VizWorld.com

Over at CADSpeed, Tony DeYoung has begun a series of articles about the use of AMD’s Eyefinity technology for multi-display CAD systems.  Of course, when you start talking about these “professional” Grade systems you pretty much have to start working with DisplayPort, so the first article is a brief on the current state of DVI and DisplayPort.

But while the graphics card manufacturers embraced DisplayPort early on, the display manufacturers (Apple aside) have only recently made the switch. Beginning in 2010, Asus, Dell, HP LaCie, Lenovo, and NEC released more than 80 displays supporting DisplayPort. But there are still a lot more displays released with only the less expensive DVI or VGA input connectors.

The Advantages of Eyefinity for CAD, Part 1: DVI Monitors and DisplayPort Graphics Cards « CADspeed.

Hardware cad, displayport, eyefinity

We have been talking for awhile about ATI’s Eyefinity and how great it is for gaming. Recently AMD has enable 5×1 Eyefinity where the screens are set up in portrait mode instead of landscape mode. Widescreengamingforum.com has posted a nice video showing off the benefits of this new Eyefinity mode, assuming you have the money to purchase such a setup.

This demo real shows setting up the new Eyefinity 5×1-Portrait Eyefinity mode. It also shows off footage of:
- Heaven Demo (v1)
- HAWX
- Half-Life 2
- Just Cause 2
- Battle Forge

running on five screens. The gameplay video is off an HD Cam, so you can see how it looks while playing.

Note that while you are seeing screens in a 1080p video, the actual setup spans a diagonal of approximately five feet. You’d have to play the video on a 60″ TV and sit about 18″ from it to get the full immersion. The setup is 5x1080x1920 – 10.4M pixels. These five 1080p screens offer 5 the pixels and resolution of an HDTV.

via : Widescreengamingforum.com

Hardware amd, eyefinity

Over at TechEye they take AMD’s latest Eyefinity-6 for a test drive with some popular CAD packages, and contrary to what I originally expected, find it to be surprisingly scalable across 6 screens.

Starting out using Solidworks and using one monitor with the ATI FirePro V9800 brought in a graphical score of 3.81. The next sequence was four monitors running the application and two showing just the windows desktop. To our surprise the actual graphical score of 3.67 had dropped only by 0.14. Finally we pushed the whole six displays into one 5760 x 2400 unit and the final run took us by surprise again, showing a fine drop of only 0.13 with a graphical result of 3.54. The overall monitor increase only saw a very minor decrease in the final graphical output, an exceptionally good result.

I really suspected some pretty heavy impacts on framerates due to the extreme number of pixels you have to push. That resolution is full HD (1080p) across all six displays, great for most people, and to see it only drop by .27 when scaling from 2 to 6 is simply amazing.  It seems to indicate they aren’t fill-rate limited, but I’ld like to see some tests with varying geometric complexity to see how it scales out.  If extremely large models perform as well as simple ones, then.. Just wow.

via Review: AMD-ATI technology will make your eyes boggle – Wanna see six or more of the same or more? This will do it | TechEye.

Hardware amd, eyefinity

Over at Develop3D, they got the scoop on Dassault System’s use of new ATI FirePro V9800 cards that supports the 6-way EyeFinity, and find that it actually works pretty well.  I have to admit, I had to wonder if a single card has the necessary horsepower to push 6 monitors with any decent framerate.  I’m not the only one.

Of course the practice of using a single graphics card to drive multiple monitors also has its critics. AMD rival Nvidia, who can currently only support two monitors with one of its Quadro graphics cards, says that there is not enough 3D performance in a single card to drive high-res powerwalls effectively.

This is a claim refuted by AMD, who explained that the card is already in use at a number of customer sites and there has been positive feedback. Dassault Systèmes, for example, has been testing Catia V5 and V6 with an ATI FirePro V9800 and has reported that performance is still very good after switching from one to six HD resolution screens.

ATI claims a 10% performance penalty when driving 4 monitors, and an adidtional 10% when driving 6.  That seems a bit low to me, as that’s a lot of pixels to push on each frame.  However, they may be simply exploiting popular shortcuts, as typically the 2 screens in the center will hold the bulk of the geometry (The user’s natural tendency to put the main focus front and center), with the remaining 4 screens only partially used.  In the example shown above, the upper-left and lower-right screens are nearly unused.

Of course, there is also the question of resolution.  They say “6 HD screens”, but HD could be 1280×720 or 1920×1080.  I run my big screens at 2560×1600, can this run 6 of those in a timely manner?  I honestly don’t know.

via DEVELOP3D blog – AMD drives six HD monitors from a single ATI FirePro V9800 graphics card. via FireUser

Hardware amd, ati, dassault, eyefinity

Which setup is better in 3×1 multi-display gaming? The GeForce GTX 480 SLI or the Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity6 2GB & 1GB CrossFireX configurations? You should be able to guess the answer. But in case you cannot, [H]ard|OCP has posted an article looking at the 3D Vision Surround experience versus AMD’s Eyefinity.

