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Game Testing ATI's Six-Screen Eyefinity System
Barence writes "ATI has carted its monstrous six-monitor Eyefinity gaming system to the offices of PC Pro for an extensive hands-on session. The game was Race Driver: GRID, the resolution was a mighty 5,760 x 2,160, and the overall effect was ... a bit hit and miss. There's no denying it has potential, and the level of immersion sounds impressive, but this report complains of problems with bezel correction that currently tarnish the overall effect."
Why not just use one big-ass flatscreen TV?
If you're going to have multi-screens with the unavoidable 4-8cm of bezel between them, and a DELL logo right in the middle, you might as well get a projector.
From the launch activities for the 5800 family.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6Vf8R_gOec
24 monitors, 4 cards, 1 PC. All consumer grade. All running Linux. And yes, there is bezel correction.
Yes, there are black lines for the monitors. I couldn't get the budget to do 24 50" Plasmas. But think beyond the demo part of the tech and think about the possibilities.
Maybe I'm missing somthing, but why aren't there monitors with a minimal almost non-existant bezel? It seems to me that it wouldn't be impossible and with the prevalence of mult-monitor setups, the market is there.
One of the reasons that people are interested in this is higher rez. I mean you can just buy a big 42" HDTV or something if you want a large display. Fine, but that's just 1920x1080. Same sort of deal with a projector. Getting one that does HD resolutions isn't hard. However you really don't want to know what a high rez one costs.
Seems like the bezels could be modular caps so you could snap the monitors together. You could have a flexible joint under the bezel cap or have some sort of adapter that would plug the monitors together at a fixed angle. I don't know why no one's done this yet.. The bezel is really not necessary in the middle of the screen. Someone could probably mock this up with a few flat panels and a dremel and a hot glue gun, any takers?
Once that's done, you could further enhance it with a mesh network bus for video and audio. Audio would be especially cool coming out of the center of the monitor panel. You could address it geometrically in 3d space and it could just come out of the right monitor speaker.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Use multiple video projectors - no bezels.
No sig today...
To eliminate the unequal bezels problem you only have to use 12 441 600 monitors of 1x1 pixel resolution.
This is Da Shizzle. http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=770
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
Keyboard ? FAIL !
I can see this being used for advanced user interfaces, where one monitor displays the game action or whatever graphics in full screen. The additional screens would be used for tool bars, statistics, messaging, or whatever else would useful for the game.
Until monitors without bezels are ubiquitous, and affordable, I can't see someone enjoying a game played like this.
but not to display a higher resolution, but to display more information. For instance, I would definitively love to play starcraft with several view point on multiple screens. Or display detailled city/empire statistic on a secondary screen in civilization. Or a tactical RPG display character statistics (as in FireEmblem DS). Having game that allow you to do this kind of things would really be AWESOME to me.
F355 Challenge and flight sims on three screens.
http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=906
stagger the monitors depthwise so that adjacent bezels overlap from the point of view of the user. this will cut your bezel problem in half.
For the less-observant, Mr. Tippett speaks from a position of some authority on ATI's Linux doings.
Mr. Tippett: You still have #ati on Freenode? I've been meaning to jump on and check out my channel (humor), but Freenode dumped my registrations.
The preceding comment is my own, and in no way construes an opinon of the Emperor of Mankind.
Multiple monitors as display area extenders seem to be used when a cost effective single monitor doesn't exist to do the job. A couple of Darius games, The Ninja Warriors and Konami's X-Men used multiple monitors in arcades since a single wider screen monitor didn't exist. But then cheap rear projection technology came along and made this setup obsolete. Soon enough a cheap, single screen solution will come along to replace Eyefinity. Then we'll need another multimonitor setup when that resolution proves to be inadequate. And so on. Developers should really focus on the level of detail in games, rather than resolution. Live action DVDs running in 480p beat the visuals of any modern game running in any resolution.
A few games do use multimonitor setups for novel purposes though - Sega's Ferrari F355 Challenge used several monitors to simulate peering out of the windows in an actual Ferrari F355 car. It was a very eye pleasing effect.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
It's the goal of Carrell Killebrew from ATI to make a holodeck.
