A nice writeup from graphics analyst Jon Peddie covers the growing market of large-scale visualization (multiple-screens) and does a great job drilling down to the main reason why they’ve become so popular recently:

In the past, circa 1990, large-scale visualization systems were built by Evans and Sutherland, SGI, and various military contractors like General Electric, Lockheed, and Mechdyne. These systems sold for $100,000 to a few million dollars. The costs were due to installation, and low-volume state-of-the-art equipment such as high-resolution bright projectors, large powerful workstations, and custom software.

Today, it’s possible to replicate those expensive systems for under $20,000 (not including physical installation and modifications.) And that brings me to the thesis of this discussion – the amazing visualization capabilities offered today on the PC from AMD and Nvidia.

Systems like EyeFinity are really making this more attractive for users, and anyone who’s ever used multiple display can vouch for the amazing impact it can have on your workflow:  The extra screen real-estate makes multitasking and cross-program workflow a breeze.

However, I really loved this sentence later on.

I’ve been testing the systems in our lab using COTS simulation programs otherwise known as FPS games. I’ve run FPS simulation programs on a six monitor API system, and S3D FPS simulation programs on an Nvidia S3D surround system. In both cases, I was extremely satisfied with the performance and the only complaint was the size of the bezels.

I can just imagine a *wink wink* *nod nod* throws in there for good measure.

via The New Visualization – Comments – Blogs.

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