NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 Surround Gaming Tested

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

After running 2D Surround on the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 for the past week we must say that we were pleasantly surprised with the user experience that we had. It has become clear to us that multi-monitor gaming has matured to the point that it is ready for mainstream adoption. Before it took running more than one card and the Windows experience with the drivers wasn’t that great. NVIDIA changed all that with the new features that are included with the latest 300 series of NVIDIA GeForce drivers and now you can run both 2D and 3D Surround with a single GeForce 600 ‘Kepler’ series card! We had a few hiccups with the monitor connected to the DisplayPort video output, but it wasn’t often and usually came right back on if the connection was lost after exiting the program. NVIDIA Surround is much more stable and user friendly compared to what we experienced last year around this time. NVIDIA has has done a good job adding the right features and improving stability.

We brought you performance numbers on a 5760×1080 2D panel setup and showed you that that the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 had no problems hanging with the fastest factory overclocked AMD Radeon HD 7970 that money can buy (The MSI R7970 Lightning is $100 more!). If you are looking for a graphics card for a triple-monitor setup today, we have no reservations recommending the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680!

To run a setup like the one we benchmarked on today you need the $499 GeForce GTX 680 video card and three widescreen flat panel monitors that can range from $140 to $200 each on average. This would put you at around $1100 if you get something like Dell P2212H 21.5-inch widescreen monitors ($199 each). This is a bit of money, but it will change your gaming experience as you will see things you’ve never seen before when gaming. Every time we fire up Battlefield 3 with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 in 2D Surround mode at 5760×1080 we can’t help but smile! A setup like this makes the games more immersive and fun! With the GeForce GTX 680 you run a triple-monitor setup for less money with great performance and features that AMD doesn’t offer with Eyefinity!

Legit Bottom Line: NVIDIA Surround has come a long way since it was first introduced and the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 can easily hang with the AMD Radeon HD 7970 in the benchmarks at Ultra HD resolutions!