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."

6x 22"? What about one large TV?

[dingen]

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.

Re:6x 22"? What about one large TV?

[91degrees]

6 HD projectors should work for you. I wonder if the drivers have functionality to allow overlap.

This sort of setup is very much a niche market for gaming, but pretty useful for commercial flight simulators or display walls.

Re:6x 22"? What about one large TV?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why didn't they make it an odd number so that you could have a center screen without having two monitor edges dead center?

Re:Obligatory question...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The fancy ATI-specific screen melding tech? Probably not, at least for another few revisions of ATI's proprietary driver.

Having 6 heads out of a single PCIe 16x slot? Probably so.

Frankly, I'm not the gamer that I used to be, so I don't really care about the driver features that allow you to force multi-monitor functions on games that are ordinarily single monitor. I'm interested in the fact that 6-headed graphics cards are now within the realm of gamer enthusiasts(ie. ~$500, stocked by normal retailers, drivers downloadable without support agreements, and so forth) rather than super-pricey financial workstation integrators and custom display wall types. I can only assume that Matrox has been praying fervently for the demise of the entire ATI driver team in a messy accident; because it is only ATI's somewhat uneven reputation in regards to software that is keeping them relevant now that this thing is in the wild.

Re:6x 22"? What about one large TV?

[Ironhandx]

I've had this done with 3 monitors for a couple of months now. Its actually pretty easy to do and I got the bezel down to about 1/8th of an inch which is barely noticeable at all. They were Lenovo 22" monitors to begin with and only had a little more than 1/2" of bezel between two monitors regardless. Sadly I actually LIKED the bezel for separating things I was working on multiple desktops with, I noticed this after the mod was done of course.

YMMV.

Re:6x 22"? What about one large TV?

[tom17]

I agree.

I also like this... "racing in Dirt 2 on a 3x2 Eyefinity configuration is a totally different experience than playing on a single, smaller screen" - Indeed, but I also think that probably, "racing in Dirt 2 on a 3x2 Eyefinity configuration is just like playing on a single, similar sized screen, except with annoying frames"
Surely a projector would be just as good/better?

One area that I think this kind of setup would be very great is where the 'peripheral' screens were displaying 'peripheral' view-ports so that when you look to the side, you have a 'to the side' camera angle rather than just the widened forward view. For a racing game say, then you could glance to the side for your mirrors and for people coming up beside you (but not level yet) - just like real driving!
I really thought this was what EyeFiniti would be when I first heard of it but was quite disappointed that it was just an expanded screen. I guess it may even be possible to do it without specialist game support, assuming that the 3d world is pretty much rendered fully on-card. If the card has the whole 3d world in its memory for any frame then surely it can generate a new viewport (I'm not up on the internals of modern graphics hardware, is this even viable?)

Oh well.
Tom...

Quadroplex setup

[sanosuke001]

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.