For questions about component-level electronic circuits, tools and equipment.
1: Be nice.
2: Be on-topic (eg: Electronic, not electrical).
3: No commercial stuff, buying, selling or valuations.
4: Be safe.
One card can absolutely run 4 monitors.
Will it get you the framerates you want? Hard to say. Depends on which game and what settings you'll use.
However using 2 cards to run a single game doesn't realy work anymore, since SLI has been dropped.
Also GPUs don't saturate PCIE 16x bandwidth anymore. Even a 5090 might only lose low single digit performance at 8x. If you could run 2 cards, that would easily be better with each at 8x, than one at 16x.
No shit. I love hearing something ive stressed about is nearly a non-factor!
I would look at benchmarks for the game you want to run that are done at 4k. Then divide the FPS by 2 for dual monitors or 4 for 4x monitors. Probably minus a bit more because scaling up isn't perfect.
However that's assuming you don't run out of vram, if that happens performance will drop a lot. Same with CPU, if the threads the game runs on are maxed out performance will drop.
This is outside of the context of the ppst but to me, especially with a game like gran turismo 4 that looked beatiful on a ps2, idk why anyone needs 4k. The only time I notice a difference and can even appreciate it, is for live sports broadcasts like nfl and nhl in live action. Moreso with hockey than football in the ability to see pucks ripping around the ice. Good shit tho thanks for the info.
Racing games are some of the easiest to run. The physics aren't too crazy, a ton of things can essentially be static images, and mostly the direction the camera will be facing and what needs to be rendered is well known.
One example is spectators in the stands. You don't need to make hundreds of fully rendered 3d modeled humans. When you're flying by at 60+ mph, a simple, mostly flat human cheering for you looks good enough that you won't break immersion.
Look up hardware benchmarks on YouTube and find videos that have games like Forza Horizons, and you'll see it's a not at all demanding game despite looking fantastic.
I'd wager a solid gaming CPU and something like a single 9070XT would be enough, possibly even overkill. I'd imagine VRAM would be the most important since the raw amount of pixels you'd have with 3x 4k monitors.
Fun fact: this is why historically racing games were able to push graphical boundaries sooner than other genres.
Why not look into VR instead?
Ive never fucked with VR personally and always like to have a grasp on something by fucking around with my own equipment before I ever offer to help or consult someone on their own projects. It is on my perpetually long todo list of shit I wanna do or check out someday tho.