From: Anandtech (4th paragraph)
I noticed some pretty visible lag in that video between the top left and the rest of the screens. Is that going to be fixed?
...even old fighter planes had cockpits with lots of support to hold the plexiglass panels (think of the Messerchmitt ME 109 or Mitsubsihi Zero). IF you think of it in these terms bezels are no big deal.
thanks to parallax, pillars in a car or plane only block the view to the extent that they exceed the distance between your eyes. on top of that you can just move your head side to side a little bit and see if anything is in your pillar-induced blind spot.
this doesn't work with monitors because the pixels are about the same distance from your eye as the bezels. a head-tracking display would help, but that wasn't mentioned in the article.
I'm not saying it can't be done, but it would be a hell of a task. It would be fairly expensive to start with, HD projectors cost a good deal more than computer monitors. Then you'd have to get some array to hold them all for proper aiming. The power and heat problems wouldn't be trivial, you'd need a dedicated circuit, maybe two, and some way of dealing with all the heat from the lights. The noise would be pretty high too, if they weren't isolated.
Once you've got that all take care of, the calibration would be extremely tedious and pain staking to create a truly uniform, break free display which would presumably be the point of all this.
OR, you can get regular computer monitors, which work pretty well. You can see why maybe that is the preferred choice. Plus bezel compensation is coming with the march drivers (betas of which can be found).
How about ATI focusing on developing 3D support--something they've been lacking for some time now, and is building tremendous popularity--instead of trying to push multi-monitor support?
The visual style of stringing multiple, independent displays together looked terrible during the CRT days and it still looks bad now. Eyefinity does not INCREASE immersion--it vastly decreases it via the huge and prominent gaps/black bars between the displays. DO NOT WANT.
Big difference: In the car or airplane, you can shift your head slightly to see what may have been blocked by the roof pillar or window frame.
You cannot do this with the computer display. Its image is 2-dimensional, so there is no parallax possible.
Yes, but they did not have to navigate menus or HUDs with a line missing in the middle.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
Nobody is complaining of roof pillars in cars...
Actually, the front pillars on cars are implicated as a major cause of motorcycle accidents. I can't dig up the original article I remember reading, but there are restrictions on the width of the front pillars of cars sold in the UK, except if there's a window in it. Modern car designs now often feature extremely wide pillars for rigidity and to hold side-impact airbags, so small token windows to get around the law are pretty much the norm.
The top picture in the article I linked demonstrates the problem very well. The small window serves no legitimate purpose.
I have never opened up a monitor - the Great Sages who taught me the Way of the Computer warned of deadly capicators and to never attempt such a thing - but what's to stop an ingenious individual from removing the frames on monitors and just sticking them next to one another?
I'd much rather have a 1/16th inch gap over a 1 inch gap between multiple monitors...
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Anyone who would like to play with this kind of tech should have a look at SoftTH, all you need is 3 monitors and 2 pcie vid cards. Works nicely in some cases and is a lot cheaper than hardware solutions http://www.kegetys.net/SoftTH/
There's not much deadly voltage to worry about in an LCD. The only thing high-voltage is the inverter for the backlight, and it's got so little capacitance that there's just not much of anything there. (And even then, by "high voltage" I mean "a couple of hundred volts," not "a couple thousand volts.")
But it's not like the bezels are there just for show. The LCD panel assemblies themselves, with backlighting, circuitry, a supporting frame, and the other fun stuff that lets them work, extend a fair bit beyond the edge of the usable display area.
Open one up and see.
Kid-proof tablet..
MacOS 6.X
It's been possible to do this on Apple's 'open slot' machines since NuBus was the sh*t....
Cheers
I hear stories of people removing the bezels from their monitors, but I have not found a site with instructions and pictures. Has anyone found one?
Social Credit would solve everything...
The App is X-plane. It's actually 4 instances tied together in a 4 3x2 configs. The quadrants get out of sync due to x-plane. Within a quadrant it runs synchronously since it rendering everything in that quadrant at the same rate.