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Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 — Gaming On Six Panels
MojoKid writes "AMD's 6-output Radeon has been seen in action at a number of events, but today the ATI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition is being officially launched. HotHardware paired the card up with six 22" Dell LCD panels in a 3x2 configuration — with a max resolution of 5760x2160 — and ran it through a number of popular titles including Dirt 2, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Left 4 Dead 2 and Crysis. For specialized, high-end graphics cards like this, the market potential may be relatively small. If, however, the idea of multi-monitor gaming is appealing to you and you've got the means to score one of these cards (along with multiple displays), you won't be disappointed."
Reader Vigile adds a different analysis of the card's six-monitor gaming: "PC Perspective found FPS games were basically unplayable because of the bezel through the middle of their vision while RTS and racing games like StarCraft 2 and DiRT 2 were spectacular."
It's 6 of one and half a dozen of the other as far as I'm concerned!
America, Home of the Brave.
Is the increased resolution of 6 screens really that much of an improvement over one large Full HD television, that the fact there are lines running right through your vision is acceptable? I really doubt that.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
6 is stupid.
Either go for 3 or 9.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those!
Heh... I remember doing my graduate numerical electromagnetics research using a DEC/Alpha that performed in the MFLOP range... Boy I wonder if I could run all my old FORTRAN77 code on this thing! :p
... and can you do this on Linux?
No?
Then I'm not interested ...
...who read "Gaming On Six Pixels?"
Moderation is overrated.
I am currently running with an Eyefinity setup - Radeon HD5770, with 3 20" displays at 1600x1200 each. (Traded up from a HD4850, brought down the idle temp and fan noise, and gained Eyefinity capability) So I'm running at 4800x1200, when it is set up as a "single panel." I've got the left and right monitors set up at a slight angle.
Most games work fine with it, some that aren't designed to scale to such a ratio I have to keep at a single monitor's resolution - but when it detects something running fullscreen, at say, 1600x1200 (each monitor's native display) it just mirrors it across all three.
Some games like RTSes have a GUI interface at the bottom - some just move the corners (unit details, commands) and leave plenty of space in between - others 'stretch' - so games will have to be patched or designed with this in mind, to fully work. (If it doesn't, at least it degrades relatively gracefully)
Some games don't scale at all - and when they go above a certain resolution, just stretch in general, or zoom their interfaces based on the aspect ratio it can generate. These ones I have to keep at a lower resolution.
So far all of the Source engine games from Valve work great - I haven't tried Counter-Strike: Source, but everything newer works fine, giving me peripheral vision. I just hope Valve updates these to allow the HUD to be movable - only downside to them that I've encountered yet.
Fallout 3 works with it, with some tweaking - had to edit the configuration file to move the HUD interface options, and fix the PipBoy 3000 interface - it zoomed too close to see the top and bottom.
So as we discover more games that do or don't work - let the developers know, hopefully they'll update their games to support the aspect ratio. At a minimum at least it degrades gracefully if it can't use the extra monitors - and by making it available on all of the 5xxx series cards, it will become a standard. Hopefully nVidia is able to implement a similar feature so that it isn't a manufacturer-centric feature that some developers won't support since it isn't 100% usable...
Well, I said that in post right next to the one you're replying to, anyway ;p (but I still said there are better numbers than 6)
One that hath name thou can not otter
http://hothardware.com/printarticle.aspx?articleid=1480
...with screens rotated 90 degrees.
One that hath name thou can not otter
In addition to the 6 screen setup acting at one unit, the screens will, I assume, be able to act independently of one another for 6 separate screens, or possibly even 2 or 4 combined with 4 or 2 staying independent, respectively. This would allow for imaging-types of applications (MRI's, Digital X-Rays, CAD) be displayed on a large surface while having a few separate screens for applications that do not require visuals - all on the same machine. I can totally see this being used is hospitals and graphics design studios where large resolution is crucial, while allowing lower resolution apps open at the same time to prevent alt-tabbing between and thus increasing efficiency.
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I currently use an Eyefinity setup in Portrait Mode with a Dell 2408FWP and 2 Dell U2410s.
Here's my trippy background http://img638.imageshack.us/img638/1050/echo.jpg (it's rather large at 3600x1920)
The setup is pretty awesome in my opinion and is pretty easily driven by my single 5870.
I do, from time to time, run into an issue where the card hits its framebuffer from being limited to 1GB or RAM so I believe I will upgrade for the sole purpose of getting that additional 1GB of RAM. I also believe the E6 cards probably come with some minor revisions to their architecture and BIOS that may allow them to be overclocked a little better than the original batch of 1GB cards that were released on Launch Day (When I got mine)
I do understand the laws of supply & demand may cause some to raise prices somewhat, but I am hoping that the new cards are not offered at some outrageous price.
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
The pr0n enthusiasts must still be asleep; there has been no mention yet. Either that, or the world will definitely come to an end tomorrow.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
That's what i want this for!
I have two screens. I like it. I play the occasional game. When I play a game, I look at one screen. It's a shooter. It has my target right in the middle. I want to be able to glance at the screen and see EVERYTHING.
