The Eyefinity Challenge with HardOCP

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
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HardOCP and AMD have been working together to get Eyefinity in front of more gamers and gauge their first hand Eyefinity gaming experience.

On Saturday November 14th, here in Dallas, TX we will be having The Eyefinity Challenge. This will be an invitation only event, and yes, we will be extending invitations to HardOCP readers in the DFW metroplex.

What we are doing is setting up a 5 on 5 team gaming/deathmatch scenario. 5 stations with Eyefinity, 5 stations without Eyefinity. You get the picture, right? Which team kicks more ass and does Eyefinity truly impact your gaming experience? There will be other demo stations set up as well to show off Eyefinity. We are planning on having the 6 display 24" Eyefinity demo setup supported by yet-to-be-announced hardware.

HardOCP and AMD will be shooting video at the event and taking before and after interviews with you guys to get us real world feedback on Eyefinity. We will need about 2 hours of your time and if you choose to stay longer and hang out, we have a venue big enough to handle our needs.

If you are part of a professional gaming team located in Dallas, I would love to hear from you. It would be great to have two professionally organized teams go head to head. Also, if you are interested in attending and are sure you have time on November the 14th we will be holding a drawing next week for invitations for HardOCP readers.

If you are not sure what Eyefinity is, I encourage you to give our video review a look.
 
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What game(s) will you be playing?

Call of Duty 4? /cross fingers
 
Bah, only an ocean and more between me and an invitation :p
 
a pro gaming team w/o eyefinity can beat a normal team with eyefinity anyday i think
 
This is cool that you guys are doing this. Hopefully this will bring more people into the eyefinity setup. I personally love mine (3x1 landscape), and multitasking with it is freaking great. There are still some issues with it, but I will never go back to a single monitor again for my main setup. 3x1Ls 4 life.
 
I hope you swap the test groups, and have multiple samples. You could then compare the difference in scores.
 
There are plenty of other threads to discuss the technology in. This thread is about The Eyefinity Challenge. - Kyle
 
Really looking forward to the results on this; another real Life [H] analysis! Thanks Kyle!
 
Are these guys bringing their own equipment? What is the control group? How are you going to standardize the gameplay and player's abilities to tell if it is truly the technology or the player that is causing the advantage? Will you have single large displays vs a multitude of smaller displays using eyefinity? Will you be gauging multitude of eyefinity small displays verse one small display? Will you be using the same cards, or different ones? If you use all AMD cards, what is to say that there isn't something in the card limiting or extending capability to influence Eyefinity.

In short, there is no real way to scientifically prove Eyefinity helps the gaming experience at all without an indepth lengthy study involving quite a large number of different people, hardware, setups, and situations. You should call this exactly what it is. The EPT, Eyefinity Propaganda Tour. I have been using multiple display setups since the Matrox Parhelia came out, and last I checked the "Eyefinity" technology has been out for ages in different forms and was pioneered by Matrox long ago. I have already seen people do setups of 6-12 displays using Nvidia and ATI cards in conjunction with Matrox technology (dualhead2go and triplehead2go) long before this came out.

While I applaud them for including this in a single card, I honestly fail to see the significance for the average user, or even most high end users. It is truly a niche market.
 
Too bad the Parhelia was crap, had barely any support and couldn't drive the resolutions it touted. Yeah, pioneered for sure.
 
Karndog said:
5970?!?! :D
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It's a little early for a refresh to be in the hands of reviewers. Why don't we try the 5870X2 since that isn't exactly "officially announced" but there seems to be enough leaks to prove it's existence is already out there in the hands of some lucky reviewers.

That's right I'm looking at you big [H]arderators that run this site. :p

On a more relevant note, I can not wait to put my name in for this drawing. I'm just about done my probationary period here at work and I have over a week of vacation accumulated already!
:D
 
Derfman said:
It's a little early for a refresh to be in the hands of reviewers. Why don't we try the 5870X2 since that isn't exactly "officially announced" but there seems to be enough leaks to prove it's existence is already out there in the hands of some lucky reviewers.
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Its not called the 5870x2, AMD dropped the "x2" brand name and called their dual GPU card the 5970
 
Awesome.:eek: Great to see such enthusiastic support for this technology.

