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AMD's DX11 Radeons Can Drive Six 30 Displays
J. Dzhugashvili writes "Whereas most current graphics cards can only drive a pair of displays, AMD has put some special sauce in its next-generation DirectX 11 GPUs to enable support for a whopping six monitors. There's no catch about supported resolutions, either. At an event yesterday, AMD demonstrated a single next-gen Radeon driving six 30" Dell monitors, each with a resolution of 2560x1600, hooked up via DisplayPort. Total resolution: 7680x3200 (or 24.6 megapixels). AMD's drivers present this setup as a single monitor to Windows, so in theory, games don't need to be updated to support it. AMD showed off Dead Space, Left 4 Dead, World of Warcraft, and DiRT 2 running at playable frame rates on the six displays."
Can't wait to build a new computer in 2 years when prices go down and my computer becomes obsolete.
PC gaming rocks.
damn!!! i hope this isn't just fud. Who has this many monitors?
Most games in multimon scenarios really need odd number of displays; 5 is better than 6 in this case (and you just know some people will say this is unusable, because of monitor bezel in the center)
BTW...goodbye Matrox, last stronghold just went away.
One that hath name thou can not otter
I'll bet I can't get more than two of them into my machine, which means I'm still stuck with a maximum of 12 monitors. Dammit.
AMD has put some special sauce in its next-generation DirectX 11 GPUs to enable support for a whopping six monitors.
Special Sauce for a Whopper, eh? I must have missed the merger announcement between AMD and Burger King.
Gaming on 6 screens seems a bit ridiculous. I mean for PC gaming you're at most 5 feet away from your screen, if that. When I first upgraded to a 22" LCD monitor from my 15" I felt a bit overwhelmed. It almost made me nauseous playing games on it at first. I got used to it, but it still takes up most of my field of view at my desk. Anything over 24" just seems to be over the top.
622677120
the physical size of the panel has in itself absolutely no effect on anything. the native resolution of the panel, however, CAN have an effect, if the user definitely want to use that resolution.
i get sick of people asking "does this card 'support' a 28" display?".
"i hope this isn't just fud. "
If fud is fear, uncertainty, and doubt, then this is anti-fud.
Finally - a good basis for this: http://ergotron.com/Products/tabid/65/PRDID/196/language/en-CA/default.aspx
Reading the article says one card is driving this. This i guess hints out how powerful the new cards are going to be over the new generation. Can't wait!
Eyefinity is enabled through a combination of hardware and software being developed by AMD. On the hardware front, AMD's upcoming Radeons will sport between 3 and 6 display outputs of various types, DisplayPort, DVI, HDMI, etc. And those outputs will be managed by software currently dubbed SLS, or Single Large Surface. Using the SLS tool, users are able to configure a group of monitors to work with Eyefinity and essentially act as a single, large display.
http://hothardware.com/News/AMD-Eyefinity-MultiDisplay-Technology-In-Action/
7680 x 3200 - that ought to increase your field of view just a tad!
This guy already had this set up for a while, it's pretty cool (now 12 screens):
http://www.stefandidak.com/office/
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
6 screens or anti-alias the crap out of it :D
in the near future an entire game could be running purely and alone off the GPU.
i personally don't agree with John Carmack, i think it would eventually be smarter to not push anything trough the CPU and keep it purely all on the GPU and it's ram (in the future, not right now).
but GPU ram does need to become upgradeable! as 2GB of video ram isn't going to cut it anymore (in 2 years).
Two words: Peripheral Vision.
But will there be decent Linux drivers, or will they be a second thought as usual?
Finally I can play without scaling then Gnomes
Optimistic, are we?
We were using X Windows and these fancy BARCO display servers that virtualized a single X-windows display over multiple video cards (everything was host:0, not host:0.1, host:0.2, etc...). This wasn't gamer performance, of course, and CERTAINLY not gamer prices, but we were building energy management control centers for electric utilities... our performance requirements and budget were quite different.
Sure it can run games on six monitors at acceptable frame rates, but the question still stands... will it blend?
Fuck Nvidia's proprietary hardware!
