Maintaining 60 FPS

Hey guys.

So I've been experiencing FPS drops when things get hectic in rifts (elite packs mainly), and decided tonight to isolate the problem.

I followed some of the previous advice given around here, and have determined that my GPU is the bottleneck. I'm running 4 clients, both roundrobin and FFA CPU settings seem to be the same, 60/30/30/30 for FPS. I did try 30/30/30/30 for FPS and still got drops, though considerably less often.

I used GPU-Z + HWMonitor to watch the loads during several rifts. My CPU (i7 4790K) didn't go above 40-50% load. 16GB Ram, ~6GB free. GPU (Radeon 7950 OCed at 1050/1350) had ~70% load in town, anywhere between 85-100% during the rift. The FPS drops coincided with the spikes up to 100% GPU load. The 7950 is quite old now, so I have no issues with upgrading.

My question is (hopefully some of you guys have some first hand experience) which of the newer cards do I need to get in order to maintain 60 FPS whilst quadboxing D3? I don't multibox any other games so it's not a huge deal, but it would be nice to play smoothly.

My thought was perhaps I should just upgrade to one of the newer cards whilst keeping my 7950 to power my second monitor, and split the clients between the two. There seemed to be no issues (50% GPU load) when running just two clients on the 7950.

Any advice would be awesome!

[MiRai]

My question is (hopefully some of you guys have some first hand experience) which of the newer cards do I need to get in order to maintain 60 FPS whilst quadboxing D3? I don't multibox any other games so it's not a huge deal, but it would be nice to play smoothly.

Are we talking nVidia or AMD? AMD's next GPU isn't due out until June, so really your only choice for "current gen" would be nVidia, and while I imagine that a GTX 970 would handle D3 just fine, I don't have any experience with it and D3.

My thought was perhaps I should just upgrade to one of the newer cards whilst keeping my 7950 to power my second monitor, and split the clients between the two. There seemed to be no issues (50% GPU load) when running just two clients on the 7950.

If you go with nVidia for your next GPU then you generally don't want to keep both manufacturer's GPUs in the same system since things can conflict. It is nice to have the option to balance the load between GPUs, so long as you understand that cross-monitor swapping of any kind will result in a loss of performance, so you'll need to use a custom Window Layout different than what you've likely used in the past.