The bezel just means there's this clear border - "this is screen 1, this is screen 2" and makes it hard for me to imagine anything else.
The other thing. Why not get 3 screens? That way you get a clear middle and then two more screens you can do stuff on.
o hai
the point in this because, for gaming in say MW2 or CS:S, you arn't interested in anything further out than a single monitor provides. The good players don't look around, they look blankly at the screen until they see something move and then twitch to it. Given that screen space of this vastness is going to put more of the game to your peripheral vision, i can't see the advantage. I'd be very surprised if you went to LAN parties and the 'elite' players used a setup like this. It does have its advantages for strategy games however where more screen real-estate is valuable and for movies, but for that to be any fun to use manufacturers will have to make specialist monitors with no screen frames.
At work, we have dual 4K projectors behind a 32:9, 15 foot wide piece of glass on our main visualization display (we do 3D visualization software) and we run a system with two Quadroplex boxes (two quadro 5800's each I believe) and nVidia's drivers are a long way from actually working correctly for us. We see a lot of tearing when in mosaic mode and multiple opengl contexts can't run concurrently (it only allows half resolution height when doing so) and makes the system very unstable. Seeing that this card doesn't require clock sync and works with six screens seamlessly, it looks like a viable alternative to us. Considering that two cards could run our 7680x2160 screen (our 4K projectors are four 1080p screens each) it might be advantageous for us to upgrade had we not just bought the new quadroplexes (nVidia told us to update our quadroplexes as our old ones didn't support the mosaic mode correctly; unfortunately, the new ones don't seem to either...)
I see these cards more useful to those with setups like ours; projectors that can display without borders and for high-quality visualizations.
-SaNo
Running ubuntu: http://blog.jasonmorton.com/?p=24
Is it the same situation with these cards as with the Radeon Mobility HD cards whereby you cannot download updated drivers directly from ATI but must go to your PC/laptop manufacturer instead? Is there proper Linux support (proprietary drivers)? There's not for the Mobility cards
They were showing MW2 with this setup at PAX East. It was horrible, the crosshairs on the screen wanted to fall right between the split of the top and bottom row of monitors. It was really awkard for your eyes to jump across the edge of one monitor and onto another one to follow the crosshair. Terrible.
Here's a review of the same setup by HardOCP. Complete with video of not only gaming but screen setup, etc.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
But it would be useful for tripling the height and width of your display.
Next we'll see a six-panel LCD without bezels that can deform from a flat screen to having the monitors on either end of a 3x2 tilt out to create a concave screen (with proper distortion applied to the video simulate peripheral view) that creates an amazing and immerse experience.
But that's just a stop-gap (and probably a very expensive one at that).
The real end to this road is a giant 3-6' tall OLED screen that starts out flat, but can then be curved to create a similar wrap-around viewing experience. Only with OLEDs it will be one big, bendable screen and it'll cost a lot less in terms of electricity to run. Some kind of controller that handles video input would be responsible for detecting the curve in the screen and distorting the input video as necessary to make the whole thing look fan-fucking-tastic.
I give it 20 years. But this will be mainstream.
Fuck everything, we're doing seven panels.
So, you can just plug in your 49" (what I did) HDTV and go gaming, do web sites or whatever, or buy 6 identical monitors & mounts and set it all up and in the end have higher resolution but have your windows all split into 6 parts ? Maybe for gaming it would work, but for web sites, having text split between monitors is really annoying. I think even for videos it would be rather annoying. What if amd drops support for this in a few years when you are ready for an upgrade ? Just wait a few years until 2k & 4k hdtv become available, you will have better resolution and one clean screen with out breaks. And no worries about being stuck to one manufacturer, you will be able to plug your 1 cable into about any computer.
Having many different multi screen setups-
my biggest gripe is whenever I stretch an actual video across multiple monitors--
only one monitor gets the output-- the rest are black
any chance I can expand VLC to span- and the video will as well?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
anyone know if the ati linux drivers work for this?
allow me to answer my own question:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzUyNQ
PC Perspective found FPS games were basically unplayable because of the bezel through the middle of their vision FPS games have a target crosshair in the exact middle of the screen. Everybody knows you need an odd number of screen in each direction to be able to target anything, i.e. either 3 screens or 9 screens for multiscreen FPS. Also, at about 4k x 4k resolution human perception reaches the point where you can't make out individual pixels while the entire screen is in your field of view; higher resolutions than that are only useful if you are going to lean in and focus on a specific area. Since most games are horizontally oriented, I don't see much use for having more than 3 screens, except for in a flight simulator, or perhaps having a fourth screen just for status info.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
So just do 3x1 monitors and you won't have a bezel going through the center of your view.... You can just by 3 big monitors instead.
Replying to remove accidental down mod. Stupid popup boxes..
[UID-HeinzIntel]
30 fps "smooth" and "acceptable" for gaming....
Well, gaming isn't much of my thing (anymore). But with decent software supplied with it it'd make a great tool for (in my case art) video presentations having a different video on each LCD. Instead of needing a separate computer for each video, I could use one computer and have 6 lcds connected to it. Neat.