Topic: Drool: AMD's EyeFinity, 6 Monitors, and 24 million pixels (Read 19266 times)

glynor · « **on:** September 10, 2009, 11:56:04 pm »

Coming soon to a $300-something video card near you. Looks insanely awesome. I suspect that if 3D Games will scale, then video will too.

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/17563

I just wonder if you can put two of those cards in SLI and drive 12 displays...

benn600 · « **Reply #1 on:** September 11, 2009, 08:50:51 am »

I just don't like all the bezel interference. We're back to square one. Monitors/projectors were so great because they removed any edge distortion from rounded glass on CRTs and this is right back there.

I'm waiting for this many pixels on a single set or projector. Of course remember that you have to sit quite closely to see all of the pixels--IF you have excellent vision.

glynor · « **Reply #2 on:** September 11, 2009, 10:49:39 am »

No reason you can't use this technology with 6 Christie's or Barco's and get that same effect with no bezels.

Other than money, of course.

newsposter · « **Reply #3 on:** September 11, 2009, 01:03:13 pm »

there are 5kx5k 'theater quality' projectors availabe for consumer purchase. Their prices start at around $175k

Of course, multi-monitor displays like this (pixels, resolution, color depth) are nothing new to the specialized card makers. The suggested price AMD wants to set is pretty close to the other products already on the market.

Mr ChriZ · « **Reply #4 on:** September 12, 2009, 02:32:59 pm »

I suspect this technology will help drive development of bezeless screens

benn600 · « **Reply #5 on:** September 12, 2009, 06:08:01 pm »

Bezeless screens still do not address the plane issue. You may be sitting and notice a horrible reflection in the upper screen because it is aimed a few degrees further downward. For me anyway, no thanks. That annoys me to no end. One reflection on a screen is bad enough, not to mention a second or third that means the whole room has to be light free--okay, for a gaming session, lights off, maybe...

Daydream · « **Reply #6 on:** September 12, 2009, 08:03:02 pm »

Quote from: glynor on September 10, 2009, 11:56:04 pm

I just wonder if you can put two of those cards in SLI and drive 12 displays...

Didn't AMD demo a system with 4 cards driving 24 monitors? I'm getting one the moment it shows up!

glynor · « **Reply #7 on:** September 12, 2009, 11:55:36 pm »

Quote from: Daydream on September 12, 2009, 08:03:02 pm

Didn't AMD demo a system with 4 cards driving 24 monitors? I'm getting one the moment it shows up!

They did just demo this exact thing: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1069/1/

24 monitors being used in Triple Crossfire as one giant display. Triple Crossfire with three Radeon HD 5870's might just give you the performance to actually drive that much resolution too!

Quote from: newsposter on September 11, 2009, 01:03:13 pm

Of course, multi-monitor displays like this (pixels, resolution, color depth) are nothing new to the specialized card makers. The suggested price AMD wants to set is pretty close to the other products already on the market.

I have one of these multi-monitor displays with that exact specialized hardware at work. This technology from AMD isn't the same at all, and is quite a bit better than even these high-end specialized graphics cards (in fact, I may just grab two of these and replace the cards running our video wall).

It is one thing to scale a PowerPoint slide, or Browser window, or still photo across multiple displays. It is quite another to scale a fullscreen 3D game across multiple displays at high resolutions. Even scaling 1080p video playback across multiple HD displays is tough.

The difference is that those specialized systems use all sorts of hardware tricks to scale even video content across the screen boundaries, and they are quite limited in that regard. For example, the computer that runs my video wall cannot scale video content (or 3D or any other "accelerated" content) across multiple screens if the video is running on that computer itself. Even using very fast decoders and Quad core CPUs and SD video, the framerate drops off a cliff of I scale across screen boundaries. To allow you to scale video across multiple dispays, it has specialized input hardware, which uses specialized hardware scalers. You can scale video input across the screen boundaries, but the video itself has to be running on an external player (BluRay or DVD set top box, or another computer).

