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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.
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
Traders.
"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
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).
I think they're implying, correctly, that larger displays generally have higher screen resolutions than smaller ones.
Two words: Peripheral Vision.
damn!!! i hope this isn't just fud.
I don't think that word means what you think it does . . .
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
But will there be decent Linux drivers, or will they be a second thought as usual?
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.
It sounds impressive but it also sounds like a stunt more than reality.
Six used 19" LCDs for 20$ each?
I'm still using a single 17" LCD, you insensitive clod!
(cue follow-up reply with "I'm still using a 14" CRT you insensitive clod")
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.
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
Pfft. 14 inches? I'm using lynx on a 5" green-screen. It was good enough for my grand-dad, it's good enough for me.
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
Does this thing come with its own small nuclear power plant and liquid nitrogen cooling system?
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
The new ATI card also lets you create groups of monitors in any combination you need. 6 monitors could be used as a 3x1, 1x2 and a single.
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Pfft. 14 inches? I'm using lynx on a 5" green-screen. It was good enough for my grand-dad, it's good enough for me.
5 whole inches? Man, I'm piping this to a punch card printer. After years of listening to the hammering I can "read" it like morse code. It just sounds like music to me. A page like this takes up to four hours, but it's worth it, I can assure you.
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!
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.
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Best code-words for masturbation to porn ever.
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.)
All programmers know the correct way is to have the punctuation outside of the quote marks, otherwise you're modifying the string literal that the quote marks enclose. And I don't care whether the rules say it's meant to be like that or not, if I'm quoting a piece of text which didn't have that punctuation in it then it feels dirty to move the punctuation inside the quotes.
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.
Only on Slashdot would you get a pissing contest to see who has the fewest inches... /me pulls out a six-inch, 800x480 eeePC
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.
becasue he want's it maximized on one screen.
I often do this with 2 screen. what I am working on is maximized, and in my 'secondary' screen there are several apps running that I monitor.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Like any current mid to high end home theater projector, but with several inch wide lines running through the picture.
I hope you're not browsing at -1...
http://www.zombieapocalypse.tv/
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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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!
Maybe it's because they want to make better use of their screen real estate? Why do people prefer larger computer monitors and TVs? Because you see can see more and see better. I mean, do you also complain that your TV is maximized instead of displaying bits and pieces of other channels next to the program you're currently watching?
Most operating systems today are capable of multitasking, but most users are not. So if you're only using a single application, and you bought a 24" monitor, then why not use that space? If you're watching a movie, you can see a bigger picture. If you're surfing the web, typing a paper, writing code, or working on a spread sheet, you can see more content at once and scroll less.
Most people don't go out and buy a 24" monitor so that they can see more of their desktop background. The better question might be, why not maximize the application you're currently using? Most OSes have a windows manager or task switcher that allows quick and easy switching between programs. Windows even has a desktop shortcut in the quick launch bar for easy access to the desktop. There's really no advantage to not having your windows maximized and fully utilizing your screen real estate. It's also easier to focus on your work when there's nothing else cluttering the screen.
Many programs, such as IDEs or graphics applications like Photoshop or Illustrator, have a Workspace manager. That's because the developers realize that your screen setup and window layout are vital to user productivity and efficiency. With complex applications as these, you often have tons of widgets, toolbars, info panels, etc. that can take up significant display area. So it makes sense to use your screen real estate as efficiently as possible. It doesn't make sense to clutter your monitor with windows that have nothing to do with your current workflow.
On a 1280x1024 display, I usually don't have space to display all the tool panels and windows I need to work efficiently. On my current 1920x1600 display, I have just enough when the Application is maximized. Sure, I can get by on less screen area. But that usually means constantly opening & collapsing tool panels and a lot of scrolling back and forth. A bigger workspace also means I see my drawings in more detail; I can see more code at a time; and I can more easily & accurately navigate long web pages. Additionally, working with an application maximized allows you to better memorize the location of various panels and toolbars since they're always in the same position. Just as switching between different model keyboards leads to slower typing and more typos, a non-maximized window that's a different size and in a different position every time is similarly less efficient.
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.
The card does OpenGL just fine, in this case it's the user being overly paranoid.