Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
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.
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)
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.
You have to deal with projector image overlap. Doable; but not trivial.
The commercially available setups all tend to require specialized software and one or more cameras(for automatic feedback and correction). This raises the cost substantially above that of the projectors alone. Always a bad sign about the price when you can't find a price sheet...
Hopefully, things like Eyefinity, and the falling costs of projectors and webcams, will drag this stuff down into the realm of the affordable at some point in the fairly near future. The software required for edge and geometry correction, particularly automatic machine-vision based stuff, isn't trivial; but it really only has to be written once(the core logic, probably a lot of nasty platform-specific glue that will need doing repeatedly) and the cost of decent projectors and cameras good enough for automatic calibration purposes has been falling over time. If it can go from niche to mass-market, it could become fairly cheap.
The problem with multiple displays, and specifically Matrox' business model, is that it is utterly trivial to add more displays to a card. The most difficult part, and I say this facetiously, is to come up with a break-out connector since the PCI backplate can only fit two full-sized DVI or VGA ports. Mash a bunch of pins into a tiny form-factor, make a cable that splits them back out into regular DVI, and you have yourself an N-way display card. The electronics are just more of the same. If you can make a dual-DVI card, then you can mash eight of those chipsets together on one board and have a 16 DVI card.
What Matrox used to excel at was their RAMDACs, which resulted in better output quality on the VGA. In this age of all-digital interconnects, there is no need for a RAMDAC anymore. It's all digital to digital, the graphics card simply acts as a frame buffer with accelerated drawing routines, all the heavy lifting has been moved to the display itself. With an act like Matrox, the "GPU" component is an underpowered 2D engine designed for low cost, not high performance.
ATI's Eyefinity is a non-starter for gaming, but it is a slap in the face of all these shitty companies that have been selling glorified garbage to multi-display fetishists for so long.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
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.
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.