Hands-on: Radeon HD 6990 Running Eyefinity 5x1

[silky salamandr]

Yep cool just to say you have it but its not for me. Love all the bezels and stuff stretched through them.

 

[goatsword]

After you use Eyefinity for more about an hour the bezels just disappear. I'm amazed by it, and I've only done 3x1. The biggest plus is that the screens "surround" you. No TV can bend in the way 3 or 5 monitors can provide that sense of being "in" the game.

 

[Zeh]

The issue with such high resolutions is that a lot of things are going to be ridiculously hard to read/see unless you manually increase their size. The tiny (relative to total display size) desktop icons on the far left would be a pain.

 

[caeden]

it is funny to me how this works. Back in the CRT days Matrox put out the parhelia card which could (with some mods) do this with almost any game (though not at the best frame rate). Then came the age of the high res flat panel, and everyone dropped back down to 1 screen. Now we are upping the screens again, just before the next jump in resolution. Then we will all be back down to 1 super high res screen yet again in a year or 2. But some are right, gaming with the screens around you is way cooler than having just one flat screen. But if 3D is to take off then a setup like this could be problematic.

 

[Trialsking]

[citation][nom]footsoldier[/nom]I don't understand, people can use that money to buy a 50" plasma tv. What's the point of connecting 5 monitors together? I don't get it, would anyone fill in the gap for me please?[/citation]
Don't think inches. Think pixels. A 50" display will "only" be 1920x1080= 2073600 pixels or 2 mega pixel display.

the 5 display shown here is 5400x1920=10368000 or 10 mega pixels. 5 times as much detail in pixels.

 

[jryan388]

I'm more excited for dirt3 than any eyefinity setup. This is nothing new.

 

[alidan]

[citation][nom]liquidchild[/nom]all this cenimassive crap everyone is talking about is silly...samsung makes LEDs that have a .2 inch bezel and it wont cost you 10 gs for 3 40 inch LEDs like it does from that ripoff site.(or at least a ripoff for a private setup) Even if your a tard and get them from best buy it would run you 3k at most. Besides all you have to do is get a run of the mill LED with around a 1 inch bezel and put the other 2 screens bezels behind the middle tvs...that is what i did YOU DO NOT PERCEIVE A ONE INCH BEZEL WHEN GAMING and its doesn't matter for work related apps[/citation]

some people wont notice it. here let me put it this way.

i had a friend who had 10 dead/stuck pixles, he didnt notice them, but they were a MAJOR distraction for me.

i gave a monitor away, because it had A dead pixle, i sent from a new sub 1080p lcd to a 5 year old crt, just because of one that i couldn't unsee.

you want to talk a 1 inch bezle? maybe if it was only 2 and a 3 monitor setup with a raceing game, but no way in hell could i play a game the way they have it set up in the video up there.

for desktop purposes, bezel doesn't matter, for gaming, unless its 5mm or less i wouldn't even consider it outside racing and flight sims.

 

[srirambond007]

I would like to setup something like this wide, but with a single monitor and simulate a proper car cockpit with wheel, gears and pedals.. A perfect replica of car cockpit!!

 

[gti88]

3 projectors with a proper screen would do the job much better.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPopmEcLihw

 

[cburke82]

3 projectors with a proper screen would do the job much better.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPopmEcLihw

problem with projectors is you have to have a very dark room. I used to see home audio/video and people would by these real nice projectors and return them saying the quality sucked. Well they where fine but unless you can block out almost ALL the light from a room it will look washed out

 

[joytech22]

I wish I worked for you guy's, such a epic job to review and write your thoughts down for others to read.

 

[gti88]

BTW, Markus, did you say to AMD that these bezels suck?

 

[dco]

5 monitors sounds good in theory but that setup looks so impractical for gaming, you have too much screen space to view for a single user.
But it definately has a place.....somewhere

 

[sudeshc]

its really amazing but what pulls me away is the monitors bezel which dosent gives a neat feel.

 

[neo700]

[citation][nom]waikano[/nom]Get rid of the Bezels and I would be game.[/citation]
what is Bezels

 

[Mark Heath]

It sort of looks like having all the stats (health ammo those sorts of things) on the extreme left or right would make it difficult to quickly glance at :/

 

[bin1127]

...the bezels. you can try to fool yourself that they aren't there until one day you completely lose it.

 

[verbalizer]

so-so, it is somewhat impressive but not blown away by any means...

 

[dark_lord69]

That's pretty awesome and all but...
look at the left monitor...
now look at the right monitor...
You had to turn your head didn't you?
I'll stick to 1 big screen.
Personally I use a 1080p 37" TV as a monitor... I don't think I'll be changing my monitor setup anytime soon.

 

[dark_lord69]

[citation][nom]neo700[/nom]what is Bezels[/citation]
A bezel is the plastic edge around the monitor.

 

[verbalizer]

" You had to turn your head didn't you? "
^+1
LMAO..

" Peripheral vision is a part of vision that occurs outside the very center of gaze. There is a broad set of non-central points in the field of view that is included in the notion of peripheral vision. "Far peripheral" vision exists at the edges of the field of view, "mid-peripheral" vision exists in the middle of the field of view, and "near-peripheral", sometimes referred to as "para-central" vision, exists adjacent to the center of gaze. "

 

[Spanky Deluxe]

They really need to add portrait-landscape-portrait support and multiple display sizes. The best multi-display setup, in my opinion, is two 1600x1200 20" monitors in portrait mode either side of a 30" 2560x1600 screen. It's probably about as big as that setup in this video but with only two breaks rather than four. You get a nice big screen to see everything on and then two smaller screens for peripheral vision.

 

[megamanx00]

:O

want

 

[Sabiancym]

I have an eyefinity 3x1 running with my 5970 and the catalyst control center is impossible to configure correctly to get the bezels compensated for. One screen is always slightly above or below the others and it's a pain.

Plus eyefinity is so hit and miss. It's only really worth it on a few games and most take a lot of tweaking to get working correctly.

WOW is the only game that eyefinity worked flawlessly on for me.

 

[TeraMedia]

What I want to know is why is eyefinity designed only for a flat array of displays?

In MSFT flight sim, you can open a window and specify a view for that window. You can then put that window anywhere in your display area. So what if you could create a view representing looking left 45 degrees, and another representing looking right 45 degrees. Then you could angle the peripheral displays towards the user (at the intended viewing angle) and get two benefits: 1) avoid the visual distortion that would be caused by placing a forward-facing image at an angle, and 2) increase the overall horizontal viewing angle. THAT, in my opinion, would be something. And yes, you would have to turn your head, but that's the point. In a real race / flight / war / fight / whatever, you have to turn your head.

I would take such technology, and use three projectors to have front, left and right wall images. THAT would be immersive.

I too believe that eyefinity should allow for mixed monitors, in terms of resolution, orientation and pixel pitch. The center monitor should have a higher resolution (e.g. 1080p or 2160p) since that's where the eye can see best. The side monitors really only need something like half of that to still provide an immersive experience.