This evaluation’s focus is on NVIDIA’s Surround Technology supporting multi-display gaming and its performance versus AMD’s Eyefinity all using identical 3×1 Landscape configurations. This will give you an idea how GTX 480 SLI stacks up to 2GB and 1GB HD 5870 CrossFireX in 3×1 gaming at 5760×1200 resolution. We will have a separate performance evaluation on 3D Vision Surround gaming coming up soon as well as articles covering GTX 460 SLI and GTX 470 SLI 3×1 performance.

NVIDIA Surround Technology Performance Review @ [H]ard|OCP

Hardware amd, eyefinity, nvidia, sli

Computex 2010 – AMD Booth Tour from Ryan Shrout on Vimeo.

While we have already had some interesting news come out of AMD this week, we couldn’t leave without stopping by the AMD booth to see what they had on display. While we of course see the normal wall of motherboards and wall of graphics cards, demos of Opteron processors and some of the new Vision-based notebooks, the killer spots were two sets of 5 portrait Samsung displays running HUGE Eyefinity configurations.

via : PC Perspective

Science amd, ati, eyefinity

Guru3d has posted a picture of the new Eyefinity¹² graphics card from Powercooler. This graphics card is based on the AMD Radeon HD 5970 graphics card, and sports 12 mini-DisplayPorts. The graphics card will take up 3 slots. A normal Radeon HD 5970 would come with 2 GB of GDDR5 memory. This new version has 4 GB of GDDR5 memory.

Remember that the Radeon HD 5970 is comprised of two Cypress graphics processors connected by a PCI-Express bridge. A normal Radeon HD 5970 has a core clock of 750 MHz and a memory clock of 1000 MHz. This is slower than Radeon HD 5870 with a core clock of 850 MHz and a memory clock of 1200 MHz.

While this is an interesting technological achievement, I do not think that we will see this sell very many units. The first problem is that not many people will be able to invest in 12 new monitors that support DisplayPort inputs. Not to mention that a 12 monitor wall is huge. Second, I am not sure how well it will perform with the latest games. Third, is that the bezels start to get in the way.

via: Radeon HD 5970 Eyefinity 12 PowerColor @ Guru3d

Hardware amd, ati, eyefinity

AMD has just announced the obvious step of refreshing the entire FirePro line of graphics cards with their newest Evergreen-based chip, that brings DX11, OpenGL3.2 & 4, and Eyefinity support to the entire line.  Tony DeYoung of FireUser.com has a great chart detailing the new cards.

Obvious standouts to me: Faster memory, more memory (think VBO performance), huge increases in number of stream processors (a.k.a shader units), and Eyefinity support on all but the V3800. What I would like to also know is energy consumption in idle mode as well as some noise comparison to previous models. I know the V8800 was significantly better in both regards to its predecessor.

Sadly, it looks like none of them support the full 6-screen Eyefinity configuration, and only the highest-end (V8800) supports 4 displays.  None of them support 3 displays.

Update 2:15pm: I was just contacted by AMD to state that all of the cards, except the lowest-end V3800k, support 3 displays.  I’m currently uncertain of how (if it’s even true), as all of them (except the V8800) only have 2 Displayport connectors.  Unless you can connect the DVI & both displayports at the same time (which seems unlikely to me)….

via The wait is over!  AMD updates entire FirePro line to Evergreen GPUs – DX11, Eyefinity, OpenGL, CAD | FireUser Blog.

Hardware amd, ati, eyefinity, firepro

[H]ard|OCP is back with a performance review of the ATI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity⁶ graphics card. As we described earlier, this card is no different than the regular AMD Radeon HD 5870 with the exception of its having 6 mini-DisplayPorts, and 2 GB of memory. Does having 2 GB of memory help the performance? What does [H]ard|OCP think of the new card?

It boils down to this, when the video cards are not so GPU limited, in the case of multi-GPU CrossFireX, we are able to utilize the frame buffer more. We can crank up more settings, enable higher AA settings if the frame buffer space is there for it. With single-GPU video cards running a high resolution like 5760×1200 we are pushing the limits of the GPUs and not really taxing the frame buffer as much. So, it comes down to the fact that CrossFireX is going to benefit more from a 2GB frame buffer per GPU than single-GPU video cards are at high Eyefinity resolutions.

via ATI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Performance Review @ [H]ard|OCP.

Hardware amd, ati, eyefinity

PC Perspective has posted a video showing Eyefinity using curved displays. My favorite uses rear projectors to get rid of the bezels. Of course, there is some problems with the overlap of projectors, but it is less egregious than the bezels, in my opinion. Another demonstration uses the Ostendo monitors that we talked about originally last year, then posted a followup in February. Check out the PC Perspective site for more info.

via : Eyefinity Demonstrations using Curved Displays

Hardware amd, ati, eyefinity, ostendo, radeon