Sleeping Dogs Benchmarked with AMD Eyefinity in Portrait at 3240x1920

Introduction

We started off our Eyefinity benchmarks by looking into the most used monitor orientation - landscape. But there's something a little different out there in the form of multi-monitor gaming in portrait. Landscape Eyefinity is when you have your three monitors side-to-side, giving you a super-wide experience. Portrait sees them flipped on their sides, for some awesome gaming.

Portrait Eyefinity provides us with 1920 pixels high, because those same pixels are usually from left to right. This gives games an incredible sense of height, and personally, first-person shooters benefit from this the most. Instead of the fish eye view from the usual landscape multi-monitor use, nothing is stretched, it just feels like a massive screen.

Let's get into it shall we? For your information, I am running:

- Intel Core i7 3770K @ 4.8GHz

- Corsair H100 Hydro Cooler

- Corsair Force Series GT 240GB SSD

- ASRock Z77 Extreme 9 motherboard

- Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 7970 Dual-X OC Edition (x2)

- Lian Li PC-T60 Pitstop

- Corsair Dominator Platinum - 16GB kit of 2133MHz DDR3 RAM

- Windows 7 Ultimate Edition x64

- AMD Catalyst 13.2 beta 4 drivers

I'd like to extend a big thank you to Sapphire, Corsair and ASRock for supplying the parts for this machine, I couldn't write this article or any future articles without this hardware!

It's a seriously nice machine, and really powers through what I do each day. I've got the CPU clocked up to remove any potential CPU-based bottlenecks, the RAM is at stock speeds and everything else is at out-of-the-box settings.

Benchmark Results

What we've done with Sleeping Dogs is run it at the Extreme quality preset, with both 'Normal' and 'Extreme' AA settings. We've run this at 1080p with a single GPU stock, overclocked GPU stock at both Normal and Extreme AA settings - we ran this again with CrossFire enabled at both stock/overclocked and Normal/Extreme AA settings. We've run this same test yet again, at 3240x1920 with single/CF GPU, stock/overclocked and Normal/Extreme.

It takes some time, but it gives us a better idea of what stresses the cards out and where potential usefulness with CrossFire comes into play. The results:

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Before we get into a talk about the results, I will add that I didn't expect much change in terms of the results between 5760x1080 and 3240x1920. This is because resolutions both equate to the same amount of pixels. In some games, there are some nice performance gains, in others, the difference is not much outside of the 5760x1080 results.

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As you can see, a single HD 7970 is no match for 3240x1920 with 'Extreme' AA, nor is it for 5760x1080. Overclocking adds the usual 10% or so in performance. Throwing in a second GPU provides over 100% performance gains, which is great to see.

Turning down the anti-aliasing settings to 'Normal' AA, we find much better results. We're hitting 64.1 FPS with a single Radeon HD 7970 when overclocked, and at stock we have 56.3 FPS - great results. The monitors I've used for Eyefinity are 120Hz-capable, so I love to get close to 120 FPS or more.

CrossFire HD 7970's doesn't get too far off the mark, scoring 103.1 FPS and 108.4 FPS for stock and overclocked HD 7970's, respectively. This is some great results from two HD 7970's, but not enough to run the game at 3240x1920 at 120 FPS.

What we hope to do in the near future is offer you these same 5760x1080 and 3240x1920 results, with NVIDIA GPU's. In the not too distant future (2-3 months) we will also be offering a look into triple 2560x1440 screens for a whopping 7860x1440 and 4320x2560. These will be some very expensive setups, but glorious articles we'll be offering up shortly.