Game Testing ATI's Six-Screen Eyefinity System 105
Barence writes "ATI has carted its monstrous six-monitor Eyefinity gaming system to the offices of PC Pro for an extensive hands-on session. The game was Race Driver: GRID, the resolution was a mighty 5,760 x 2,160, and the overall effect was ... a bit hit and miss. There's no denying it has potential, and the level of immersion sounds impressive, but this report complains of problems with bezel correction that currently tarnish the overall effect."
Flatscreen TV (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Flatscreen TV (Score:5, Funny)
Because then you'd be able to see the middle of the screen, and nobody wants that.
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Why don't they make such monitor where the bezels are as minimalistic as possible? Judging by these pictures I couldn't ever play with so much blocked view.
Re:Flatscreen TV (Score:5, Informative)
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Samsung are making a range of thin bezel monitors for eyefinity.
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The immersion is supposed to occur because you can see more to the sides. If the side views are not in my periphery, isn't the effect lost?
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I agree, The setup in the article sucks donkey balls.
Immersion is something like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3jpG3rv4zI [youtube.com]
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Someone commented on the original article about the Samsung 'UTN' and 'UXN' professional displays. This one results in less than a quarter inch edge-to-edge.
http://www.samsung.com/ca/consumer/office/professional-displays/large-format-lcd/LH46MVTLBB/ZA/index.idx?pagetype=prd_detail [samsung.com]
Re:Flatscreen TV (Score:5, Funny)
A big-ass flat-screen TV would not have a resolution of 5760 x 2160, and therefore would have a smaller e-penis.
Re:Flatscreen TV (Score:4, Interesting)
But what if instead of six 1920x1080 displays, I hook up six Matrox TripleHead2Go boxes each with three inexpensive 1280x1024 displays, for nearly 23.6 megapixels of display instead of 12.4 MP (assuming the card can handle 23.6 MP). The digital Matrox boxes have their own bezel adjustments, though they do it by exaggerating the outermost bezel, so you're limited in useful arrangements to six-by-three portrait. 5760x2160 vs. 6144x3840.
But then I think you need the bandwidth of six dual-link DVI ports, one for each Matrox box. Their analog VGA version last I checked didn't have bezel adjustments.
Also, I wonder if they considered using only 5 screens with a single portrait-oriented display in the center to get rid of the center horizon bezel issue. 4920x2160 (10 MP usable) isn't bad and for driving games you don't need as much vertical resolution in the center. Maybe five 16:10 displays instead (5040x2400, 11.52 MP usable)? Or some 2048x1152 displays (5248x2304, just under 11.8 MP usable)?
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Higher resolution displays just often tend to be better quality. They're more likely to be used by consumers for watching movies and such and so they have a target to shoot for there. Not that you can't still buy low res displays, but they're almost always disappointing in comparison to bigger, brighter, higher resolution ones.
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Man, shit, where’s your imagination??
Just put up a couple of HD beamers! On a concave screen. And you’re good. You can even fill all of your viewing area that way.
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Yeah, I dunno. My present solution is a 60" tv with a Ps-3 hooked to it. All this seems...excessive.
(hypocrisy, thy name is em emalb)
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Loser.. I am a "secret" Illegitimate child of the owner of the Dallas Cowboys.. I play halo on their 70 yard wide screen.. Daddy makes Tony Romo play me, and makes it clear he better let me win... :)
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You win the prize! ;-)
You must have one hell of a walk down to the reset button on the console.
That screen is insane. Over 11.500 sq ft of viewing space. Unreal.
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Yeah, I dunno. My present solution is a 60" tv with a Ps-3 hooked to it. All this seems...excessive.
(hypocrisy, thy name is em emalb)
My Ps3 is hooked up to a 10' projector :P
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You should research smaller projectors.
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Why not just use one big-ass flatscreen TV?
That's a fair question.
HDMI 1.4 delivers a single cable solution for 4Kx2K video, Ethernet over HDMI, 3D over HDMI, etc.
The tech for affordable 4Kx2K projection isn't that far off. Epson Develops World's First 4K Compatible HTPS TFT Liquid Crystal Panel for 3LCD Projectors [epson.com]
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That's a fair question. HDMI 1.4 delivers a single cable solution for 4Kx2K video, Ethernet over HDMI, 3D over HDMI, etc.
And here's a fair answer: Because this solution is available today, which is more than you can say for "a big-ass flatscreen TV" that does 4kx2k video.
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Why not just use one big-ass flatscreen TV?
Less pixels is better, um right?
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Why not just use one big-ass flatscreen TV?
Less pixels is better, um right?
If you sit at a reasonable distance, yes?
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If you want peripheral vision immersion at reasonable distances, then you're going to need, oh, let's say, 6 big-ass flatscreen TVs.
One step closer to holodeck (Score:2)
It's the goal of Carrell Killebrew from ATI to make a holodeck.
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Projector (Score:2)
If you're going to have multi-screens with the unavoidable 4-8cm of bezel between them, and a DELL logo right in the middle, you might as well get a projector.
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But I don't have eyefinity eyes yet, so I don't think I could appreciate it.
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They require fairly serious installation, so they aren't cheap, and your system has to compensate for the excessive brightness and image overlap you get where the edges of two or more projectors' throws meet, so installations generally involve one or more cameras and some rather specialized software.
