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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."
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.
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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
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).
Correct, and traders will hate this. We tried the Matrox TripleHead2Go a couple of years ago and it stretched the screen across...wait for it...THREE monitors. I never heard so much bitching about how hitting the maximize button made an app take up all three screens. Fortunately Matrox had anticipated this and provided a setting in the drivers to provide the desired functionality. I hope AMD is as insightful.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
The post uses irrelevant concepts like the physical size of display, as if that's relevant to a graphics card. GP was just following the post's lead.
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
With xrandr, xorg.conf is largely redundant.
I can attach an extra monitor to my ATI GPU laptop running Fedora 11 and I don't have to fiddle with xorg.conf at all. The only thing I have to do is setup where I want the laptop screen to appear in relation to the larger LCD display.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
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
That's just... sad, really.
On the brighter side, I suppose you could now drive four DIVEs from a single PC.
LOL
Nah. The power consumption would be high, but not that high. You might even be able to get it all on one circuit without blowing a fuse.
According to the specs, a 30" Dell LCD consumes somewhere between 163 and 250W.
This number is surprisingly high, considering a 27" CRT TV only uses approx. 100W, although the same guy measured a 30" Dell LCD to consume approx. 90W, which sounds much more believable. If your LCD is consuming 250W, it's either going to be blindingly bright, or throwing off a serious amount of heat.
On the other hand, Dell also manufacture an "energy efficient" line of monitors, the largest of which is 24", and consumes approx. 23W while in use, which is pretty impressive. You could easily run 12 of these off of a single domestic supply, even on one of North America's puny 120V circuits. In fact, 12 of Dell's 24" 'Green' displays would consume less power than a single 30" display if the spec sheet is to be believed.
Now, that being said, you also certainly wouldn't need a 220V 3-phase connector to run this many 30" displays. You'd likely be able to do it off of a single domestic circuit (barely). Most newer North American 120V outlets support a maximum load of 15A, or 1800W. If we can safely assume that the monitors will consume 100W each, and the PC stays under 600W, you'd just be able to squeak by (600 + 12*100 = 1800W)
On the other hand, if you live in one of the civilized nations that use 220-240V as their domestic supply, you'd be able to do this without risking blowing a fuse (oddly enough, fuse boxes are still quite common in certain parts of the world). A European 16A CEEForm plug should be able to safely deliver 16A * 240V = 3840W, which would hypothetically be enough to power 24 monitors, and a PC to drive them. Domestic Schuko, BS1363, and BS546 outlets (most of Europe, the UK, and the commonwealth countries) would also be able to handle this sort of load without a problem, provided that they were wired correctly.
Heat distribution wouldn't be a problem, considering that 12 30" monitors would occupy approximately 32 square feet. Passive cooling should be adequate, provided that you're not cramming all this gear into an unventilated closet.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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!
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.
30" is where the pixel count increases, and the pixel size shrinks a bit. It's those new 27" screens that really rip people off.
20" 1600x1200
20" 1680x1050
22" 1680x1050
24" 1920x1200
27" 1920x1200
30" 2560x1600
(I've started seeing 1366x768 and 1280x720 LCD screens being pushed as desktop monitors, so I think we're actually going backwards.)
So, here is the question. If you have 3 screens, why on earth are you maximizing?! Seriously, because I dream of nothing more than to have to turn my head a full 90 degrees in order to read a full line of text.
Because Windows users always maximize their apps. Nobody knows why.
I never understood either why people using my computer (24" @ 1920x1600) always feel the need to maximize every single window which I almost never do except for a few graphical apps like digiKam or BibblePro.
I'm sure they'd do the same across 3 or 6 screens. Probably in Windows the maximize button stops working if you don't use it often enough.
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Why run three monitors with ultramon when you can run three independent PCs with three independent monitors using synergy? I've got the same (or more) screen real estate and 3x the horsepower.