You could put 6 video cards into a Mac II (Nubus) and run 6 displays as one giant desktop. Of course, the Apple cards were only 640X480, but some higher res cards were available from third parties like Radius.
No sig? Sigh...
It sounds impressive but it also sounds like a stunt more than reality.
Jesus, what kind of processing power does this GPU have?
A "single" card running a game at that resolution with a good framerate 25 - 30 / 60? Now i didn't notice any information on the texture and other post processing settings that each game engine supports. If it can play Crysis on half that resolution on Very High i'd sell my soul for one of those GPU's.
nVidia: Our new DirectX 11 GPUs are able to support six monitors simultaneously.
ATI: Well, the Jerk Store called, and they're running out of you.
This is cool and all but why would you show off something like this and not be running Crysis, its still the best looking game to date.
I want my 4000x2400 21" display. I want to be able to have tiny letters in high quality anti-aliased fonts and have it look really good. Why hasn't it happened?
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
I (unlinke most slashtards) can drive a larger number of women on an average weekend. Color me unimpressed.
Does this thing come with its own small nuclear power plant and liquid nitrogen cooling system?
The only interesting thing of DX11 is DirectCompute, aka OpenCL, so it already is obsolete.
...before the Mac existed. Multiple BARCO monitors, driven by DEC GIGI terminals. You'd send drawing commands to them over 9600-baud hard lines, from a VAX 11/780 with a separate process to control each display. It was... primitive. But it was a multi-screen interactive system, at a time when such things were uncommon to say the least.
citation
What on earth would six simultaneous displays on Windows be useful for in the real world?
There are plenty of people who find multiple monitors very useful. Hell, I'm currently only using one 1920x1200 24" monitor and I need to use virtual desktops quite heavily to feel comfortable with this setup. An ideal setup for me would have at least two more monitors.
I've also noticed something (not directed at you) interesting in that a lot of Windows users seem incapable of understanding why one would want lots of non-maximized windows, or any non-maximized windows for that matter, it's like a whole lot of them (including a lot of sysadmins, developers and the like) view the windows as a stack, or to use the desktop metaphor, it's like covering your entire desk a stack of large sheets of paper. Now, from this perspective a six och nine monitor setup seems completely useless, but as someone who almost never runs apps maximized (except for Maya, Photoshop, Sketchbook Pro and similar apps) I like being able to see all windows as once (another pet peeve, what's with windows users and avoiding multitasking as much as possible, you're not running Windows 98 anymore, newer versions of Windows are actually capable of running more than one app at a time without exploding).
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
I got the impression from TFA that this was just based on drivers (and the extra heads), and has nothing to do with the actual GPU processor. So, wouldnt NVIDIA also be able to do this by just releasing a new driver and their card manufactuers by releasing a card with more heads? Whats so special about what ATI did?
At work I have a computer with 3 displays (each is 1280 by 1024 pixels). The station itself supports 2 dispalys and the 3rd is enabled by a USB => DVI displaylink converter. 3 monitors for one person is reasonable.
But why stop at 3 when you can be future proof and make hardware that supports 6 ?
I could put my dual display computer at home close to my TV, then when I want to watch movies stored on my PC on the TV I could easily enable a 3rd monitor without any cable hassles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
It might be nice to be able to drive up to 6 30" displays, but it just means being able to drive more junk TN panels.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Seems to me you are barking up the wrong tree. The drivers on this tell Windows that it is one monitor. Not 6 different monitors. As far as Windows is concerned, with this it thinks there is only one really high resolution monitor attached to the computer. That wouldn't do anything for a simultaneous multiple user environment.
Stop Global Warming!
Just say no to irreversible processes!
You're an idiot.
I want my 4000x2400 21" display. I want to be able to have tiny letters in high quality anti-aliased fonts and have it look really good. Why hasn't it happened?
I've been asking the same question for some time. I find it disappointing that 30" displays get the same resolution as 24" displays but at significantly higher cost. And for that matter 24" displays get barely any higher resolution than 21" displays.
