ATI drives six displays from one video card
AMD'S ATI DIVISION thinks that the world plus dog wants to have six screens blasted onto a wall at once.
AMD announced Eyefinity yesterday, a new technology that allows up to six displays to be driven by one video card.
Eyefinity technology will appear in ATI Radeon graphics cards that support DirectX 11. It can run up to six screens in either landscape or portrait orientation as a single combined display.
Yesterday AMD was showing it off onboard the mothballed WWII aircraft carrier USS Hornet in Alameda, California. It had 24 monitors hooked up to a single PC, driven by four Eyefinitiy-based graphics cards. The four GPUs - each driving six 24-inch Dell LCD monitors - powered a 3D flight simulator that ran across all 24 screens.
Apparently Samsung has worked with AMD on producing ultrathin-bezel monitors and stands designed with Eyefinity in mind.
The technology uses Displayport although HDMI and DVI-based cards should also be available. It can manage a theoretical maximum resolution of 268 megapixels. In a statement, AMD pointed out that the typical 19-inch LCD has a resolution of a bit over one megapixel, so each Eyefinity card should easily be capable of driving six 30-inch or even larger displays.
AMD didn't announce specific price points, but did state that Eyefinity-based graphics will make it into desktops and notebooks "at very affordable prices".
While we can see that gaming enthusiasts will certainly want to have a go, we can also imagine that others including engineers, scientists and doctors might want to use six screens in visualisation applications too. µ
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I want one on the side of my house!
Now I want displays with no edges!
Pr0n
Does this mean they've un-broken spanning support under Vista/Windows 7? If so, I might finally move away from XP (my monitor is driven from two inputs, so breaking spanning killed my interest in LDDM drivers). On only need two outputs, but a working spanning driver matters.
Just use a projector to have a 80 inch display instead :
1 projector : 600$ +1 proj screen 100$ = 700$
VS
6 x 200$ LCD :1200$ + power bar +electricity bill + that frigin card == mucho $$
i use a projector with my laptop in my living room, and man it something else. its clean, less cable clutter and man .. ITS BIGG!
The point is not six monitors, six isn't really hard now for anyone.
But up to 24 monitors on one PC.
@Sense:
The issue isn't as much the size as the number of pixels.
One 80" projector display won't have the 6,000 x 4,000 resolution of six monitors.
I'd love to have at least four monitors rigged for playing FlightSim.
can you run far cry or crisis or any other hi-res game on it with such a huge immersive wrap-around display?
Dumbass. One projector's resolution is around 720p (or 1080p if you want to pay more) compared to, say 8000x8000 you get with many monitors. Also no humming sound, crappy luminosity and popping lamps.
If the theoretical maximum number of addressable pixels is 268,000,000, then EyeFinity could technically drive... quite a few monitors:
65: 30" (2560 x 1600)
115: 24" (1920 x 1200)
152: 20" (1680 x 1050)
If you can be happy with single slot graphics cards, you could get by with a motherboard that's less than two meters long (not that there's a chipset anywhere that can feed 65 PCI Express slots).
I have two 23" 1080p LCDs and with one of those I wouldn't need an IGP to pump out BluRay.
But it'll have to wait as only a few EXPENSIVE monitors have Display Port.
This is somewhat cool, mostly in that making a large monitor out of several smaller panels should be more economical. The diversity of being able to use them separately or as one big screen is the more interesting part. Now if samsung will sell me 3 or 6 already joined without bezels, that would be awsome.
The point is 6 monitors off a single video card. That means you don't needs a $400 motherboard with 3 pcie 16x slots and 1200 watts of power supply.
Errm 6 monitors is hard if you happen to have a female living in the same house as you.
Otherwise go for it.
A displayport to DVI adapter is around $30, and that will come down as it gains popularity.
Now we can have six times as many pop-up ads like the ones on this web site!
I've been running 3 LCDs on the Matrox Triple Head to Go Digital for a while now. After only a few hours you don't even notice it in games because there are no bezel blind spots. If you want a good idea of what playing games would be like, go to http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=A88DD60D96DA476D&search_query=triple+head+2+go
This happened yesterday...
Everyone who cared about this event has already read everything posted on this little blurb, and all the innacuracies of this little blurb have also been discussed and explained to death. If you want actual info go to any other hardware site.
I'm sure most of you people go to at least 1 other website on teh internets.
Don't ask questions, they have all be answered elsewhere 12 hours ago.
...so does this mean that these cards are super-awesome at that too?
I know it was probably not a selling point at the time, but I'd still love to know.
Actually "Sense" may have hit on something there about using a projector...or rather several projectors if you have cash to burn....instead of say a 3 monitor set up where you would have the screen bezel breaking the image why not have three projectors and three projection screens....think that would be awesome...a seamless surround display as big as you want.
Remember when Matrox were players? Then they just started making cards with multi-monitor output and forgot about gaming cards altogether. Let's hope ATI isn't going the same way...
Sounds like ATI reverse engineered some Matrox tech. Honestly it's a nice feature but not a big selling point. I say this because most people that would want this are gamers and most games don't support anything over 1920x1200 with only standard resolutions available. This is partically because no card can support gaming at a decent framerate above that res unless it's a game released a couple years before the card or older and standard resolutions is what 99% of gamers use. That said between the cost of the card and the screens it would probably be cheaper to buy a normal card and a 52in 1080p big screen which doubles as a TV getting a similar effect overall without bezels plus a TV.
The one advantage this card gives to gamers depends entirely on how the software lets you setup the screens. I've setup a triple screen matrox card in the past as part of a store display where you could get three screens set up horizontally for a wider field of view without compression but very few games could support it and most of them required you to have relatively intimate knowledge of the games setup file cause you had to edit it manually to support the resolution required and even then there were glitches. The big problem with this of course is most desks won't fit more then 3 screens if even that many which is why even matrox doesn't bother advertising gaming on more then 3 screens even though most of their high end cards these days support 4 screens.
All in all it's nice but only really useful to extreme multitaskers who aren't the target market for high end graphics cards. In otherwords expect this to be like the Matrox cards, predominantly sold to professional graphic artist multitaskers.
Bring it on !!!
Here's a video of Eyefinity in action:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzvfzJq3VTU
Wall St., Times Square, Madison Avenue, The Eyeful tower, Blighty's big Swiss Gerkin. ooh la la
Which means that I would be forced to look to 6 screens displaying Windows Vista (ME 2) or Windows 7 (ME 2.5).
No thanks.
300,000,000 pixels Is Enough for High Defination, same as todays wide screen atsc, only on 40 foot panel, where every square inch is HD quality.
Infineron....
DRASHEK
With the ability to run 6 screens, I really need a new desk.