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."

Comments

Reminds me of this cool setup

[Acer500]

This guy already had this set up for a while, it's pretty cool (now 12 screens):

http://www.stefandidak.com/office/

Re:Merketing trumps reason again... ;)

[jeffb (2.718)]

Wrong direction. You need NINE displays.

Actually, seriously, it seems like it would be more useful to have a standard 30" display centered in your FOV, and a projected 90" display surrounding it at lower resolution. You still get the peripheral cues, but you're not wasting resolution (and expense) on parts of the display where you can't perceive it. The math and logic is fairly simple, but I've never heard of a card that supports it. (There were some esoteric simulators many years ago that did this, but it never caught on in the wider market.)

Re:damn!

[ArhcAngel]

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.

Frameless monitors

[RevWaldo]

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?

Re:damn!

[Fred_A]

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.