Back when CRT monitors were still the standard displays, resolution generally increased significantly with size. For some reason we have accepted that to not be necessary with LCD?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I've also noticed something (not directed at you) interesting in that a lot of Windows users seem incapable of understanding why one would want lots of non-maximized windows, or any non-maximized windows for that matter,
Guilty as charged. I've tried fiddling with windows to fit them right, I've tried using virtual desktop but unless there's some really compelling reason to have something side-by-side I've found it easier and faster to navigate between them while always having the window controls in the same place. However, I do like the split view in Dolphin but I used to use Norton Commander back in the oooooooooold days.
Now, from this perspective a six och nine monitor setup seems completely useless
Yes, I wouldn't run my desktop as one big screen. But I'm definately looking at the possibility of running three screens - one maximized window per screen, of course. For example specs left, code center, docs right sounds like near ideal development setup for me.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
in the near future an entire game could be running purely and alone off the GPU
Unless of course if you need the game to process something exotic. Such as conditional statements.
About the only time I use an application maximized is when it actually needs that much space. Otherwise, I don't like them to take up that much space. (On a small monitor, they generally do need the whole screen.)
I generally keep the inactive windows minimized, though, unless I specifically need to have two windows up at the same time. That keeps it un-cluttered...
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Well the drivers are what "Drives" the impressive power it has, that it can set things up to display as 7680x3200 at 60hz - I have not seen any previous Nvidia, ATI, or otherwise cards that push out 24576000 pixels so fluidly.
As a day trader I can safely say that the more monitors the better. It's a pain in the ass to get 8 monitors working nowadays with just one computer - there are some quad cards out there but they really aren't that fast. Good enough to display charts, but after hours you can forget gaming.
This might actually sound like what I need.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
That goes up to 11, which is one more than 10.
It is also 5 more than 6.
Six 30 inch displays: That's going to use a ton of electricity. It's ok though, we'll just keep building coal power plants.
Betas of Catalyst 9.10 are already in Ubuntu's 9.10 alpha releases. Whether it will support OpenGL 3.1 and OpenCL or not is another thing.
Yes, things play nicer when there's only one display, but do you maximize to just one physical screen then? How do you run a video full screen on one monitor while working on the other?
Multi-head complications are irritating on every computer I use, regardless of whether it's Linux, Windows, or OSX. Making one big screen isn't the solution I'm looking for. But I doubt they'll fix this mess in the next 10 years.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
How hard would it be to make frameless or very-minimally-framed monitors designed for stacking together like this? Or at least a set of monitors with the bulk of the framing only on particular edges?
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
What's the point of showing off their card with this useless application? who the hell has 30 monitors and would use them all to play a stupid game? It's as stupid as those idiot dictators building huge statues of themselves to make them feel big while they're only 5 feet tall. i.e. Intel's response is "Meh, wtv."
Perfect. 98 MP is equivalent to 68 square inches at 1200 DPI. Finally, a pixel precise page preview for a 7.5"x9" content region. But I think you'd want this display oriented in portrait mode.
My will they have a dumb look on their faces whey they first try to actually play a shooter on that setup, and the cross is exactly at the horizontal edge.
Or as we on the Internet say: FAIL!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Yeah, everything would be great if only the whole world realized you know the perfect way to use a computer and just followed along.
Arrogant cunt.
If the frame of the screen is a problem why not use well calibrated ( i mean well put together ) cheap hd progectors. I know they are not so HD as a 30" but you could instead have a super-ultra-mega large image at a good resolution. Or a not so big image but of super hight definition. The trick would be adjusting the borders, coler or whatever, but that would be a bigger issue with framed screens.
On the problem of gaps between screens: Just get a big enough room, 6 full HD projectors and place them and the screens properly and you will not have to worry about all those gaps between screens.. ofcourse that does limit you to 5760*2160 resolution, but it is a small price to pay compared to the cost of the 6 HD projectors..
A happy user of only one full HD projector for games. Though the reolution is less, the image size helps immersion tremendously.
And in theory, future revisions of DisplayPort should be able to support daisy chaining displays off of one port on the host computer. I read about DP quite a bit when I bought my Dell 2408WFP last year, and was impressed by the amount of things that were taken into consideration/allowed for in future revisions of DP when its protocol was first being designed. I don't have a source for this, but I suspect it was on wikipedia and/or one of its references for the article.