Anything that doesn't run through the hardware scaler can't run across monitor boundaries, or playback is unwatchable. Powering 3D accelerated applications across the displays, with no apparent slowdown due to pushing so many megapixels, is unheard of, even in $100k systems, but that's exactly what AMD demoed. On our system (and all others I've investigated) the only way you could run a "game" fullscreen across the entire display would be to use two computers (the server running the wall, and an external computer running the game). Of course, then the game would be running at a lower resolution, like 1080p, and then scaled by the input cards on the video wall server.

That's certainly not the same thing as just running a "game" or "video" at full resolution across multiple displays.

Daydream · « **Reply #8 on:** September 23, 2009, 06:55:50 pm »

Holly smoke! The toy is out! (and supplies already gone)

And the 5xxx comes - between other crazy things - with a super-cool surprise: that card has PAP and will bitstream lossless audio (Dolby TrueHD and DTS-MA)! It's over, Xonar and the rest of +$150 audio cards, wave good-bye!

glynor · « **Reply #9 on:** September 29, 2009, 01:39:23 pm »

I know.... The bitstreaming support is just icing on the cake. For what it's worth, Newegg now has stock on a bunch of the HD 5870 cards. It took a week for them to stay on the "shelves" but they're there now. The HD 5850 is supposedly coming later this week for ~$260, and that will probably be a MUCH better deal for most people who don't have ultra-high-resolution monitors. If you're gaming at 1900x1200 or lower, the HD 5850 will be all you need. (If you're not gaming really at all, wait for the "Juniper" HD 5770/5750 cards, which will have all the same bitstreaming support but slightly lower performance and costs around $150.)

I'm just waiting for the prices to come down a bit after Christmas and then I'll probably be grabbing a HD 5850 (or maybe I'll splurge and grab a 5870). In January, the prices on these will probably come down quite a bit. Nvidia is way behind with this generation, their DX11 GT300-based cards are not likely to ship in volume before January. However, the GT300 will still be a big, massive, monolith of a GPU and will certainly beat the 5870 in performance (despite costing $400+ itself). When the GT300 finally ships early next year, AMD will respond with a nice healthy price cut on these, and I'll be picking one up then!

Daydream · « **Reply #10 on:** September 30, 2009, 10:00:06 pm »

Quote from: glynor on September 29, 2009, 01:39:23 pm

the HD 5850 will be all you need.

Yea, yea, yea... spotted in the wild for a short while, now gone. Not so patiently waiting for stocks to be rebuilt. All eyes on the prize...!

glynor · « **Reply #11 on:** October 02, 2009, 12:02:30 am »

Sapphire card in-stock RIGHT NOW at Newegg. Go go go go go!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102857

Daydream · « **Reply #12 on:** November 21, 2009, 05:09:22 pm »

Did anybody set up a 5xxx card with 3 monitors yet? I'm testing this 5750 and... what Eyefinity??? It does 2 monitors (any combination of the 2 DVI, 1 HDMI, 1 DisplayPort) and that's it. Try to enable the 3rd (Extend desktop) - "To Extend the desktop, a desktop or display must be disabled". Catalyst 9.10, 9.11, 9.12 beta I-don't-know-what, Sapphire online drivers (Catalyst repacked with all Ati stuff) - NO JOY! Did I miss anything?

glynor · « **Reply #13 on:** November 21, 2009, 11:34:13 pm »

Quote from: Daydream on November 21, 2009, 05:09:22 pm

Did anybody set up a 5xxx card with 3 monitors yet? I'm testing this 5750 and... what Eyefinity??? It does 2 monitors (any combination of the 2 DVI, 1 HDMI, 1 DisplayPort) and that's it. Try to enable the 3rd (Extend desktop) - "To Extend the desktop, a desktop or display must be disabled". Catalyst 9.10, 9.11, 9.12 beta I-don't-know-what, Sapphire online drivers (Catalyst repacked with all Ati stuff) - NO JOY! Did I miss anything?