I wish I lived closer to Dallas.

I have used EyeFinity on my own hardware and found it to be a very workable technology for gaming. My only gripe is the bezel of the monitors, which unfortunately can't be helped. I've played FEAR2,HL2,COD5,and a little Borderlands. My experience was very positive. I'm anxious to see this up and running with CrossFireX.

I look forward to the write-up following the 14th.
 
NoOther said:
Are these guys bringing their own equipment? What is the control group? How are you going to standardize the gameplay and player's abilities to tell if it is truly the technology or the player that is causing the advantage? Will you have single large displays vs a multitude of smaller displays using eyefinity? Will you be gauging multitude of eyefinity small displays verse one small display? Will you be using the same cards, or different ones? If you use all AMD cards, what is to say that there isn't something in the card limiting or extending capability to influence Eyefinity.

In short, there is no real way to scientifically prove Eyefinity helps the gaming experience at all without an indepth lengthy study involving quite a large number of different people, hardware, setups, and situations. You should call this exactly what it is. The EPT, Eyefinity Propaganda Tour. I have been using multiple display setups since the Matrox Parhelia came out, and last I checked the "Eyefinity" technology has been out for ages in different forms and was pioneered by Matrox long ago. I have already seen people do setups of 6-12 displays using Nvidia and ATI cards in conjunction with Matrox technology (dualhead2go and triplehead2go) long before this came out.

While I applaud them for including this in a single card, I honestly fail to see the significance for the average user, or even most high end users. It is truly a niche market.
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Equipment will be supplied. Groups of 20 will be brought in to play for 1.5 hours every 2 hours.

This is not a scientific study and we never presented it as such. This is a bunch of gamers getting to experience the technology and see if it impacts their gaming experience. Nothing more, nothing less.

I am sorry you see it for something other than what it is. Your opinions are noted and you need not post in this thread again.
 
NoOther said:
Are these guys bringing their own equipment? What is the control group? How are you going to standardize the gameplay and player's abilities to tell if it is truly the technology or the player that is causing the advantage? Will you have single large displays vs a multitude of smaller displays using eyefinity? Will you be gauging multitude of eyefinity small displays verse one small display? Will you be using the same cards, or different ones? If you use all AMD cards, what is to say that there isn't something in the card limiting or extending capability to influence Eyefinity.

In short, there is no real way to scientifically prove Eyefinity helps the gaming experience at all without an indepth lengthy study involving quite a large number of different people, hardware, setups, and situations. You should call this exactly what it is. The EPT, Eyefinity Propaganda Tour. I have been using multiple display setups since the Matrox Parhelia came out, and last I checked the "Eyefinity" technology has been out for ages in different forms and was pioneered by Matrox long ago. I have already seen people do setups of 6-12 displays using Nvidia and ATI cards in conjunction with Matrox technology (dualhead2go and triplehead2go) long before this came out.

While I applaud them for including this in a single card, I honestly fail to see the significance for the average user, or even most high end users. It is truly a niche market.
Click to expand...

So what setups beside eyefinity can run 5760x1200 resolution with 4xaa on operation flashpoint 2 and maintain a nice average framerate?
 
Emret said:
a pro gaming team w/o eyefinity can beat a normal team with eyefinity anyday i think
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I hardly think anyone doubts this. The real question is, if there's no difference in skill, which team wins more often? My honest opinion is that it is highly dependent on the game you're playing. If the game played were Counter-Strike or Call of Duty, then my money is on very little difference (if any). In games like these, sound is much more important than your vision. A game like Battlefield, I would wager has a much bigger impact with Eyefinity.
 
I seriously hope you guys switch the temas from an Eyefinity environment to a Non Eyefinity Environment. Back and forth if possible and record the results.
 
Sweet stuff. Looking forward to hearing what the guys have to say about playing with and without Eyefinity.

Don't invite me, I'll be out in Weatherford all day hunting though. :p
 
I'm surprised that everyone just assumes that eyefinity will either be roughly the same or better in terms of FPS.
I like playing cstrike on a smaller screen because the action is much closer to the focal point of the eyes and less of it in the periphery.

