I am not looking to do a whole rant here, just to point out my observations.
I have a 980x, Rampage III, 12 gigs of dominator ram, and two Sapphire Toxic 5870 2gb cards, running on three Dell U2410s. I am running 10.5 drivers on my Vista 64 OS and 10.6 Drivers on my Windows 7-64bit OS and I am getting the same stuttering. Additionally, I have disabled the PCI expess link power management (which helped with Just Cause 2).
It seems that the best possible eyefinity experience is had with only one card versus two in crossfire.
Even when I am hitting over 60fps with games like crysis, Just Cause 2 and Dirt 2, things just don't seem "fluid." However, when I only run one card I get much smoother performance. In fact, even when I am only hitting 30 fps with one card, it seems so much smoother than when I am hitting 60 fps with two cards.
I am just finding that the whole multi card thing is a bit overrated and I have SLId 8800 ultras, 280 GTXs and crossfired 5870s & 5970s. I mean what is the point of having 60fps, if it seems like its only 20fps? For the record, the stuttering seems to be much more pronounced on Eyefinity setups versus single screens.
Does anybody concur or deny these findings? If you are running two HD5000s in crossfire and eyefinity and do not have any stuttering what are your secrets?
I have exactly this problem on my setup. I haven't played any games in triple wide for ages as I find the constant stuttering annoying and makes aiming in fps difficult.
Even in games where my fps are high (eg serious sam HD min 90's avg mid 100's) the stuttering is present, when I switch to single screen mode all is perfect. I even notice it in source games like hl2 although it's not as noticable on that. Res is 3x1920x1200, even if I select 3x1680x1050 stuttering is still present.
I'm running dual 5850's i7-860 @ 3.8ghz, always been running latest cat drivers. I'm thinking of just getting rid of the 2 side monitors as they only get used now when i'm on the windows desktop.
Funny thing is that I used to run a 4870x2 with a Matrox triple head2go and it seemed much more fluid with that setup even though my fps were lower than my current.