Question about IS Boxer / WoW / ATI Eyefinity

[Stealthy]

Hi guys,

Just wondering if anyone has had any experience running IS Boxer with multiple accounts under an Eyefinity setup?

For those wondering, Eyefinity is a feature of ATI cards that allow multiple monitors to be treated as a single monitor. E.g. I'm running 3 x 27" monitors in portrait mode, which gives me an effective resolution of 3240x1920.

Machine Specs:
Intel i7 950 3.06Ghz CPU
12GB RAM
ATI 5970 2GB Video card
Win 7 Pro 64 bit

Setting it up in IS Boxer was straight forward, but when I log into WoW with 5 accounts, the frame rate is really low (>10 FPS) - this is with everything on low settings except the viewing distance. If I close down 3 of the accounts, the frame rate jumps back up to 60 FPS again.

My assumption is that the job of rendering 5 accounts at 3240x1920 is probably too much for the video card to handle...and on that basis, I'm guessing I will have to go back to split monitors in a landscape setup.

But running WoW under Eyefinity is amazing, and I would love to be able to play this way if possible...

Has anyone else had a similar experience to this, or does anyone have any suggestions i can try out?

Thanks in advance...

Cheers,
S.

[lax]

Is the game in Direct3D9 mode or Direct3D11 mode? You can probably squeeze some performance if you run in D3D11 mode (see the post in the Announcements section about the D3D11 support for IS), and disable Aero in windows.

I know of some others using Eyefinity setups but I'm not sure what resolutions they're using. I'd probably just disable Instant Swap (and give up mouse broadcasting because of the resolution de-sync) if I wanted to boost performance at that resolution though.

[ZorbaTheGeek]

My Quad-Box Eyefinity setup is a LOT slower than yours but is able to run 4 clients @ 5248x1050 if the detail/view settings are minimized on the slaves. By setting a "Do This Mapped Key" on your window swap hot keys you can dynamically change all the settings on swap.

However, personally I choose not to run like this as I feel rendering slaves (which I barely look at) at such massive resolutions wasteful of the resources I can use to get better settings on the main. And of course, mini windows at these resolutions either take up too much space or are hard enough to see to make them pointless. I have a second GFX card running the three slaves on two more monitors(@1200x800), only running the main in eyefinity, and obviously, I don't use instant swap.
(I made some modifications to the repeater script in InnerSpace so I can still use a version of mouse broadcasting - Lax has hinted that there may something similar as an option in the future =P)

I suspect when Lax releases his new "swap layout" version of ISBoxer you could easily do something similar. Run main in full eyefinity, run 4 much lower res slaves in the extremities of your screen space and swap one to the middle monitor, over the top of the main, when you need it. I'm looking at the possiblities of this setup myself (when Lax lets me have the beta)

(EDIT: Just so you know =D I average around 45-60 fps depending on location for the main, Slaves are capped at 20fps. I had to cap slaves at 10fps to get 30fps on the main with eyefinity slaves. I didn't consider this to be acceptable, but it was playable)

And yeah, you're right, once you play ANY game in eyefinity it's hard to go back.

[Stealthy]

Thanks for the reply guys.

Lax - I did try it under DX-11 and got a few more frames out of it, but still not enough to make it playable. Will try disabling Aero and see how I go with that - thanks for the suggestion.

Zorba - thanks for the feedback. I'll try using the mapped keys to adjust setitings on the swap and see of that helps. I'm getting another 5970 this week, so I'll see if throwing MOAR horespower at it is enough to overcome this issue. Like you, I'd want 40-60 FPS to make it what I consider playable.

The "swap layout" version of ISboxer sounds promising - will watch the development with much interest.

Cheers,
S.

[Stealthy]

Just a quick update...

Dropped the 2nd video card in, here are the results:

1. 3 monitors in eyefinity - still not really playable, frame rates better, but still around 15-20 FPS. Oddly though - with crossfire disabled, WoW crashes (BSOD) when I start up the games, bascially as soon as I move the mouse after logging in. However with crossfire enabled, WoW runs without problem (although with low FPS).

2. 2 monitors in eyefinity, 3rd monitor separate - quite playable, sessions 1-3 getting 40-60 FPS, sessions 4-5 getting 20-40 FPS. I think I will be able to smooth things out by playing around with the processor affinity settings in ISBoxer, will post an update tomorrow regarding this.

The only other issue I've had so far is that when i click through to alt sessions, it messes the camera angle up. This only happens when I left click, if I right click, the camera angle remains the same. Is this a setting I need to adjust in ISBoxer?

Cheers,
S.

[lax]

The only other issue I've had so far is that when i click through to alt sessions, it messes the camera angle up. This only happens when I left click, if I right click, the camera angle remains the same. Is this a setting I need to adjust in ISBoxer?

In your Window Layout's main options page, find the setting "When I click to focus a game window" and set it to "Ignore the click".

Alternatively, change the Swap option to something other than Always and then enable Focus Follows Mouse. Then you can mouse over whichever window, type in it without clicking, and even click around without having to click just to focus it first.

[Stealthy]

Thanks for that Lax - will give it a try tonight when I get home.

After more play testing last night, I've found that with 2 monitors in eyefinity it's playable *most* of the time, but sometimes the frame rate drops to >20 FPS on all screens - usually going into a heavily populated city like Ogrimmar. The FPS tends to jump around depending on what I'm doing. Adjusting the processor affinity didn't really have much of an effect on sessions 4-5 either which makes me suspect there is either a bottleneck on the CPU or graphics side - will keep testing tonight and have a closer look at the CPU & GPU utilization and report back on what I find.

Going back to individual screens, the experience is *smoooooooooth*...so much so that it feels like I have some headroom to play around with the graphics settings to pretty things up (currently running on low graphics settings with max view distance), so I'll be testing that out as well.

Cheers,
S.

[Stealthy]

DId some more testing on the weekend and had a mixed bag of results...

Firstly a quick word about my graphics cards - I'm running 2 x ATI HD 5970 at the moment. Now the 5970 is a dual GPU card, and is essentially a pair of downclocked HD 5870s in Crossfire mode. This works great for games that fun in fullscreen mode, but for multiboxing WoW, you are running the games in Windowed mode. Under Windowed mode, Crossfire doesn't take advantage of the 2nd GPU - and sure enough, when I tested it this weekend (using GPU-Z) the 2nd GPU on each card is not being utilised at all.

I suspect this is also the reason I get crashes when I disable Crossfire - as a dual GPU card, the card was most likely designed only to run in Crossfire mode. I'm going to do some more testing under Eyefinity tonight and see if the GPU utilization is same (I expect it will be).

While I am still getting acceptable performance running WoW with the main session in one monitor and the 4 alt sessions on the second monitor (the 3rd I use for websites like WoWhead and such) - its frustrating to know that my system is being gimped on performance. The plan now is to sell the 5970's and replace them with 580 GTX's instead. I'm lucky enough to work for an IT distribution company, so I can get the 580 GTX's at wholesale cost price, which means my change over cost will be around $150. Not too bad all things considered, but a rather expensive lesson none the less...

So what it comes down to is this - dual GPU video cards are not good for single machine boxing.

Cheers,
S.