AMD's DX11 Radeons Can Drive Six 30 Displays 439
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."
gunna be great (Score:2, Funny)
Can't wait to build a new computer in 2 years when prices go down and my computer becomes obsolete.
PC gaming rocks.
Re:gunna be great (Score:5, Funny)
Re:gunna be great (Score:5, Funny)
Affordable, graphics on six 30-inch monitors, or playable framerates. Choose 2.
Re:gunna be great (Score:5, Insightful)
Can't wait to build a new computer in 2 years when prices go down and my computer becomes obsolete.
Such is the life of graphics whores.
Meanwhile, the rest of us are happy to play with our HD4350s and GF 6200s, and upgrading only once every five years or so, to the next bargain-bin card, whose R&D was paid by all of you :)
Re:gunna be great (Score:5, Insightful)
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I was briefly intrigued, until I looked around for these mythical "borderless monitors". I merely found a bunch of marketing drivel. Quoting:
Merketing trumps reason again... ;) (Score:3, Interesting)
Most games in multimon scenarios really need odd number of displays; 5 is better than 6 in this case (and you just know some people will say this is unusable, because of monitor bezel in the center)
BTW...goodbye Matrox, last stronghold just went away.
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The summary itself makes it clear they are in a 3x2 configuration so there is no bezel in the center.
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3x2 just makes it a horizontal divider vs. vertical
Re:Merketing trumps reason again... ;) (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think you know what bezel means.
Re:Merketing trumps reason again... ;) (Score:5, Funny)
When your computer is possessed by Satan, you point at the screen and say:
"Look at that bezel bub!"
Re:Merketing trumps reason again... ;) (Score:4, Funny)
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When your computer is possessed by Satan, you point at the screen and say: "Look at that bezel bub!"
and when he gives away your private key you've got a "loose-cypher".
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I do, but apparently I was the one who didn't know what bezel means. Never mind.
Re:Merketing trumps reason again... ;) (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Well, with a few projectors, a camera and some smart software, you could have it all auto adjust perfectly with no discernible lines.
I for one, could easily see the fun in having six 1080p projectors lighting up the screen
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How about 6 projectors pointing in different directions running Milk Drop 2 visualizations of Pink Floyd.
Re:Merketing trumps reason again... ;) (Score:5, Interesting)
Wrong direction. You need NINE displays.
Actually, seriously, it seems like it would be more useful to have a standard 30" display centered in your FOV, and a projected 90" display surrounding it at lower resolution. You still get the peripheral cues, but you're not wasting resolution (and expense) on parts of the display where you can't perceive it. The math and logic is fairly simple, but I've never heard of a card that supports it. (There were some esoteric simulators many years ago that did this, but it never caught on in the wider market.)
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Most games in multimon scenarios really need odd number of displays; 5 is better than 6 in this case
The article states that they expect the most common setup to be 3 monitors (which makes sense).
Re:Merketing trumps reason again... ;) (Score:5, Funny)
Most games in multimon scenarios really need odd number of displays; 5 is better than 6 in this case (and you just know some people will say this is unusable, because of monitor bezel in the center)
Somehow I doubt it supports exactly 6 monitors.
Though on the other hand I went to buy a bomb shelter from this vet with one arm, and he told me that it'd withstand a 40 megaton blast... no more... no less.
Re:Merketing trumps reason again... ;) (Score:5, Funny)
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True, but it's possible that it doesn't support non-rectangular configurations (especially since it presents everything as one big virtual monitor to Windows).
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Games. I would love to have 6 displays but not for games. I can a full screen app in each one. or better yet go to text mode and have 80x25 text resolution on them. So I can really see what I am typing.
How many slots does the card take up? (Score:5, Funny)
I'll bet I can't get more than two of them into my machine, which means I'm still stuck with a maximum of 12 monitors. Dammit.
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From TFA,
Re:How many slots does the card take up? (Score:5, Funny)
But you missed the 220V 3 phase power connector and the freon pipes for cooling.
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3 phase 220 V? And here I was thinking 3 phase was generally 400 V.
Of course, I suppose maybe there's some country out there that uses 220 V 3 phase.
/Mikael
Re:How many slots does the card take up? (Score:5, Informative)
Electricity is fun!
