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."

Comments

AMD multi-display problems

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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.

Re:AMD multi-display problems

[cheater512]

I've got 5 monitors connected to 2 ATI cards (Linux + Xinerama).

The most interesting artefact I've seen is some apps can corrupt the cursor so the pointer is a little bit of random memory contents.
But only on some monitors. Move it to another monitor and it may come back, move it to the original monitor and it dies again.

There must be some really fun bugs in their drivers that rear their heads with massive setups.

Re:AMD multi-display problems

[mkairys]

I've got 5 monitors connected to 2 ATI cards (Linux + Xinerama).

The most interesting artefact I've seen is some apps can corrupt the cursor so the pointer is a little bit of random memory contents. But only on some monitors. Move it to another monitor and it may come back, move it to the original monitor and it dies again.

There must be some really fun bugs in their drivers that rear their heads with massive setups.

I actually get this exact same problem on my Windows 7 desktop (3 monitors). The primary display cursor will sometimes have fragments of the cursor graphics or loading animation displayed but moving the cursor across each screens fast and back again can sometimes resolve it. Interesting that its a problem on both platforms.

Re:AMD multi-display problems

[Mashiki]

As a useful point, this has been an on-going issue with Nvidia drivers since about 290ish--and in the last three releases on 400,500 and some 600's where the drivers were so bad that they caused hardlocks across the board. Where either the drivers have been crap, or causing hardware lockups, or the various reports that can't be confirmed of them nuking hardware. In fact, it got so bad back 6mo ago that nvidia was looking for people in the continental US to send their entire rigs in to their hardware labs for testing. So, people thinking that this is a "flameware" or some other asinine thing, need to realize that there's driver issues on both sides. Sometimes however, the issues are more serious than reported for one side or the other. And between the two, nvidia has the more serious driver issue, and that's coming from someone who's last 6 cards have all been nvidia made by evga--three of which that had to be RMA'd because of a sudden hardware failure after a driver update.

Thinking on this a bit more, it reminds me of how nvidia was at one point blaming the driver reset issue only on "bad configurations" and "PSU power issues" until it was found that undervolting or overvolting(mainly) the cards solved this problem. Especially on the 500 series cards, this was of course after they had adjusted the voltage supplied to the cards downward, in order to make them run cooler.

That's what you get with duopoly

[Taco Cowboy]

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.

Multi-Monitor Gaming Just Sucks

[Beardydog]

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.