AMD's DX11 Radeons Can Drive Six 30 Displays

J. Dzhugashvili writes "Whereas most current graphics cards can only drive a pair of displays, AMD has put some special sauce in its next-generation DirectX 11 GPUs to enable support for a whopping six monitors. There's no catch about supported resolutions, either. At an event yesterday, AMD demonstrated a single next-gen Radeon driving six 30" Dell monitors, each with a resolution of 2560x1600, hooked up via DisplayPort. Total resolution: 7680x3200 (or 24.6 megapixels). AMD's drivers present this setup as a single monitor to Windows, so in theory, games don't need to be updated to support it. AMD showed off Dead Space, Left 4 Dead, World of Warcraft, and DiRT 2 running at playable frame rates on the six displays."

Anti-fud

[Petersko]

"i hope this isn't just fud. "

If fud is fear, uncertainty, and doubt, then this is anti-fud.

Finally - a good basis for this: http://ergotron.com/Products/tabid/65/PRDID/196/language/en-CA/default.aspx [ergotron.com]

More details and shots of AMD Eyefinity here

[MojoKid]

Eyefinity is enabled through a combination of hardware and software being developed by AMD. On the hardware front, AMD's upcoming Radeons will sport between 3 and 6 display outputs of various types, DisplayPort, DVI, HDMI, etc. And those outputs will be managed by software currently dubbed SLS, or Single Large Surface. Using the SLS tool, users are able to configure a group of monitors to work with Eyefinity and essentially act as a single, large display.

http://hothardware.com/News/AMD-Eyefinity-MultiDisplay-Technology-In-Action/ [hothardware.com]

7680 x 3200 - that ought to increase your field of view just a tad!

Re:Thats cool!

[hansamurai]

For one, it's ATI, they're awful with Linux drivers. Secondly, seems like anything is possible in xorg.conf, so it's probably possible.

Re:Special Sauce for a Whopper?

[Totenglocke]

You got it wrong - McDonald's has the special sauce on the Big Mac, there's no special sauce on a Whopper. Apparently the person writing the summary doesn't eat much fast food or he'd know to avoid a mixed fast food metaphor like that!

Re:Linux?

[Elbart]

The only interesting thing of DX11 is DirectCompute, aka OpenCL, so it already is obsolete.

Re:Merketing trumps reason again... ;)

[clone53421]

It's the setting in which a gemstone is held, and presumably the meaning has been extended to refer to the plastic case around the edge of the monitor screen in this context.

Re:How many slots does the card take up?

[maino82]

3-phase 220V (or 240V, depending on if you're looking at the nameplate on the equipment or the voltage coming out of the plug) is not-so-commonly used in the US on commercial buildings in residential neighborhoods that are served by 240V transformers where the utility company is too lazy to upgrade their equipment and give you a proper voltage for a commercial building. It's called a high leg delta system where you have a neutral coming off of the mid-point of one of the transformer windings. This creates 120V for 2 of the phases to neutral, 208V for the third phase to neutral (this is the "high leg" part), 240V single phase when you connect line to line and 240V three phase when you connect line to line to line.

Electricity is fun!

Re:damn!

[click2005]

The new ATI card also lets you create groups of monitors in any combination you need. 6 monitors could be used as a 3x1, 1x2 and a single.

Re:Why have LCD resolutions stalled out?

[hyperion2010]

It hasnt happened because the smaller you make the pixels the worse your yield is. If you tried to make a 21" monitor with pixels the size of the ones on my n800 it wouldn't be profitable, you would have to junk too many because of bad/dead pixels. The quality control required for stuff like that this just doesn't make economic sense.

Re:Thats cool!

[PitaBred]

ATI's fglrx driver is awful. I'm hearing very good things about the open source drivers, though. They're moving very quickly forward, and it's proper open-source. If you don't mind compiling a bit, you can get Quake 3 and more (up to OpenGL 1.4 I believe) running on the latest 4xxx Radeons. Next steps from what I hear are GLSL and Gallium3D support, now that KMS is merged into the kernel and mesa is supporting the Radeon DRI.

Go check over at Phoronix [phoronix.com] if you're curious. The ATI employed open-source driver developers post and discuss things pretty much daily.

print preview

[epine]

Perfect. 98 MP is equivalent to 68 square inches at 1200 DPI. Finally, a pixel precise page preview for a 7.5"x9" content region. But I think you'd want this display oriented in portrait mode.