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LOL
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Nah. The power consumption would be high, but not that high. You might even be able to get it all on one circuit without blowing a fuse.
According to the specs, a 30" Dell LCD consumes [dell.com] somewhere between 163 and 250W.
This number is surprisingly high, considering a 27" CRT TV only uses [wordpress.com] approx. 100W, although the same guy measured a 30" Dell LCD to consume approx. 90W, which sounds much more believable. If your LCD is consuming 250W, it's either going to be blindingly bright, or throwing off a serious amount
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Going by the previous generation 4890s, you can fit 4 of them in certain x58 motherboards, Most will support upto 3 however.
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That's just... sad, really.
On the brighter side, I suppose you could now drive four DIVEs [duke.edu] from a single PC.
Re:How many slots does the card take up? (Score:4, Insightful)
The article sucks, that's what. Each card got a 8kx8k maximum resolution, so in theory you could have four such cards with 268 MP total. It's actually better spelled out in the AMD press release...
2. 268 megapixels is supported only with low refresh rates on future generation 8K x 8K display technology. For 3D gaming using current generation monitors and 60Hz refresh rates, 98.4 megapixels can be achieved.
Note that the last one is four times the MP count of this setup, so you should be able to drive a 5120×3200x6 = 98.4 MP display. I wouldn't exactly expect 3D performance at 15360x6400 effective resolution though...
print preview (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Special Sauce for a Whopper? (Score:5, Funny)
AMD has put some special sauce in its next-generation DirectX 11 GPUs to enable support for a whopping six monitors.
Special Sauce for a Whopper, eh? I must have missed the merger announcement between AMD and Burger King.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Special Sauce for a Whopper? (Score:4, Funny)
Rodeo Whopper?
E-peen just keeps getting bigger? (Score:2, Interesting)
Peripheral vision (Score:5, Insightful)
Two words: Peripheral Vision.
Re:Peripheral vision (Score:5, Funny)
Two words: Peripheral Vision.
If I wanted the peripherals in my vision, I'd put the printers in front of the monitor!
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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.
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Re:E-peen just keeps getting bigger? (Score:4, Insightful)
More details and shots of AMD Eyefinity here (Score:5, Informative)
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!
Reminds me of this cool setup (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.stefandidak.com/office/ [stefandidak.com]
Re:Reminds me of this cool setup (Score:5, Insightful)
The significant difference between the Radeon multi-mon setup and what that guy did is that the Radeon presents all the displays as a single display to Windows. You don't have to arrange the monitor icons in the Settings tab of the Display Properties, they all show up as one big monitor. This can be significant sometimes. For instance, on a dual-monitor setup I've seen video players act strangely when split down the middle (the video only played on the left display until the window was moved so the entire video was on the right monitor, and then it appeared).
6 screens or (Score:2, Interesting)
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John Carmack will make you his bitch!
Re:6 screens or (Score:4, Insightful)
considering how fast video card prices drop it'd probably be cheaper just to buy a new, much faster card then to upgrade the memory.
Thats cool! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Thats cool! (Score:4, Informative)
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:Thats cool! (Score:4, Interesting)
With xrandr, xorg.conf is largely redundant.
I can attach an extra monitor to my ATI GPU laptop running Fedora 11 and I don't have to fiddle with xorg.conf at all. The only thing I have to do is setup where I want the laptop screen to appear in relation to the larger LCD display.
Re:Thats cool! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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/
Oblig (Score:3, Insightful)
If the designers of X-Windows built cars, there would be no fewer than five steering wheels hidden about the cockpit, none of which followed the same principles -- but you'd be able to shift gears with your car stereo. Useful feature, that.
- Marus J. Ranum, Digital Equipment Corporation
(Stolen from: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/disaster.html)
*Ducks and runs*
We were doing this in the '90s (Score:2)
We were using X Windows and these fancy BARCO display servers that virtualized a single X-windows display over multiple video cards (everything was host:0, not host:0.1, host:0.2, etc...). This wasn't gamer performance, of course, and CERTAINLY not gamer prices, but we were building energy management control centers for electric utilities... our performance requirements and budget were quite different.