Yeah... Sounds like you're doing it wrong. One thing... To enable three monitors in Eyefinity mode, one of them MUST be a DisplayPort monitor. And, to be absolutely clear, it MUST actually have a native DisplayPort on the monitor itself. You cannot convert a DVI or HDMI monitor using a cheap passive adapter. If you are trying to do this, you can buy an active adapter, but it will run you about $100. Dell makes a good one that works. Apple also makes one but it does not work well with non-Apple displays (and gets terrible reviews, but most of those come from people using non-Apple displays), and I would avoid it and get the Dell one if you need it.

For the other two monitors, you can use either both DVI or one DVI and one HDMI. This is all due to the timing resources available on the card. Both DVI and HDMI (which are internally extremely similar) require special hardware timers, and the 5x00 series cards have two of them, like most graphics cards. Native DisplayPort does not require external timing signals, and so supporting multiple DisplayPort monitors is "cheaper" (hardware-wise) than using DVI. You can't use one of the passive DisplayPort <> DVI adapters, because the DVI monitor still requires the external timing signal, and it isn't available because both hardware timers are being used by the two other DVI monitors. The active adapters provide this timing signal on that the DVI monitor needs.

I'm assuming you knew all of that (or tried it that way anyway), but just to be sure...

Either way... You do NOT extend the desktop via the normal Windows mechanism. The instructions are in the CCC Help file, if you look there. Here's a nice video where a guy shows how to configure it:

http://www.linustechtips.com/ltt-videos/ati-eyefinity-setup-guide

Daydream · « **Reply #14 on:** November 22, 2009, 12:31:16 am »

OK, I'll be outside for awhile, trying to break the record of swear words per minute... in a couple of languages!

...

So, pretty much this is where my dream of having a cheap card driving 3 (or more) monitors stops. Back to the 2 cards setup.
I was suspecting that a $5.22 DisplayPort to DVI adapter (cue for laughs)

is not gonna cut it, but then I'm not sure how this is going to work at any rate. The prices for any DisplayPort LCDs - all what, 4 of them? - are $150-200 higher than a normal LCD of the same size. Expensive adapters are out of the question, it's either freaking working as it should or not at all. So I guess it's not at all.

Looking at that video - BTW, big thanks Glynor, you were dead-on, I knew some of the details but not all - I'm not sure that is how I'd use a system with Eyefinity. The Start button on the left monitor at the bottom, and the close X for a window on the far right monitor at the top.... That idea works for games, but for other apps isn't it somewhat unnatural? (At least until they bring the very thin bezel monitors around...

Coupled with the fact that the guys on Doom9 are struggling for the last 250 posts and 38 tryouts of ffdshow, to make it bitstream Dolby TrueHD and DTS-MA with a 5xxx card, the whole experience becomes rather underwhelming.

Edit: there may be something that doesn't add up here. I can do an expanded display (2 monitors) with the DisplayPort connection (using the DVI adaptor). That shouldn't have worked at all, isn't it?

glynor · « **Reply #15 on:** November 23, 2009, 09:11:35 am »

Quote from: Daydream on November 22, 2009, 12:31:16 am

Edit: there may be something that doesn't add up here. I can do an expanded display (2 monitors) with the DisplayPort connection (using the DVI adaptor). That shouldn't have worked at all, isn't it?

Nope. That works. The card has two of these hardware timers, and will allocate them to the first two monitors that are connected, basically. The problems don't start until you connect three monitors.

The bitstreaming software support isn't quite there yet, but it is coming. It is fully enabled in the drivers, but there are currently no decoders available that fully support it. The Doom9 people are trying to hobble it together. Cyberlink and TheaterTek are both working on official support for it in their next versions of their players/decoders, but they aren't released yet. As of right this very second, it is very difficult to use the bitstreaming support on the 5x00 series cards, but that won't last long (word is that the Cyberlink software supporting it should be out by the end of the year).