Of course this is all relative to how close you sit. A bigger screen but sitting further away would be the same as a small screen while sitting close.
What bothers me about eyefinity is that it seems like people will be playing the same distance from the screen that they would be playing from their single, smaller, screen.

edit* it might be that I am unaware of the FOV intricacies that eyefinity uses, which would change my opinion significantly.
 
A setup with 3 projectors would be the most awesome.

Even using 3 Pico Projectors would be cool.
 
Invite enough people and monitor sales will double in the DFW area. :D Last time I was at Fry's a few weeks ago I saw a guy carting out 3x24" Asus monitors. IMO Eyefinity will be a bigger change for gaming than SLI/crossfire ever was. Unlike SLI, it is easy to justify 3 monitors for times you are not gaming.
 
Mehen said:
I'm surprised that everyone just assumes that eyefinity will either be roughly the same or better in terms of FPS.
I like playing cstrike on a smaller screen because the action is much closer to the focal point of the eyes and less of it in the periphery.

Of course this is all relative to how close you sit. A bigger screen but sitting further away would be the same as a small screen while sitting close.
What bothers me about eyefinity is that it seems like people will be playing the same distance from the screen that they would be playing from their single, smaller, screen.

edit* it might be that I am unaware of the FOV intricacies that eyefinity uses, which would change my opinion significantly.
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For competitions, gamers often choose less eyecandy and resolution as aid to aim and shoot better. Eyefinity is not about FPS and neither is [H]. This you can see in any review and the purpose of this event even. Its all about the gameplay and the reviews shows what settings you can have while maintaining gameplay. Then they show what FPS they got with optimal settings:
We focus on quality and immersion of the gameplay experience rather than how many frames per second the card can get in a canned benchmark or prerecorded timedemo situation that often do not represent real gameplay like you would experience at home. Then we will follow with apples-to-apples testing based on real gameplay as well.
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Triplehead gaming is about having main action of center display, while having larger view of the world added to left and right for more immersion. The goal is usually to have same vertical FOV while adding to the horizontal FOV with the extra screens. Here's CS-source (use mouseover to see the change of FOV):
http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/screenshots/cs-source-th2go.php
 
I think this meet-up is an awesome idea. I've been doing 3-monitor gaming for awhile now, and I really enjoy it.
 
Unoid said:
A setup with 3 projectors would be the most awesome.

Even using 3 Pico Projectors would be cool.
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yeah would be awesome. It's a shame those pico projectors have a such a low resolution, I don't mind the low brightness (doesn't matter in the dark) and the fact that you don't have to change bulbs is great, but the res kills it, maybe here soon they will be up to par.

Always the diy route as well.....
 
hmm.. this could be really neat. What part of the DFW area are you in?

I'm near the DFW airport :p
 
Karndog said:
Its not called the 5870x2, AMD dropped the "x2" brand name and called their dual GPU card the 5970
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Ahhh well that is a pleasant change then. But it will always be an X2 card to me. ;)

So this will allow us to goof around and have some mad gaming fun on a top of the line Eyefinity setup... I can't wait to put my name in the hat. ;)
 
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Hah and on my birthday no less... I'll see if I can wrangle up some of the old TAU cs crew. Been wanting to see this in action ever since that review was posted!
 
They just might give Kyle and company and those attending updates on where the thin bezel stands.

Of course we all will get to hear the juicey news soon after. :)


P.S. and the bezel management. :p
 
I live in the Dalls are and would love to see Eyfinity in action. I have been wanting to try it out, but the bezel thickness and the DP to DVI/HDMI adapter are my concerns, so seeing how it actually looks close up would be nice and could push me over the edge. The video was awesome, but you can only get so much from that.
 
I just want to know- what game is that? It looks like it might be Dirt2. Is it? :D

Thanks!
 
awesome work guys.. i hope this actually works out and AMD continues to work with you guys because eyefinity could be a great thing.. keep up the good work and great idea's.. now if only i lived in texas.. :(
 
Jesus Christ Kyle, this is a genius Idea. Were I not going to NY this weekend I would definitely make the trip out that way just to go to this. I can't wait to get a look at the video of the event.
 
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