Well, we were doing this in the '80s (Score:2)
You could put 6 video cards into a Mac II (Nubus) and run 6 displays as one giant desktop. Of course, the Apple cards were only 640X480, but some higher res cards were available from third parties like Radius.
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Ah Radius. I still remember our 8.5x11 Radius pivot monitor (first color monitor!!!111) from 1990 or so. I forget the resolution.
Was Anti Aliasing and V-sync off? (Score:3, Insightful)
It sounds impressive but it also sounds like a stunt more than reality.
ATI's reply (Score:5, Funny)
nVidia: Our new DirectX 11 GPUs are able to support six monitors simultaneously.
ATI: Well, the Jerk Store called, and they're running out of you.
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Oups, should have been AMD instead of nVidia.
Re:ATI's reply (Score:5, Funny)
You just know that somebody, somewhere, in a board meeting is saying "Fuck it, we're going to 9 monitors, with an aloe bezel"
Why have LCD resolutions stalled out? (Score:3, Interesting)
I want my 4000x2400 21" display. I want to be able to have tiny letters in high quality anti-aliased fonts and have it look really good. Why hasn't it happened?
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Because nobody else wants that. It's expensive to make higher resolution screens.
EXACTLY! If anything LCDs are going backwards (Score:3, Insightful)
The tube monitor I had in the late 90s ran at 1600x1200. Now over 10 years later my 24" LCD is a paltry 1920x1200. It pisses me off that vertical resolution hasn't increased. There is a reason newspapers and now web pages put text into narrow columns -- readability. My eyes work fine so I don't give a crap that fonts look smaller as dots per inch increase.
Now vendors are cheaping out further on 24" LCDs by using 1920x1080 panels as the default offering. A total lack of progress.
Don't even get me starte
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:4, Interesting)
30" is where the pixel count increases, and the pixel size shrinks a bit. It's those new 27" screens that really rip people off.
20" 1600x1200
20" 1680x1050
22" 1680x1050
24" 1920x1200
27" 1920x1200
30" 2560x1600
(I've started seeing 1366x768 and 1280x720 LCD screens being pushed as desktop monitors, so I think we're actually going backwards.)
What about power? (Score:3, Funny)
Does this thing come with its own small nuclear power plant and liquid nitrogen cooling system?
Frameless monitors (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Frameless monitors (Score:4, Informative)
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:Frameless monitors (Score:4, Informative)
6 full HS projectors.. hmm.. nice (Score:3, Interesting)
On the problem of gaps between screens: Just get a big enough room, 6 full HD projectors and place them and the screens properly and you will not have to worry about all those gaps between screens.. ofcourse that does limit you to 5760*2160 resolution, but it is a small price to pay compared to the cost of the 6 HD projectors..
A happy user of only one full HD projector for games. Though the reolution is less, the image size helps immersion tremendously.
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Traders.
Re:damn! (Score:5, Interesting)
Correct, and traders will hate this. We tried the Matrox TripleHead2Go [matrox.com] a couple of years ago and it stretched the screen across...wait for it...THREE monitors. I never heard so much bitching about how hitting the maximize button made an app take up all three screens. Fortunately Matrox had anticipated this and provided a setting in the drivers to provide the desired functionality. I hope AMD is as insightful.
Re:damn! (Score:4, Informative)
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:damn! (Score:4, Funny)
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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:damn! (Score:5, Interesting)
So, here is the question. If you have 3 screens, why on earth are you maximizing?! Seriously, because I dream of nothing more than to have to turn my head a full 90 degrees in order to read a full line of text.
Because Windows users always maximize their apps. Nobody knows why.
I never understood either why people using my computer (24" @ 1920x1600) always feel the need to maximize every single window which I almost never do except for a few graphical apps like digiKam or BibblePro.
I'm sure they'd do the same across 3 or 6 screens. Probably in Windows the maximize button stops working if you don't use it often enough.
Re:damn! (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe it's because they want to make better use of their screen real estate? Why do people prefer larger computer monitors and TVs? Because you see can see more and see better. I mean, do you also complain that your TV is maximized instead of displaying bits and pieces of other channels next to the program you're currently watching?
Most operating systems today are capable of multitasking, but most users are not. So if you're only using a single application, and you bought a 24" monitor, then why not use that space? If you're watching a movie, you can see a bigger picture. If you're surfing the web, typing a paper, writing code, or working on a spread sheet, you can see more content at once and scroll less.