Quote from: Daydream on November 22, 2009, 12:31:16 am

So, pretty much this is where my dream of having a cheap card driving 3 (or more) monitors stops. Back to the 2 cards setup.
I was suspecting that a $5.22 DisplayPort to DVI adapter (cue for laughs) is not gonna cut it, but then I'm not sure how this is going to work at any rate. The prices for any DisplayPort LCDs - all what, 4 of them? - are $150-200 higher than a normal LCD of the same size. Expensive adapters are out of the question, it's either freaking working as it should or not at all. So I guess it's not at all.

That's really too bad that you didn't know this ahead of time... I'm sorry.

In reality, it is hard to blame AMD for this. Those Passive DVI<>DisplayPort adapters really "shouldn't" exist. They are forcing the DisplayPort to run completely out-of-specification (effectively turning it into a DVI port). If you had a video card with ONLY DisplayPort on it, those would never work. And, one of the biggest drivers of DisplayPort in the first place was to allow the manufacturers to get out from under the DVI/HDMI payola issue. The DVI/HDMI spec is patent-encumbered, and to be able to use you have to pay both an annual and a per-unit licensing fee. DisplayPort is really a superior specification in many technical ways, as well. However, when you use it connected to a DVI monitor via one of those cheap adapters, you aren't really using DisplayPort. You are using DVI/HDMI through a DisplayPort connector. The video card vendor would still have had to pay up for each port, and would have had to include all of the extra resources that DVI requires.

That is part of the reason that DisplayPort monitors are more expensive. They are much more capable, but require more hardware. DVI is less capable, but requires this additional hardware to be built into the video card rather than the monitor... That's only part of the reason for the price, of course. Right now, most DisplayPort monitors are "premium" in other ways too. Since it is a newer standard, it is generally only included in the high-end models that have full compliments of port clusters, higher-quality panels, and other premium features.

That will change. Next year we will have MANY more DisplayPort models to choose from. The standard HAS been adopted by most of the big players in the computer hardware world. It is just new right now, so there is an economies of scale issue as well.

Quote from: Daydream on November 22, 2009, 12:31:16 am

Looking at that video - BTW, big thanks Glynor, you were dead-on, I knew some of the details but not all - I'm not sure that is how I'd use a system with Eyefinity. The Start button on the left monitor at the bottom, and the close X for a window on the far right monitor at the top.... That idea works for games, but for other apps isn't it somewhat unnatural? (At least until they bring the very thin bezel monitors around...

Yes, this is one of the big problems with Eyefinity. It is really designed for gaming (and, perhaps, video-wall type displays). For standard desktop use, you'd really often be better off using three monitors in a standard extended desktop configuration, with UltraMon. That way the OS remains "aware" of the monitor boundaries, and can use them. Ideally in a few driver revisions, the drivers will provide an easy method to switch back and forth between the two modes. I'd like to game with all three monitors (and maybe sometimes play video scaled across them all), but for regular desktop use, I'd want the standard Windows Extended desktop functionality.

Daydream · « **Reply #16 on:** November 23, 2009, 08:48:12 pm »

You know what bugs me? That I didn't expect the need to read the technological brief on Ati's Eyefinity in order to be informed what works and how. These details should've been displayed (ha!) in big, bright, blinking pink letters, not lost in various PDF files and read-the-fine-print pointers. If that would've been the case the whole Eyefinity thing would've either 1) die a quick death or 2) be relegated to some niche market on some forgotten planet until 2015 or something.

On all the boxes, on all magazines, both in US and Europe (that I happen to read) it's touted as "support 3 monitors", some publications going as far as mentioning 4 monitors (which is a scenario that will never work). It bugs me how it turns out that, well, you have 4 connectors, you will never be able to use them all. "What if I want to have 3 screens and output the sound via HDMI to a receiver?" "Sorry that scenario will never work!"

And Dell... dirty little thieves :> a $100 an active adapter. I think I'm done with multimedia for a couple of days; gonna go and rethink my life.

Read a book maybe. The old style, since I can't buy a Nook cause it's out of stock till January.