Re:Frameless monitors

[Monkeedude1212]

There are a few already designed like that (by LG I think?)

And the full article mentions that they might make deals with manufacturers who want to produce Bevel-less monitors.

Re:damn!

[geekoid]

becasue he want's it maximized on one screen.

I often do this with 2 screen. what I am working on is maximized, and in my 'secondary' screen there are several apps running that I monitor.

Re:Thats cool!

[Randle_Revar]

No, they are great with Linux drivers. 2.6.32 will have r600/r700 KMS (including dri2, ttm/gem) and Mesa 7.6 (due very soon) has r600/r700 3D good enough for compiz. Mesa 7.7 will have the Gallium3D r600g driver (not sure what state it will be in).

AMD/ATI has not said anything about a new arch for r800, so it is probably very similar to r600/r700 (r300/r400/r500 was another series of three that were very close) and adding it to the r600 driver shouldn't take too long/

Re:Peripheral vision

[Fred_A]

3 words for you: 103 inch LCD [gizmag.com].

Yay for fist size pixels. Way to go Panasonic. Useless on a PC.
Works fine as a TV though I suppose.

Re:Frameless monitors

[morethanapapercert]

There are what are known as open frame monitors by a wide variety of manufacturers. These usually come with very large and clunky metal brackets as they are intended for use by system integrators and kiosks. On most the bracket is removable, leaving you with what is known as a raw panel or raw module. Or you can also get raw panels yourself, but there are a couple of caveats: 1) Most I found are more expensive than simply buying a regular monitor at your local retailer and throwing the bezel away. (see 2) 2) These are usually models intended for mobile or rough duty use. (cars, kiosks etc) so they'll have heavier Plexiglas on them, be lower resolution/refresh/contrast versions and so on. 3) All LCD monitors are framed by a metal channel edging that acts as a clamp to hold the various layers together. In all the newer monitors I have seen disassembled, the metal channelling is pretty close to the same width as the plastic bezel that covers it. Removing it won't gain you much, unless you are prepared to replace the channelling on the connecting sides with something that clamps just as firmly but with less depth. (say 3mmx5mm H channel vs 5mmx5mm C channel) 4) if you do replace the channelling, that will leave you a dead zone. Panels are designed with the channel in mind, so there is a roughly 5mm zone that isn't "addressed" by the controller all the way around. I suppose a really hard core DIY type could file/sand down this dead area, but frankly I don't know what effect this would have on the rest of the panel and I wouldn't want to kill several panels finding out. (Would the liquid crystal goo leak?) I've been messing around with some designs for combining several monitors myself. (one 32" and two 19" monitors in portrait mode on the wings) The best I could come up with on my back of the envelope sketches was to replace the channel on the connecting edges with H profile channel acrylic channel to minimize the gap and the visual impact of the channelling.

Re:Frameless monitors

[Anonymous Coward]

NEC makes the 46-inch MultiSync X461UN, which has a combined 6mm of bezel when mounted side by side. It even allows you to chain 4 and they will split a 1080p signal among the 4. The feature needed with bezels is to compensate for the empty pixels where the bezel is. If you don't compensate for them motion video jumps 6mm. It's enough to be distracting. The NEC compensates for it giving the bezel a window pane illusion.

In true Slashdot fashion, I haven't bothered to read the article, but hopefully the software side of ATI's solution will do this.

Edge blended projection off one playback machine will be fun with these though. It'll be awhile though before the rest of the machine will be able to render HD video at high enough resolutions to make this useful for non-gaming/rendering applications.

Re:gunna be great

[schmiddy]

I was briefly intrigued, until I looked around for these mythical "borderless monitors". I merely found a bunch of marketing drivel. Quoting:

The firm unwrapped the range in Berlin yesterday, but - as journalists debated the benefits of a TV able to display images right to the very edge of the device - Register Hardware discovered that LGâ(TM)s sets don't do what the name suggests. 'Borderless' is more about freedom, according to LG, because the range apparently gives owners the freedom to, say, transfer images over Bluetooth.

link [hexus.net]. So, not borderless at all. Shame, this would actually be a cool feature.