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Multi-Display Gaming Artifacts Shown With AMD, 4K Affected Too
Vigile writes "Multi-display gaming has really found a niche in the world of high-end PC gaming, starting when AMD released Eyefinity in 2009 in three-panel configurations. AMD expanded out to six-screen options in 2010 and NVIDIA followed shortly thereafter with a similar multi-screen solution called Surround. Over the last 12 months or so, GPU performance testing has gone through a sort of revolution as the move from software measurement to hardware capture measurement has taken hold. PC Perspective has done testing with this new technology on AMD Eyefinity and NVIDIA Surround configurations at 5760x1080 resolution and found there were some substantial anomalies in the AMD captures. The AMD cards exhibited dropped frames, interleaved frames (jumping back and forth between buffers) and even stepped, non-horizontal vertical sync tearing. The result is a much lower observed frame rate than software like FRAPS would indicate and these problems will also be found when using the current top-end, dual-head 4K PC displays since they emulate Eyefinity and Surround for setup."
AMD also seem to have some serious problems, which seem to be worsening with each new driver, on their premium workstation cards when driving multiple displays. We've seen numerous video playback issues, including glitches away from the video area itself, on multi-display configurations. The most likely culprit at the moment seems to be changes in the GPU memory timing. I really hope they fix this soon, because our "professional" workstations are giving our professionals headaches right now.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Yet, here you are posting, instead of over at wearetheworld.org. Just because people are starving doesn't mean that this isn't a problem worthy of mention for others. This is a tech site. If you want coverage of famine, there's a bevy of leftwing rags out there that talk about it every day. Go read one of those.
This 'first world problem' routine is little more than politically correct shaming language, meant to shame people focused on their own issues into caring only about whatever the speaker wants them to focus on (usually some identity politics 'crisis.').
I remember when we had those Matrox cards to go with our video editing workstations. Those things were stable as hell
Back then there were more vendors competing fiercely in the market, and all of them were on their toes as they knew even one slip could turn out to be totally fatal.
Nowadays, other than AMD and Nvidia, what other serious players do we have ?
None.
With the market turns into duopoly both the players no longer have the urge to bring new and innovative features into their new products.
How many times we have heard of the horror stories brought on by their crappy drivers ?
Other than lamenting online, the users (no matter if they are casual gamers or professional users) have no other option but to wait for a newer version of the drivers, or roll back the drivers to one that worked.
ps. I still have several of those Matrox cards with dual video outputs.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Note that the words "driver" and "version" don't occur on the page. There is a know issue that AMDs been working that sounds a lot like this issue. It's been known for months, they've got a "two phase" plan to attack it, the first of which is implemented in the current beta driver-set.
The timing of this article is very suspect. They're either reporting on a new problem (and totally failing at providing any relevant data on their configuration), or they're simpy regurgitating an already know issue, like doing a big splashy article about a bug report.
So we have a problem. Now the hard work of narrowing the problem down can begin. My money is on all of the above. Subtle errors all over the place that nobody could test for and thus couldn't know they needed finding and fixing.
You mean narrowing down the problem that is already known and already being worked on?
Perhaps the problem is rather, why does this article, which pretends nothing of this is already known, exist? If this is a new issue, they totally failed to show it.
The biggest problem with multi-monitor gaming is that it's just plain garbage in any kind of "surround" configuration. Apart from Fisheye-Quake and some fancy pants flight sims and racing games, arcing three or more monitors does nothing but waste power and processing capability to render a smeared-out mess on every monitor but the one in the center. Most games aren't even mathematically capable of producing a 180-degree FOV. I've never been quite sure who should get the ball rolling in that department, but I've just decided it should be Valve. I don't have a good reason. Get on it, guys! Ubiquitous support for rendering games to multiple-viewports.
These days, you can't get more features out of your gamer card by tricking the card or driver software into believing it is a "Pro" card any more. If you buy a Pro card now, it's usually based on the previous generation of chipset, with a well stabilized and thoroughly tested driver, compared to the very short time to market that top range gamer cards get. The big problem is that newer chipsets often are run on the same driver and iterations between the chipsets are often nothing more than a die shrink size and maybe some optimization in memory path, controllers and such. This means that drivers are essentially the same for all chipsets and the single code base requires both stability for Pro cards and bleeding edge features for the latest and greatest gamer stuff. Essentially, the Pro users of GFX cards like the CUDA and engineering people, suffer from the big pull of the gamer market demanding ever increased high resolution and frame rates because the manufacturers work with a single code base for both lines of product.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
except its true and measurable
Even me on my shitty 4870 with two monitors have problems under windows 8. Everything is fine with one monitor active, but turn on dual monitors and all of a sudden I get flickering artifacts in 3D game on the main monitor.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
all the old fireGL 1000/2000/3000/4000/5000/4 cards. SGI's Extreme series. all designed for pushing acurate polygons at the expense of texture mapping performance. And these were pushing the envelope not graphics cards for gaming. But you also paid through the nose for them.
An attitude which I never understood. Games designed to enforce a 90 degree FOV fail to take into account that on average, our peripheral vision encompasses about 150-160 degrees for most people.
Well, that's sort of the point of peripheral vision, isn't it? There's an easy test that I was taught in junior high that quickly demonstrates this. Hold your arms out in front of you, thumbs up. Move them to the edges of your vision on both sides until you can just see them. Stop, and take a quick look left and right. If you're like most people, you'll find that you're arms are now almost straight out from your sides.
Games which take into account this awareness tend to to do one or both of two things. The first is to allow an FOV up to some arbitrary limit somewhat greater than 90 degrees, say 110 or 120 degrees. Anything after that tends to get so distorted as to be useless on a single monitor anyhow.
The second option is to show some sort of indicators on the side of your monitor and/or allow a quick free look around of just your head. The best implementation of this model belongs to an FPS series that emphasizes realism in its player model to an extent that I've seen nowhere else. I'm speaking of course of the Operation Flashpoint/ArmA I-III series. This game series has been working on this basic model since, what? 1998? The ArmA branch of that series has also provided native support for multiple monitors and TrackIR since the first iteration.
If a FPS this fanatically dedicated to realism (OK, as long as you forget the brain dead AI and concentrate on everything else!) thinks this is OK, then why can't other games at least acknowledge the issue?