AMD's ATI Eyefinity Technology Review @ [H]

very cool except

Fish eye
Expensive
desk space
motion sickness
the space between each monitor...
 
Bigbacon said:
very cool except

Fish eye
Expensive
desk space
motion sickness
the space between each monitor...
Click to expand...

fish eye wasnt an issue with crt.
it will be chaper when manufactures make TN panel with DP.
get a good thing to make the screens hover in air
motion sickness happens when people watch it from the outside, not playing.
bezel is deleted by the brain and it becomes a non issue.

all and all, its pure enjoyment.

Then some always complains about anything everytime.
:D
 
Motion sickness.
Its more common watching as the movement is reinforced without being behind the wheel.
Its rare for those playing.

Its due to how people compare the input between the visual input and the inner ear input.
So when the signal is mixed and the brain cant make sense of it, and the lag time between moving for example the mouse and what happens on the screen gets to obvious, the brain cant handle it.

People playing games learn to seperate the visual input and the inner ear one so they know what is what when playing.
 
On the issues of bezel management, and side screen distortion: I think a lot of it is going to come down to the game developers implementation.

iRacing.com is a fairly serious racing sim with a whole lot of members using 3 screens via TH2go, and to a smaller extent soft_th. Because of this iRacing implemented some new options a few months ago.

http://members.cox.net/bodido/3screen_options.jpg

This takes care of the bezel issue and the distortion or fish-eye effect. It works brilliantly. I hope other game developers go this route when 3 or more screens get mainstream.
 
Awesome review, probably the best I've seen so far. Thanks Kyle.

--

My triple 30's are almost as excited as I am. ;) I will probably wait until closer to Christmas to see what their xfire on a single board brings, plus my C2D E8500 setup looks like it is going to need an i7 overhaul to do 7680x1600. Regardless, it looks like some research is in order. I should probably wait until all this tech matures some... but you can most likely guess the chances of that. :D
 
sbuckler said:
You seem to be assuming fov in games does matches where you are sitting in relation to the screen, this is an incorrect assumption. e.g. ut2004 had a standard fov of 90 degrees for a 4/3 screen in the days when everyone had 17 inch screens. You do the math - to be correct we should have all had our eyes a few inches from our screens. I play halo on an xbox from my sofa. My fov across the tv must be about 20 degrees, yet the game doesn't give me 20 degree fov in game?

I understand the math, and the angles. I agree if you sit very close to a very wide display that some distortion as seen on the football field might be required. Although to do that you'd need to know the true fov of your head to the screen, and take into account the way people angle the outer screens.

Anyway back on point - you currently have no idea what the users fov to their screen is and they'll probably angle the displays anyway, so the default should be no distortion. Perhaps one day ati will come out with fancier setup where you can input the exact position of your head, the screens, etc and a *little* distortion will be added to counter the angle to the screens.
Click to expand...

I agree. FoV in a first-person game is the in-game character's field of view, not the gamer sitting in front of the screen. If your screen was a "window" into the virtual world, you would have the extreme distortion being described, but also a very small view. You can change the fov to something that looks more natural to you, but this varies from game to game. Obviously with HL2 the default 70 fov doesn't work well on a triple monitor setup.

Edit: It's kind of hard to think about it in that way, that it feels normal to watch what someone else's eyes are seeing from an offset distance.
 
Last edited:
sbuckler said:
You seem to be assuming fov in games does matches where you are sitting in relation to the screen, this is an incorrect assumption. e.g. ut2004 had a standard fov of 90 degrees for a 4/3 screen in the days when everyone had 17 inch screens. You do the math - to be correct we should have all had our eyes a few inches from our screens. I play halo on an xbox from my sofa. My fov across the tv must be about 20 degrees, yet the game doesn't give me 20 degree fov in game?
Click to expand...

i agree with you here, rarely does the fov match the viewer.

I think with the introduction of eyefininity/th2go/ultra high resolution displays, game devs should begin giving us the ability to match the fov in game to our actual seating position.
Some gaves have it, but i think it should be as common of an option as changing the resolution.
 
I have a 3 x 24" Dell setup now and this card is getting me ridiculously excited. The video review pretty much sucked down my entire morning at work. :p

I'm a little torn however--I'm thinking that "bezel interference" is going to bug me more and more eventually. I've heard about some people running a 30" flanked by two 20" (1600 x 1200) monitors in portrait mode, so that the 30" is a bigger "sweet spot" and the smaller monitors cover peripheral vision for immersion and can be also there for office productivity. This setup is also consistently 1600 vertical pixels across, which likely makes it easily compatible with games--I hope!

Has anyone tried out this setup yet?
 
sbuckler said:
All 3D rendering is doing is fooling the brain by drawing on the screen in a way that makes it look 3D, exactly the same as I can draw a 3D image on a piece of paper. If my brain is quite clearly telling me this is wrong because Alyx's head looks twice as wide as it does high then the 3D rendering is wrong.
Click to expand...
You've obviously never taken an art class, because you're obviously not recognizing one point perspective. If you draw with one point perspective, the farther objects get from the point, the wider they become. This is how your eyes see, but the "one point" is always in the center of your vision, so it always looks correct.

When a video game does this, it puts that one point in a fixed position in the middle of the screen. The game relies on you looking at the middle of the screen for things to look correct (and at the proper distance for the selected FOV).

If you can't wrap your head around the concept, I'm sorry...

In the end, though, if you're seeing distortion on the side monitors while looking straight ahead at the center monitor, you either need to SIT CLOSER, or TURN DOWN THE FOV until it looks correct.