The tube monitor I had in the late 90s ran at 1600x1200. Now over 10 years later my 24" LCD is a paltry 1920x1200. It pisses me off that vertical resolution hasn't increased. There is a reason newspapers and now web pages put text into narrow columns -- readability. My eyes work fine so I don't give a crap that fonts look smaller as dots per inch increase.
Now vendors are cheaping out further on 24" LCDs by using 1920x1080 panels as the default offering. A total lack of progress.
Don't even get me started that most netbooks are using something around a 800x600 (or 576) resolution screen. Are we returning to the windows 3.0 days? I bought a 11.6" gateway netbook primarily to get the whatever by 768 display. (if only they had a matte version in stores) Again small font for more vertical lines is a trade-off I'll take every time.
I'll save my rant of GNOME's special-ed style of font and icon size (see the 150% line height on the gnome website as the first mistake) for another day.
I am pretty pissed at AMD/ATI. Intel too. I ended up ordering Nvidia stuff for my MythTV box, and that hurt. Went with an Atom CPU, so I'm sorry to say that Intel got some of my money. VIA was almost a coïntender.
FWIW, both teams seem to be trying to make good, and occasionally release a slightly-less-crippled graphics driver update. It looks like Intel is currently ahead, and AMD has more momentum so they might end up winning, long term. But when it comes down to what is available and working right now, both AMD/ATI and Intel fail.
And no, this isn't off-topic. Hardware that can do x is useless, if there aren't drivers. It might as well be vaporware.
We've had multi-monitor systems for decades now, available to the average Joe desktop user to plunk onto his bog-standard machine. However, no game that I can think of actually supports multiple independent displays from one card, each at different viewing angles.
This 6 monitor trick still does the very crappy "one giant rectangular display" mode, and the game developers still just support a single viewport. Driving games and FPSes would double in immersion if you could actually look around to see your surroundings, and have movement off to the sides catch your peripheral view, while still moving in a different direction.
!yruxuL ?seerged 09 ylnO
AMD's drivers present this setup as a single monitor to Windows, so in theory, games don't need to be updated to support it.
Now all we need are frameless interlocking monitors...
Ooh... 6 neatly aligned projectors... HDTV with line-quadrupling...*drool*
Could this bring HTPC back to life?
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
So was it a single RV870 card, or an X2 card to drive all of that? Nobody else seems to be asking or speculating on it. And how much display memory? 2GB or >2GB? Either way it's a spectacular achievement.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
...nobody wanted to pay $18K a pop for them.
Read about how they were driven and you'll see one of the reasons they didn't catch on.
I'd love to see super-high-res screens, too, but as presbyopia sets in, it's getting less relevant to my own interests.
So now everyone can have a Jumbotron in their house if they want? I wonder what a Bluray movie would look like on the thing?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
I think you are barking up the wrong tree as well. I'm not sure why you think that single-user == single display. I'm currently sitting in front of 8 30" panels that are all driven by a single machine and they are all dedicated to me (and yes, it is running Linux - though it can also boot into Windows). It isn't like they are all showing the same thing - no I have my work spread out all over them. I can use it to divide up my tasks when I'm doing lots of small things, or I can spread out over the whole display when I'm doing large tasks. For example, imagine writing code in an environment where you can instantly see, edit and reference 24 different source files simultaneously? Previously, I'd print out huge reams of code to trace bugs across multiple files, and as soon as I found a single bug and fixed it, my code set was out of date. if I'm writing a paper, I display the paper itself 2-up in one display and then surround the region with notes, reference tools (e.g., Endnote), and a collection of papers that are informing my writing. I can also visualize huge data sets, and I can use the space to add extra meaning to open documents (like priority based on position). Now is my setup going to really be useful to folks who just want to read their mail and maybe surf the web a little? No, it is probably overkill. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a use for it.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzUyNA
over 60 megapixels. (4 GPUs, multi-head mode, with X-plane.)
