[Guru3D] AMD Eyefinity 3-panel Mixed Resolution review

F

Final8ty

Gawd
Joined
Jun 13, 2006
Messages
1,001
Play your games in Eyefinity ... on different monitors

AMD recently added a new feature to their Catalyst 14.6 Beta drivers, you can now mix several monitor resolutions and still create an Eyefinity (multi-screen) gaming setup. Funky stuff as you can now finally put these old dusty monitors on your attic to use, and yeah we just had to check that out ourselves. So we will take two Full HD monitors and combine them with an odd WFHD (2560x1080) resolution monitor to see if AMD's story holds up. The end result we'll show you is something wide, very wide. To be able to actually games on such a massive resolution we will pair the setup with the beastly AMD Radeon R9 295x2 and will show you that multi-monitor experience.

In the past if you wanted to create an Eyefinity setup, your monitors all had to be of the same size and resolution. Back it up even further into the past and the monitors even needed to be of the same series and brand. A lot has changed and now with Catalyst 14.6 Beta this new driver brought a couple of interesting features to all ya gurus including Mantle support for laptops with Enduro configurations, JPEG Ddecoding acceleration and expanded color control capabilities. In this article however we'll talk about Eyefinity setup in 3x1 solely, yes with Catalyst 14.6 AMD brings mixed resolution support to the table.

But Hilbert - what exactly is mixed resolution support ?

Simply put it allows you to create a single Eyefinity display group while each monitor runs at a different resolution. The feature has become available as with this update Eyefinity received two new display modes, Fit and Expand, which join the traditional Fill mode. With Fit and Expand mode AMD can now adapt to and compensate for mismatched resolutions by creating a 'virtual' desktop that has a different resolution than the monitors. Obviously there are some ground rules to follow, but we will address these in this article. So yes, we'll look at Eyefinity3, we'll build fairly simple multi-monitor setup that entails three monitors out of which one has a different resolution.

Now we'll also show some performance numbers as we'll use that uber-sexy Radeon R9 295x2 dual-GPU marvel of a graphics card, and sure this is Guru3D.com my man, we're all about the numbers man. The end result will be creating a monitor resolution of 6720 x 1080 pixels (yeah baby!). As such we'll record some rather very wide high-definition footage and show you gaming videos in that MASSIVE monitor resolution.

Hawt darn .. this is going to be fun ! But first meet the threefold setup showing it all ...
Click to expand...
http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_eyefinity_3_panel_mixed_resolution_review,1.html
 
It would've been nice if they explored how some of the fill options worked with different vertical resolution monitors, but it looks like AMD has mixed-resolution Eyefinity working. Kudos to their driver team, they've been on a roll lately.
 
Hmm guess I know what I will be playing with tomorrow.. I have a 24inch 1920x1200 monitor and 2 dell 1600x1200 monitors i'll be hooking up to mess with.. Should work out pretty well.. I can post up some pictures if any one is interested.
 
Ozymandias said:
It would've been nice if they explored how some of the fill options worked with different vertical resolution monitors, but it looks like AMD has mixed-resolution Eyefinity working. Kudos to their driver team, they've been on a roll lately.
Click to expand...

you cant do mixxed mode portrait monitors unless they are native portrait.

landscape monitors in portrait mode require the frame buffer to be rotated 90 degrees, eyefinity cant do that unless you do all of them.

for example in a LPL orientation, scanline would be left to right on the two end monitors, but because the portrait monitor is just a rotated landscape monitor scanline would be up and down on the center monitor.

Thats a no-no. the scanlines must be the same accross all the monitors.

A native potrait monitor would obviously fix that problem.
 
Last edited:
This is making me want to go multi-screen again!
 
Wait until Unknown-One and Prime1 show up and somehow spin this to say that "AMD SUCKS LOLILOKIKKKOLOL"
 
The Mac said:
you cant do mixxed mode portrait monitors unless they are native portrait.

landscape monitors in portrait mode require the frame buffer to be rotated 90 degrees, eyefinity cant do that unless you do all of them.

for example in a LPL orientation, scanline would be left to right on the two end monitors, but because the portrait monitor is just a rotated landscape monitor scanline would be up and down on the center monitor.

Thats a no-no. the scanlines must be the same accross all the monitors.

A native potrait monitor would obviously fix that problem.
Click to expand...

I wasn't referring to a PLP setup. You can mix monitors of different vertical resolutions, like 2x 1920x1080 monitors and one 2560x1600 monitor. There's an AMD slide on this page of the review that shows the mixed displays in action with different vertical resolutions (the hidden areas slide). The review used 3 monitors that were all 1080 pixels high, but with different horizontal resolutions, so it didn't really show this feature in action.
 
I have personally tried mixed eye finite with two 900p monitors and one 1050p monitor.

Works like a charm, but there is no way to scale the image, so the centre screen has a noticeably higher DPI, so enemies in my peripherals seem a ton closer than they actually are.

I don't expect a solution to that issue anytime soon, but I've been looking for an excuse to use one of my spare 1050p monitors so it works out.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top