Hopefully the HD5870 will drop in price eventually. I think I will probably purchase it once a rebate or something comes out for it. I can't wait to get a couple extra monitors so I can triple display game. Hopefully new games in the future will be built to maximize the advantages a triple display setup provides!
I hope they start releasing monitors with very very thin bezels.
Well multiple monitors supported is great if your game can support it. I would hope that I can get some use out of my older monitors again if I do this. So. Does anyone know where in he UK these are available to order. My HD4850 is quite a nice card however. I had to do quite a bit of surgery to replace a failing fan - It was a Sapphire card btw. I was thinking get a straight replace or maybe up to a 4870 or 90. This looks like the better option though. So how soon before Nvidia releases a mainstream 4 monitor card?
I suppose I could have 2 non crossfired of these and run 6 monitors like Terry Pratchett
Thanks to the new architecture, you can crossfire these cards to display on more than 3 or 6 displays.
There is another version of this card coming out called the Eyefinity Six which uses 6 mini display ports and can display onto 6 different displays. If you crossfire these across 4 different cards, you can display across 24 different screens. Considering the number of pixels that is I doubt many games would be runnable across such a set up , but it's a cool concept none the less.
I think now that this technology is much more prevalently out there, game developers are going to be much more willing to optimize their games to be able to display across triple screens. They will probably now consider to put the HUD elements on the middle screen instead of having them stretched across the side screens, making checking those much more of a hassle than a "HUD" is supposed to be. They also need to optimize the aspect ratio so that they reduce the amount of fish eye that the an ultra wide screen aspect ratio might have. They'd need to make sure the FOV is acceptable without stretching the things on the edges of the triple monitor setup too far. Another thing that ATi needs to fix is the bezel compensation software. They have yet to release the software necessary for the GPU to compensate for the bezels in the screen. Currently if you have look at a face or whatever stretched across a bezel across 2 displays it is split directly in half, which can look very weird. Matrox has already developed the drivers for their TripleHead2Go to compensate for this and makes it so that the bezels are accounted for when displaying such a face. Even though the bezel is technically going to 'block' the pixels behind it, it should look much more natural as it just seems like you are peering through windows instead.
I personally am going to wait until some new displays come out with much thinner bezels and have DP support. It seems that a lot of monitors that are under 24" don't have displayports, which makes finding my 3rd monitor that much more difficult. Since I'd rather stick with the 1680x1050 resolution of my 22"s I'm hesitant to upgrade to the 24" as that would mean the GPU would have to push more pixels and therefore have a performance hit. Currently the Eyefinity technology can only output across triple screens in their native resolutions, but they might be able to add additional functionality in the future to allow that to happen.
Comments
Hopefully the HD5870 will drop in price eventually. I think I will probably purchase it once a rebate or something comes out for it. I can't wait to get a couple extra monitors so I can triple display game. Hopefully new games in the future will be built to maximize the advantages a triple display setup provides!
I hope they start releasing monitors with very very thin bezels.
Well multiple monitors supported is great if your game can support it. I would hope that I can get some use out of my older monitors again if I do this. So. Does anyone know where in he UK these are available to order. My HD4850 is quite a nice card however. I had to do quite a bit of surgery to replace a failing fan - It was a Sapphire card btw. I was thinking get a straight replace or maybe up to a 4870 or 90. This looks like the better option though. So how soon before Nvidia releases a mainstream 4 monitor card?
I suppose I could have 2 non crossfired of these and run 6 monitors like Terry Pratchett
Thanks to the new architecture, you can crossfire these cards to display on more than 3 or 6 displays.
There is another version of this card coming out called the Eyefinity Six which uses 6 mini display ports and can display onto 6 different displays. If you crossfire these across 4 different cards, you can display across 24 different screens. Considering the number of pixels that is I doubt many games would be runnable across such a set up , but it's a cool concept none the less.
I think now that this technology is much more prevalently out there, game developers are going to be much more willing to optimize their games to be able to display across triple screens. They will probably now consider to put the HUD elements on the middle screen instead of having them stretched across the side screens, making checking those much more of a hassle than a "HUD" is supposed to be. They also need to optimize the aspect ratio so that they reduce the amount of fish eye that the an ultra wide screen aspect ratio might have. They'd need to make sure the FOV is acceptable without stretching the things on the edges of the triple monitor setup too far. Another thing that ATi needs to fix is the bezel compensation software. They have yet to release the software necessary for the GPU to compensate for the bezels in the screen. Currently if you have look at a face or whatever stretched across a bezel across 2 displays it is split directly in half, which can look very weird. Matrox has already developed the drivers for their TripleHead2Go to compensate for this and makes it so that the bezels are accounted for when displaying such a face. Even though the bezel is technically going to 'block' the pixels behind it, it should look much more natural as it just seems like you are peering through windows instead.
I personally am going to wait until some new displays come out with much thinner bezels and have DP support. It seems that a lot of monitors that are under 24" don't have displayports, which makes finding my 3rd monitor that much more difficult. Since I'd rather stick with the 1680x1050 resolution of my 22"s I'm hesitant to upgrade to the 24" as that would mean the GPU would have to push more pixels and therefore have a performance hit. Currently the Eyefinity technology can only output across triple screens in their native resolutions, but they might be able to add additional functionality in the future to allow that to happen.