As a Windows sysadmin I have 4 19" LCDs and could definitely use two more. I do maximize some applications, the ones that lend themselves to it anyway. The two screens I stare at the most have Chrome maximized on one (with anywhere from 2 to 12 tabs going), and Outlook on the other. Chrome because many of our management tools are web-based, and Outlook because a large portion of my tasks come to me via email.
The other two screens don't typically have maximized windows, they are a smattering of system monitoring tools, customer databases, provisioning tools, etc. which I neatly arrange so I can quickly get to any of them without having to go to my taskbar (which is auto-hidden, btw.)
Sorry AMD but this isn't any good.
Treating multiple displays as a single display is great for gaming, but sucks donkey testicles for everything else.
The ONLY possible acceptable solution is that in 2D mode each display is discrete (or have it selectable WITHOUT restarting) and have 3D mode present as a single display.
This because nay kind of normal work becomes bullshit.
I use 3x 22" LCDs both at home and at work, and I can tell you that nVidia's multi display technology is superior to AMDs in every regard, provided you have Ultramon installed and also the nVidia control which adds extra buttons to the top left of each window: "Maximise across all monitors" and "Send to Monitor".
Without these features using multiple displays gets painful.
Inparticular, it is bullshit when you maximise a window but can't get it to sit just on one screen.
Oh - there's NO DOUBT I'll be getting one of these cards, but by god they'd better have the software well-sorted so that all possible combinations of 2D/3D single and multiple monitors are supported and are easily selectable, or programmable depending on what your preferences are.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
No, no, not 80x25. Go to the old standard from when every dot was precious -- 5x7 characters in a 6x8 matrix. With six 30" displays, that gives you 1280 columns and 400 rows, or approximately 256 VT100's, with an extra 16 rows of text across the bottom for status bar, function-key labels and whatnot.
Or 500 TRS-80 Mod I displays. Or, for that matter, over 54 green-bar printout pages, or more than an entire box of punch cards.
If the designers of X-Windows built cars, there would be no fewer than five steering wheels hidden about the cockpit, none of which followed the same principles -- but you'd be able to shift gears with your car stereo. Useful feature, that.
- Marus J. Ranum, Digital Equipment Corporation
(Stolen from: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/disaster.html)
*Ducks and runs*
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
6! Woot! 6 BSOD's! Sign me Up!
I have the ATI Radeon HD 3300 technology and it can't even do OpenGL, even 2D EXA acceleration was something one could only dream of until very recently. I have heard that there is this binary blob for Radeon cards floating around, but I am NOT about to use such immoral and very questionable things. Dear AMD and the folks at ATI you assimilated, make the xorg radeon and radeonhd drivers actually work with the cards you already released or at minimum share more useful documentation before you go around sending out press-releases who say that you supposedly can do something new and impressive -- specially when we all know that it will take years, if ever, before your shiny new technology can be used on Linux-based variants of the GNU operating system.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
Why?? Seems more logical (and cost-effective) to simply use a 50"-60" LCD/Plasma setup. Duh
The main problem with such setups under Windows is that most applications haven't been adapted to the "overlapping windows" feature of Windows yet. Therefore they start up in Fullscreen. Believe me, trying to read a PDF on such a large and split up screen is not much fun.
Oh and then those 30 inch displays are also to expensive to actually do that.
It's my impression that AMD has really been doing pretty well in this regard. There's been extensive documentation of the R600/R700 chips available since around January IIRC. It's taken this long for the driver to reach a usable state - even given the documentation, you can't expect folks to write a complete driver for something as complex as a modern GPU overnight. As for the proprietary drivers, there are presumably a lot of copyright/patent/trade-secret issues preventing them from releasing the source code.
Linux 2.6.31 (released in the last few days) and Linux 2.6.32 will have quiet an a big addition of AMD/ATI Kernel Mode Setting code and x.org looks like they might start to release something new for the new Ubuntu release.
Hopefully they will get some things right, because the next release after that is probably going to be LTS.
New things are always on the horizon
The card does OpenGL just fine, in this case it's the user being overly paranoid.
http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3635
I have heard that there is this binary blob for Radeon cards floating around, but I am NOT about to use such immoral and very questionable things.