Most people don't go out and buy a 24" monitor so that they can see more of their desktop background. The better question might be, why not maximize the application you're currently using? Most OSes have a windows manager or task switcher that allows quick and easy switching between programs. Windows even has a desktop shortcut in the quick launch bar for easy access to the desktop. There's really no advantage to not having your windows maximized and fully utilizing your screen real estate. It's also easier to focus on your work when there's nothing else cluttering the screen.
Many programs, such as IDEs or graphics applications like Photoshop or Illustrator, have a Workspace manager. That's because the developers realize that your screen setup and window layout are vital to user productivity and efficiency. With complex applications as these, you often have tons of widgets, toolbars, info panels, etc. that can take up significant display area. So it makes sense to use your screen real estate as efficiently as possible. It doesn't make sense to clutter your monitor with windows that have nothing to do with your current workflow.
On a 1280x1024 display, I usually don't have space to display all the tool panels and windows I need to work efficiently. On my current 1920x1600 display, I have just enough when the Application is maximized. Sure, I can get by on less screen area. But that usually means constantly opening & collapsing tool panels and a lot of scrolling back and forth. A bigger workspace also means I see my drawings in more detail; I can see more code at a time; and I can more easily & accurately navigate long web pages. Additionally, working with an application maximized allows you to better memorize the location of various panels and toolbars since they're always in the same position. Just as switching between different model keyboards leads to slower typing and more typos, a non-maximized window that's a different size and in a different position every time is similarly less efficient.
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Anti-fud (Score:4, Informative)
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]
Re:damn! (Score:5, Funny)
damn!!! i hope this isn't just fud.
I don't think that word means what you think it does . . .
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The post uses irrelevant concepts like the physical size of display, as if that's relevant to a graphics card. GP was just following the post's lead.
Re:damn! (Score:5, Insightful)
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I would if I could find a single card that could run them all that didn't cost $$$$$$$$. I get used 19" LCDs for $20 a pop for a local PC recycler. At 1280x1024 I'd have 11.7mp with six 19". More than enough, and not bad for only $80 more (I already have two).
Re:damn! (Score:4, Funny)
Six used 19" LCDs for 20$ each?
I'm still using a single 17" LCD, you insensitive clod!
(cue follow-up reply with "I'm still using a 14" CRT you insensitive clod")
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Pfft. 14 inches? I'm using lynx on a 5" green-screen. It was good enough for my grand-dad, it's good enough for me.
Re:damn! (Score:5, Funny)
Pfft. 14 inches? I'm using lynx on a 5" green-screen. It was good enough for my grand-dad, it's good enough for me.
5 whole inches? Man, I'm piping this to a punch card printer. After years of listening to the hammering I can "read" it like morse code. It just sounds like music to me. A page like this takes up to four hours, but it's worth it, I can assure you.
Re:damn! (Score:4, Funny)
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Only on Slashdot would you get a pissing contest to see who has the fewest inches... /me pulls out a six-inch, 800x480 eeePC
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http://www.naturalpoint.com/trackir/ [naturalpoint.com]
Re:damn! (Score:5, Funny)
"I really hate having to have one hand on the "stick", and the other trying to set "flight controls" and hit the keys to "look around" when I'm "landing."
Best code-words for masturbation to porn ever.
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I think they're implying, correctly, that larger displays generally have higher screen resolutions than smaller ones.
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The 5870 is apparently more powerful than a 4870x2 or a GTX295, and the GT300 is supposed to be even faster. This next generation of graphics cards are going to be intense.
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What on earth would six simultaneous displays on Windows be useful for in the real world?
There are plenty of people who find multiple monitors very useful. Hell, I'm currently only using one 1920x1200 24" monitor and I need to use virtual desktops quite heavily to feel comfortable with this setup. An ideal setup for me would have at least two more monitors.
I've also noticed something (not directed at you) interesting in that a lot of Windows users seem incapable of understanding why one would want lots of non-maximized windows, or any non-maximized windows for that matter, it's like a whole lot
Re:Home Jumbotron, here we come! (Score:5, Funny)
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The card does OpenGL just fine, in this case it's the user being overly paranoid.