really slurring my words today jeez in racing games and simulator games it's okay to use your peripheral and just kind of scan motion by that having to move your eyes like a shooter game it's actually more realistic that way now the other type of gamer MMO gamers uh yeah I guess you could sort of benefit from it like dab low three and I really - mm oh but dab low three World of Warcraft or whatever quest I guess to have a quest next or whatever it's called you got EVE Online and all that kind of stuff if you the other panels are nice but most of all you're looking at is terrain there's nothing happening over there because the game is designed to pretty much be happening in the center of your viewing range so eh that's kind of what I feel about it I mean it's really up to you I can't say it would or wouldn't benefit you I mean it could be nice if you're if you're looking for that one mob or you're looking for that NPC and you can't find them instead how to look around that one little panel if you can see way wide like Diablo 3 it really comes in handy looking for loot and treasure and things like that and enemies it really comes in handy especially in World of Warcraft if you zoom out real far you have like a massive viewing range so but it also depends on the optimization of the games as well not all games are optimized for envy surround or Eyefinity it's up to the developer of graphics card to get those drivers running off to eyes for that some games are not Battlefield franchise I don't feel at optimized for it whatsoever you've got to get rid of that stretching you can see it right here on this to the left of me let's watch as this guy turns look right here where my hand is don't focus over here focus right here do you see how right there it's all stretched you're really only rendering to about right here and then it stretches so as you're running you'll see things look like they're coming in slow and then the moosh they wish by you that really screws with you I racing I don't think I could ever race on a single panel now the last thing to discuss here is SLI configs yes if you're going to be running multiple panels like this SLI crossfire it is pretty much going to be required even a Titan black edition or regular Titan yeah they have high amounts of VRAM but they're not going to have enough processing power and the GPU to render out all three screens and still have acceptable frame rates now the cool thing is on battlefield 4 with 2g 780 s which now you can find used for $400 apiece obviously talking $800 in graphics cards I'm getting over 120 to 130 frames per second in battlefield 4 in ultra settings with msaa on but I am capping out my vram the three gigabyte vram cards I am capping them out but I'm not getting any ill effects I'm not getting any crashing any blue screens but that's all just a myth that crap doesn't really happen when you cap out your vram it just when it cut about your vram you don't get any additional frames beyond that and you'll get any horrible frame latency my frame timing is when I monitor frame timing is pretty consistent so that's all just myth maybe we'll handle that in another video so here are my final recommendations maybe you skip forward to this part in your hoping j-just give it to us flat out we don't care about all the background stuff just tell us what to do PC guru no I'm just kidding I don't I really don't know anything about computers if you're an FPS gamer ditch the other two panels get yourself a really good 1080p or 1440p panel skip 1200 P that's not a standard 16 by 9 ratio anyway 1080p 1440p 1600 P I still recommend two cards if you are a simulator driver racer fly or whatever ba-baby three panels you got to go with three panels I'm telling you it is such an immersive environment in fact maybe you could have three panels like mister barnacle YZ 346 inch screens and you feel like the game is just flying right out at you that'd be kind of cool if you were an MMO gamer it's really up to you it's not going to be beneficial for you ultimately in the long run but then again games like World of Warcraft they're not very visually enhanced or very very intensive anyway so it's probably not gonna be too much of a problem now guys I don't regret doing this like I said I even thought about putting my third 780 in there but I'm going to leave it with two and three panels and no I don't plan on going to 1440 PE or 1600 or 4k any time soon whatsoever it'll be at loose at least two more generations before I even consider a 4k panel so I hope this videos helped you guys knows a little bit more discussion based not a whole lot of tech information in here but these are just my opinions hopefully they'll help you make a decision on what you should do with your rigs now I sincerely want to thank you guys for all your views and all of your support the channel growth has been I am deeply indebted to you guys you guys make this all worthwhile and fun if you guys want to chat with me the link to Facebook and Twitter is down in the description I love interacting with you guys there it's easiest places to get a hold of me for the most part there's a lot of messages guys I'm trying I'm trying to get to them all but I'm only one guy doing this part-time but anyway if you guys want to chat with me that links are down in that description you gotta open it you gotta click it it opens up some of you guys I don't think new that you got to click the little arrow it opens up there's all kinds of stuff down there like the affiliate links for Amazon some direct support links if you guys want to support through PayPal and as well as our sponsor links and you guys can actually save some money because I've worked out some deals for you guys with Coolermaster and aqua tuning so with that said guys I hope you guys come and hang out on some social media and as always I will see you in the next one
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