I'm a big supporter of open source, except where that support crosses over into unbelievable faggotry. GUESS WHAT YOU JUST DID?
Also nice truther sig, you cocksucking libertarian shitweasel.
I don't see what's such a big deal about multi-monitor configurations like this.
It doesn't matter how many monitors you can drive - When you have a 3" wide GRID of monitor bezels and power status lights running through the middle of the image, the whole point of a multi-monitor setup disappears. What good is a high-quality image if it is cut-up and dotted with status lights?
Until someone can build a monitor where you can remove a section of bezel so that you can connect screens so that a SEAMLESS (excluding the inevitably dimmer areas at the edges of each screen) image is projected. The arrays that they are using, and that people, for some unknown reason, think are cool, are the equivalent of painting a large, black 3" grid over a sliding glass door.
This is worthless until manufacturers start making monitors with removable bezels. If you want to see why it's worthless, look at the second image, and look at how much of the image being shown and cut up by the bezel "grid".
This chip is a waste of money if they can't come up with a better setup. Until then, I'll save my money for 1 really big ass high-quality flat screen or projector.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Who makes ZoneSize? Link?
"I got the impression from TFA that this was just based on drivers (and the extra heads)"
- which in the real world is saying, they intentionally designed the whole graphics card from bottom-up to support this and changed their whole approach to multi-monitor setup within windows to support it better.
From your comment, it seems you think "extra heads" is the same as drilling a new hole into an old card and "drivers" means you just type in a new "hello new-multi-monitor-world" line into the driver.
I'd stop commenting on stuff you don't know about if I were you...
That wouldn't do anything for a simultaneous multiple user environment.
You can't do simultaneous multiple users with a stock windows kernel anyway, so hacking the display to work would be trivial.
Windows NT 3.1 was multi-user and able to run multiple tasks as different users simultaneously and they haven't removed that feature since. That's all that all that's required to run with multiple simultaneous users at kernel level really.
Windows NT 3.1 was multi-user and able to run multiple tasks as different users simultaneously and they haven't removed that feature since. That's all that all that's required to run with multiple simultaneous users at kernel level really.
Oh, sure, you can have multiple user logins. You can even allocate multiple independent display sets. The basic problem is that the kernel only supports a single input path; all keyboards and mice are automatically connected to the single current active display set. This seems to be a basic assumption of the kernel architecture, and you would need to run a modified kernel to fix it.
Six monitors ? Heehee... Look at that: twenty-four monitors ! http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzUyNQ
Am I the only one that noticed that the POWER BOX is right there in the same room? I haven't read all the comments about how much juice something like this would take, but it's obvious that AMD/ATI weren't taking any chances in that department. Which is good, because in my new house I'm installing a power box in every room that could conceivably hold a 6 monitor setup... Namely all the bathrooms.
Why bother doing all of that when each version of Windows has a way of getting the input from multiple mice / keyboards in user space. You can use Raw Input (XP and later)/DirectInput (prior to XP)/opening the ports yourself (prior to NT 4.0, back when you could get keyboards and mice that worked that way). If you're determined, you can write a device driver (which may live in kernel space, but doesn't modify the kernel) and pass the input via a side port.
In user space you can filter keyboard/mice messages and post your own behind the scenes and other similar hacks. Most of these you don't have to do (Windows supports multiple user contexts which have their own user state).
Of course, it's not as nice or seamless or even as easy as changing the kernel, but it can be done.
Yes, but that makes everyone do the work, not just one person, and in this case, it takes a considerable amount of reading to realize who is the originator.
Skrommel ZoneSize, do a text search of the page.
>For example specs left, code center, docs right sounds like near ideal development setup for me.
It is.
>I've tried using virtual desktop but unless
There are (customizable) keybindings that will flick you around instantly. On Linux, ctrl+arrow was so fast. I was doing 3x2 with dual monitors and even 3x3 (18 monitors' worth of space) and filling up most of it.
I've dabbled with virtual desktops for Windows and I don't remember liking it either. If you have to use the mouse to get around, it's too slow. You can just use the mouse to minimize/maximize and its the same shit anyway.
What's the point of zillion times zillion pixels when all you get is ugly polygons?