Where did these guys learn to run a business?

glynor · « **Reply #17 on:** November 30, 2009, 11:07:21 am »

I really hate to be contrarian, but...

Right on the main Eyefinity page at ati.amd.com it does say: "Driver version 8.66 (Catalyst 9.10) or above is required to support ATI Eyefinity technology and to enable a third display you require one panel with a DisplayPort connector." It is a "footnote" but it is there. The same note is included in the specifications for each of the cards that support Eyefinity. This limitation was also WIDELY reported in the reviews of the cards when they came out.

And... FWIW... Running 3 monitors and a $300 video card really IS a niche market. Period. This is enthusiast-class stuff, not mainstream stuff. If you want mainstream, buy an Xbox.

The Eyefinity technology supports a very high number of monitors. Cards are coming out that will support 6 monitors (though not until next year, and they'll be ALL DisplayPort). You can actually run multiples of these in parallel to support an absurd number of monitors.

The Dell Active adapter isn't price gouging, really. That's just what they cost. Hopefully there will be more choices in the future, but for right now, that's what they are. Keep in mind, the active adapter is effectively doing the job that a "real" DisplayPort monitor's circuitry does, which explains why the DisplayPort monitors are a bit more expensive right now. Hopefully, as DisplayPort becomes more widely deployed next year, the adapters will come down in price due to economies of scale.

Daydream · « **Reply #18 on:** November 30, 2009, 05:47:19 pm »

Quote from: glynor on November 30, 2009, 11:07:21 am

I really hate to be contrarian, but...

Right on the main Eyefinity page at ati.amd.com it does say: "Driver version 8.66 (Catalyst 9.10) or above is required to support ATI Eyefinity technology and to enable a third display you require one panel with a DisplayPort connector." It is a "footnote" but it is there. The same note is included in the specifications for each of the cards that support Eyefinity. This limitation was also WIDELY reported in the reviews of the cards when they came out.

Well I guess we have slightly different angles to look at this - I can say there was wide confusion when the cards came out, by the number of posts on various forums asking exactly the same questions as I was, only that those happened 2 months ago, and I obviously missed the issue. Somehow I did got the message that 6 Display Port cards that will come out will work with Display port only stuff, I just didn't get around the mix and match no-go issue. And the adapter's price, well... the card is $150, I can't see how an adapter like that be worth $100. I'll be better off buying another card. Anyways, it's a good (line of) card(s), even if this feature didn't work as I have planned in my particular case.

Now I keep my hopes up for the lossless tracks bitstreaming; since PowerDVD got it right since last Friday (at least for a good number of receivers if not all; my Onkyo 606 works), it would be pretty awesome to get a MKV -> ffdshow -> bitstream solution at some point.

Lacolo · « **Reply #19 on:** March 07, 2010, 04:20:27 pm »

Hey guys (sorry for the necropost)

I've just gotten a HDMI cable to hook my TV up to my already dual monitor 5850 equiped PC, so I was sad to see that I've gotta have a DisplayPort monitor to use all three monitors at once.

So I've been looking at active adapters. It was said that Dell made a good active adaptor, just wanted to comfirm that this one is indeed active? It doesn't look THAT bulky, which is what I'd be expecting.

http://accessories.dell.com/sna/products/Accessories/productdetail.aspx?c=ca&l=en&s=corp&sku=330-1210

Thanks guys.

Daydream · « **Reply #20 on:** March 07, 2010, 06:39:51 pm »

No! An active adapter needs _power_ (via additional USB connector or some other source) otherwise is not active. This is one, on Dell.

Good luck spending another $100!

Lacolo · « **Reply #21 on:** March 08, 2010, 06:25:31 am »

Damn, yeah okay, seems there is no way around this. Was hoping I'd found a cheap active one.

I'll just have to hold off until I upgrade one of my desktop monitors to a DisplayPort monitor.

INTERACT FORUM

Author Topic: Drool: AMD's EyeFinity, 6 Monitors, and 24 million pixels (Read 19266 times)