Eyefinity Configuration Question (one card for each monitor)

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Rock&Roll

[H]ard|Gawd
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With crossfire and eyefinity having a hard time coexisting, would it be possible to use a single card to drive a single monitor?

This would mean, if I want to do a 3x1 monitor config, I would simply buy 3x 5870's and NOT put them in tri-crossfire. Just have one card drive each monitor.

Perhaps someone here (Brent?, Kyle?, anyone?) could clarify if this is possible.

IMO, if it is not an option, I think AMD/ATI would do well to think about implementing it. This kind of configuration would have better performance than a normal tri-fire config, what with multicard scaling not being 1:1 with a single card. I figure if you could hand each card it's own 1920x1200 chunk of the pie, each card would perform awesomely.



Someone else already provided me a link to this website (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzUyNQ) which shows 4 cards in non-cf mode running a flight sim. There are 4 instances of the game program running on the linux box, and the driver used was an in-house Linux driver.

If you pay close attention, you'll see that the four quadrants of the display move at different times as the camera pans. So there is some sync issue with the kind of demo setup they had there. I don't think running multiple instances of games is a viable solution for end users.
 
I believe a single card will be sufficient enough to power 3 monitors (DP & 2 DVI). Here's one of Kyle's eyefinity reviews where he used a single HD 5870 to run 3 monitors.
 
How would you program 3 independent cards to render the same instance of a game? They needto share a frame buffer, textures, etc... which means you need communication between the cards...Crossfire.
 
I suppose you're right, Antimatter...

And, Ozzie, I posted the question in reflex to reading that review. I personally don't take away from the review that a single card does get it done. And one card shouldn't get it done. I've considered 2560x1600 (4096000 pixels) dual card territory for some time. 3x 1920x1200 (2304000 pixels) is 6912000 pixels, and well beyond what I would ask of one card.
 
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I understand where you're coming from, hopefully Kyle or someone with more knowledge on the subject can chime in.
 
Rock&Roll said:
With crossfire and eyefinity having a hard time coexisting, would it be possible to use a single card to drive a single monitor?

This would mean, if I want to do a 3x1 monitor config, I would simply buy 3x 5870's and NOT put them in tri-crossfire. Just have one card drive each monitor.

Perhaps someone here (Brent?, Kyle?, anyone?) could clarify if this is possible.

IMO, if it is not an option, I think AMD/ATI would do well to think about implementing it. This kind of configuration would have better performance than a normal tri-fire config, what with multicard scaling not being 1:1 with a single card. I figure if you could hand each card it's own 1920x1200 chunk of the pie, each card would perform awesomely.



Someone else already provided me a link to this website (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzUyNQ) which shows 4 cards in non-cf mode running a flight sim. There are 4 instances of the game program running on the linux box, and the driver used was an in-house Linux driver.

If you pay close attention, you'll see that the four quadrants of the display move at different times as the camera pans. So there is some sync issue with the kind of demo setup they had there. I don't think running multiple instances of games is a viable solution for end users.
Click to expand...

To run Eyefinity, all the panels to be grouped must be on the same card.

Running 4 instances of a game on a different card is different than running the same game on 3 pieces of hardware.

You will need driver and application support for this to work. You will need to divide up the output into 3 parts, and have each card render each output. It is probably easier from a technology/development/compatibility standpoint to just CrossFire and have it output to multiple panels.

It is an interesting idea, but I doubt it'll ever happen, it's better that we wait for CrossFire and Eyefinity to mature further.
 
Have they given any sort of eta on xfire and eyefinity. I grabbed a 5850 and 3 lcd's thinking I would just xfire when I had extra cash only to find out it doesn't work :(
 
Well, technically, it does. They just got it working in the 9.12 hotfix drivers. But, it's still something that still has a long way to go to mature.
 
Hate to bump a thread this old butttt

Has anyone seen an update to running eyefinity in linux? Say for example I want to run eyefinity with x2 5870 eyefinity 6 cards to push 12 monitors, is this now supported in the new cata drivers running regular applications? Last I heard, X-plane worked with 24 monitors because the app has multi head support.
 
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