Okay, here's the thing: I'm thinking of going Nvidia Surround in order to able to play Witcher 2 at maxed settings (without Uber). I'm torn between two options: A) GTX 580 SLI or B) GTX 590
I'm gravitating more towards the 590, because I truly don't want the headache of running two cards.
How high can you run WItcher 2 with each of those cards enabled for a 6040x1080 resolution?
Would love to hear your thoughts!
The card still uses SLI to render and communicate since it's two discrete GPUs. There is no headache when running two cards in my experience, and the only game i played that didn't support SLI (through a profile or in the game) was Amnesia: The Dark Descent. NVIDIA SLI also does not suffer the stuttering problems that AMD does, and runs smooth as silk. Most games nowadays also scale really well across multiple GPUs, often offering the 200% maximum jump in performance.
If you're running surround I would highly recommend getting the 3GB version of the GTX 580, or even the 2.5GB GTX 570 from EVGA. 1.5GB will not cut it for modern PC games with larger textures and more post-processing. I just bought a 2.5GB GTX 570 myself and it has been able to run everything I've thrown at it so far maxed out.
the 590 is 2 cards in one and it uses sli, the advantages are it uses 1 slot so you dont need an sli capable mboard
be aware even though its a 3gb card it behaves like a 1.5gb card (each gpu has 1.5gb)
also the momory is clocked 20% lower than the 580
This is correct. the way SLI works is each GPU alternates rendering frames, meaning each framebuffer is still only as big as the memory on a single card. Also keep in mind that each GPU in the GTX 590 is on par with the performance of a GTX 560 Ti.