It's like when you turn the FOV up to 100 on a single screen and everything looks all warpy and fish-eyed. What do you do? You turn down the FOV until it looks correct!
 
Last edited:
Its really impressive. The Bezels are a bit annoying. I loved the video review and wish I could have seen an RTS game in action. just imagine the game play advantage in Company of heroes with all of that screen real estate. I really wish warcraft 3 supported wide screen. Is an update that takes a few lines of code. I think RTS games will net an actual game play advantage and not just added immersion with this set up.
 
Omg i want that setup so bad. how much would it cost ?
Posted via [H] Mobile Device
 
The one thing I would like to know that this can do is if it can play a movie/tv show (AVI etc) fullscreen while also playing a fullscreen game on a second monitor.
 
videogamer323 said:
The one thing I would like to know that this can do is if it can play a movie/tv show (AVI etc) fullscreen while also playing a fullscreen game on a second monitor.
Click to expand...
Not in Eyefinity mode, but you can do that with a standard multi-monitor setup easily.
 
Really? I have never been able to do it successfully. It always seems to black out the secondary screen. If it means anything I have only owned Nvidia cards so far and non have worked.
 
Sorry. All I have handy right now. If one of you guys want to Torrent it, I will link it on the news page so we get lots of seeds.
Posted via [H] Mobile Device
 
What band is playing at the end of the video showing the games ? I dig the tunes :cool:
 
Thanks, so the song that starts of at the end o your review and showing the triple screens in gaming, right around the 29:00 minute mark ? Its 311 ? Is that new 311 or old school ?
 
I wish I had the money to make one of these setups right now...

Anyway, does anyone know if overscan compensation (the kind where you have the GPU render a slightly smaller resolution and then put a border around it) works with Eyefinity? Seems to me like DLP rear projection would work nicely with this technology if you had the space due to having narrow bezels and low power consumption for their size, but most DLP sets use at least a little overscan.
 
Kyle,

I'm curious how output will work with two cards.

If I have a two card setup (say 4850x2), I understand crossfire will NOT work at this point, but could I utilize a DVI output on the second card for a 3x1 all DVI setup?

If not now, will this config be supported with crossfire is enabled?

Rephrased, can outputs on different cards be in the same "display group" now? later?

It makes sense that the answer is yes given the 24 screen demos, but perhaps those are a special case with the 6 DP output cards.

I'm extremely torn on what to do at this point given that I have a 2407WFP and a 3007WFP to work with! I'm thinking of getting the cards and then hacking together those screens with a CRT just to try it out.
 
You cannot create a display group using outputs from different cards. From what we have heard, it doesn't sound like this will be a supported usage scenario. The demo with 24 monitors was actually 4 instances of a program running rendered side by side and not something the end user can actually accomplish in the windows environment.

Mixed resoloutions and orientations is also not something that is currently supported however these usage scenarios MAY be supported in the future...
 
Is there any technical reason why dell or another company couldn't make monitors that don't have a bezel on the sides? I realise this is a very niche market but 3x30" monitors side by side without the bezel on the sides would probably be gobsmacking.
 
DoubleParadoxx said:
Kyle,

I'm curious how output will work with two cards.

If I have a two card setup (say 4850x2), I understand crossfire will NOT work at this point, but could I utilize a DVI output on the second card for a 3x1 all DVI setup?

If not now, will this config be supported with crossfire is enabled?

Rephrased, can outputs on different cards be in the same "display group" now? later?

It makes sense that the answer is yes given the 24 screen demos, but perhaps those are a special case with the 6 DP output cards.

I'm extremely torn on what to do at this point given that I have a 2407WFP and a 3007WFP to work with! I'm thinking of getting the cards and then hacking together those screens with a CRT just to try it out.
Click to expand...

1. The 4000 series will not be supported, only looking forward. As to the setup you are talking about, I do not know currently, but I am guessing no since AMD has never mentioned this and I have questioned them at great length about triple DVI setups.

2. Don't know, but I don't think so.

3. I don't understand, you will have to be more specific.

4. You cannot use different resolution monitors in an Eyefinity display group.
 
Could you ask if the 2gb cards would have big impact vs. the 1gb cards with Eyefinity, considering the higher resolution?
 
Kyle,

I know this works full screen wonderfully, any possiblity of you testing with windowed mode?

I run Eve-Online with 2 clients and the ablity to drop clients across that display and have forums and TS running as well would be amazing. Currently with windowed you have to be very carefull not to overlap one windowed session on the other monitor as it kills the frame rate.

If Eyefinity treats the 3x1 as one surface then i wont have the overlapping monitor issue.

Very curious if this works like that or not.
 
Kyle or Brent, on the 5870's that will have 6 dp's, will you be able to use a passive adapter to dvi as I can see a lot of cables running everywhere if not.
 
One thing that really bothers me about this technology is the fisheye - horizontally stretched view. Most pc games today support widescreen modes but not super widescreen. Sure you get wider FOV but that stretching is annoying. this is the problem with pc technology in general. since games weren't designed with these uber widescreen resolutions, they either look stretched or from what I say from the Far Cry 2 video, they cut off the top and bottom. Are alot of these games' aspect ratios fixable with hacks/ini edits.
 
this is probably why having 6 monitors would fix this issue since you increase the vertical res, reducing the fisheye. But with bezels getting in the way and the amount of money involved i don't think a 6 monitor setup is feasable for most, even for hardcore gamers.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top