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Hey now, listen up. This is probably not going to interest you unless you absolutely MUST have the fastest, smoothest gaming experience OR you are a hardware geek. If you fall into either of those two categories, though, it will probably be game-changing*.

So you've bought yourself a pair of the smokin' hottest GPUs out there on the market, but when you get them all teamed together in your favorite game, they look like utter crap! FRAPS says you are cruising along at an average of 100FPS, but you could swear the game looked better on your old-n-busted GPU that only managed 45FPS max.

Well, the truth is...you could be right.

"Microstuttering" is the name for a phenomenon which most often affects dual-GPU setups, causing barely perceptible skips and jumps that quickly cause you to want to throw your mouse through the screen even if you aren't consciously sure why. Here's a video that shows what's going on by slowing it down enough to see, as well as a link to an article regarding that video:

Multi-GPU micro-stuttering captured on video:


Note that just cranking up the raw framerate isn't enough to make the problem go away. It still happens, but (assuming your monitor can keep up) it just gets harder to figure out why staring at the screen makes your eyes ache, your chest anxious, and your mouse-throwing arm twitchy.

Right now, it looks like the solution is to either get the best single card that money can buy (right now that would be the GTX 580) or to gang together 3 (yes, three) mid-range, single-GPU cards of the non-"budget" variety (such as 3x Radeon 6870/6850 or equivalent). There may be other solutions on the horizon, but for right now these seem to be your only two guaranteed ways out**. Note that the triple-card solution is usually difficult to achieve, since most mid-range cards still only have enough bridge connectors to support a pair of cards. This usually means having to pair together one dual-GPU card (R5970/R6990/GTX590) with one of its non-dual equivalent siblings (R5870/R6970/GTX580, respectively) and then using driver tools to reduce the single-GPU card's speed to match the internal speed of the dual-GPU card. Though screamingly effective, it is also unusually expensive and punishingly abusive on all but the highest-quality power supplies.

And now, you know.

--Patrick
*Unless you already knew about it, you well-informed nerd, you.
**Unless and until the graphics driver-writing people figure out some way to compensate.

I've always been mistrustful of multiGPU setups, but could never quantitatively express why... nice to feel validated after all these years of favoring beefy single-GPU solutions instead of plexing together multiples in what always felt, to me, like some mad scientist experiment.

I didn't know but now I do. I am one of the few gamer type that is happy with single powerful card I never trust/like dual video cards

That's interesting!

I knew that, of course! ... no wait, I was only dreaming. Sorry!

I'd heard about this, but never seen it in practice, since I never play mean enough games to "require" multiGPUs.

My dual setup of Nvidia 8800GT's worked beautifully (until one of them died). Never had any problems.

I'm running one beefy card now though so in light of this I'll just keep it by itself for a while...