We've been fortunate enough to spend
a bit of time with an
Eyefinity setup before, but up until now, it's been somewhat of a hassle to get a fully functional six-screen setup into a consumer's home. Today, AMD is taking the legwork out of the equation with the introduction of the Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition, a standalone GPU with 2GB of GDDR5 memory and innate support for pushing a half-dozen panels at once. Outside of that, it's essentially the same card that
we saw last September, and based on the cadre of reviews that we rounded up, the doubled memory bank doesn't do much to boost frame rates. What it
does do, however, is enable six-screen gaming. Unfortunately (though understandably), this type of gaming scenario is only meant for a select segment of users, and many critics found the novelty wearing off exceptionally quick. In fact, it wasn't long before
NeoSeeker became fed up with the bezels ruining the experience, and just about everyone agreed that you needed to sit a good half-mile away to really enjoy it. Either way, we'd encourage you to hit up
Hot Hardware's collection of videos before biting the bullet, buying up an extra five LCDs and then regretting it for the rest of your Earthly life.
Read - Hot Hardware
Read - AnandTech
Read - NeoSeeker
Read - Rage3D
Read - PC Perspective
Read - TweakTown
Read - FiringSquad
Read - Tom's Hardware
Read - ExtremeTech
Read - Hexus
posted March 31st 2010 10:36AM
@MRCUR
xfx is awesome..lifetime warranties can't be beat
@hexideciml - I have to agree there. I've had two 5850s from them and I've been impressed with both.
so i wonder when they will put the 6 display outs on a 5970...I'm sure the frame rates would def get a healthy boost from the dual GPUs
Why isn't it obvious to use 6 HD projectors? I mean... since money is no object.. (at least one not found in my wallet).
For the price of 6 LCD displays, wouldn't it make more sense developing actually immersive visual experiences?
I am sure the old "eyephones" of VR yore can be scaled to become cheaper, lighter, and less intrusive. Maybe the cycles wasted in computing images which we can't see used for head/eye tracking (I assume the idea is nto produce immersive 360 display environments, but human field of vision is nowhere near that, its more like 120 odd degrees with almost half of those degrees being used by peripheral vision which can't cope with much detail).
The 6 channel eyefinity makes sense for collaborative immersive environments in which many people interact in the same room with the same data set. Like the old VR rooms that SGI used to power, which were basically 6 projectors (4 walls + 2 for ceiling and floor) synchronized.
This card would be great for BUSINESS use(or if you are an evil overlord), not so much for gaming. This is much better and cleaner than other methods to display on multiple monitors.
@Imogen Heap - I totally agree with you there. I could see it working great in something like a trade show video wall situation. Or in a boutique environment (like a custom simulator experience) maybe. But the average Joe will probably only use 2 (maybe 3) screens if they go true multi-display.
Makes me wonder if you could coordinate displays in an inverted "T" configuration? Ideal for a flight sim (left, right, ahead, up), but there would have to be some programming to handle a non-rectangular display area.
I wonder how this card would perform on a single screen @ 1920x1200
@F430 wow... that would be awesome... 1000 fps in DiRT 2!!!
ok, imagine how overkill this is for the average gamer, now imagine how overkill FOUR of these cards in crossfire, THATS 24 30" DISPLAYS, and a total cort of about $25,000, time to enter in game shows!!! lol