Frankly, I'm a bit skeptical of the value of Eyefinity for most gaming purposes(3 monitors, I can see, for games where a sense of peripheral vision is helpfu
Re:Projector (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with multiple displays, and specifically Matrox' business model, is that it is utterly trivial to add more displays to a card. The most difficult part, and I say this facetiously, is to come up with a break-out connector since the PCI backplate can only fit two full-sized DVI or VGA ports. Mash a bunch of pins into a tiny form-factor, make a cable that splits them back out into regular DVI, and you have yourself an N-way display card. The electronics are just more of the same. If you can make a dual-DVI card, then you can mash eight of those chipsets together on one board and have a 16 DVI card.
What Matrox used to excel at was their RAMDACs, which resulted in better output quality on the VGA. In this age of all-digital interconnects, there is no need for a RAMDAC anymore. It's all digital to digital, the graphics card simply acts as a frame buffer with accelerated drawing routines, all the heavy lifting has been moved to the display itself. With an act like Matrox, the "GPU" component is an underpowered 2D engine designed for low cost, not high performance.
ATI's Eyefinity is a non-starter for gaming, but it is a slap in the face of all these shitty companies that have been selling glorified garbage to multi-display fetishists for so long.
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That's what mini-DisplayPort is for. You can stuff a bunch on a card, and with PCI-e there are motherboards that support up to four cards. So with one of these [gadgetsteria.com] you could have 24 displays!
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Oh, wow, after posting that I realized that is an Eyefinity card, except the article came from over three months ago.
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Um, why? Dual screen (e.g. staring at a bezel) is crap for gaming, but having a large central monitor and a monitor at either side for peripheral vision - that is something worth having. And if you are comparing it to something 30"+, the price is going to be approximately half of what that setup will cost, with more pixels and more area. And no bezel anywhere near the focal point. That's non-trivial, especially when a 30" screen costs more than you might spend on
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Actually I build Viz rooms, The one a competetor install with overlapping projectors ended up looking like crap because they couldn't get the overlap area right. we do it the cheap way and just have them flush against each other and it looks great. Only problem is when the cleaning lady decided to try to dust them and messed up the alignment.
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I saw a 4 monitor display (13" CRT'S IN inverted T) set up on a Quadra 700 back in '93; center, right, left and up mapped to Hellcats Over the Pacific flying game (I think that's what it was called). The guy also has joy stick, throttle, and foot pedals set up. I think the bragging rights was that he was able to do this for under $10k.
Currently, I have 4 1920x1200 displays around my desk, with a horizontal span of 7680 pixels. I've set up 16 spaces (OS X desktops) and now have 122,880 pixels wide to play wi
Doesn't get the resolution (Score:4, Insightful)
One of the reasons that people are interested in this is higher rez. I mean you can just buy a big 42" HDTV or something if you want a large display. Fine, but that's just 1920x1080. Same sort of deal with a projector. Getting one that does HD resolutions isn't hard. However you really don't want to know what a high rez one costs.
Re:Doesn't get the resolution (Score:5, Interesting)
How about 6 projectors aimed properly?
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Just ask your neighbors to cover the side of their house in white plywood for the right screen size
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Uuum, are you... dumb?
Just put the projectors closer!!
You can even use less powerful ones, since there is less surface to light on.
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place them so close to the screen that I have 6 projectors between me and my display, or just far enough away that I am in between my projectors and their destination ?
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Put them above/below you, and turn on keystone correction. Hell, you can put all six on the floor and point them up if you can't afford to hang them from the ceiling (although if you can afford six projectors, you probably can...)
Good luck with that (Score:2)
I'm not saying it can't be done, but it would be a hell of a task. It would be fairly expensive to start with, HD projectors cost a good deal more than computer monitors. Then you'd have to get some array to hold them all for proper aiming. The power and heat problems wouldn't be trivial, you'd need a dedicated circuit, maybe two, and some way of dealing with all the heat from the lights. The noise would be pretty high too, if they weren't isolated.
Once you've got that all take care of, the calibration woul
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One of the reasons that people are interested in this is higher rez. I mean you can just buy a big 42" HDTV or something if you want a large display. Fine, but that's just 1920x1080. Same sort of deal with a projector. Getting one that does HD resolutions isn't hard. However you really don't want to know what a high rez one costs.
This is why a 30" monitor looks so much better then a 42" TV.
Although it's a tech demo, you can do 24 screens (Score:5, Interesting)
From the launch activities for the 5800 family.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6Vf8R_gOec [youtube.com]
24 monitors, 4 cards, 1 PC. All consumer grade. All running Linux. And yes, there is bezel correction.
Yes, there are black lines for the monitors. I couldn't get the budget to do 24 50" Plasmas. But think beyond the demo part of the tech and think about the possibilities.
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For the less-observant, Mr. Tippett speaks from a position of some authority on ATI's Linux doings.
Mr. Tippett: You still have #ati on Freenode? I've been meaning to jump on and check out my channel (humor), but Freenode dumped my registrations.
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I noticed some pretty visible lag in that video between the top left and the rest of the screens. Is that going to be fixed?
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I have never opened up a monitor - the Great Sages who taught me the Way of the Computer warned of deadly capicators and to never attempt such a thing - but what's to stop an ingenious individual from removing the frames on monitors and just sticking them next to one another?
I'd much rather have a 1/16th inch gap over a 1 inch gap between multiple monitors...
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There's not much deadly voltage to worry about in an LCD. The only thing high-voltage is the inverter for the backlight, and it's got so little capacitance that there's just not much of anything there. (And even then, by "high voltage" I mean "a couple of hundred volts," not "a couple thousand volts.")
But it's not like the bezels are there just for show. The LCD panel assemblies themselves, with backlighting, circuitry, a supporting frame, and the other fun stuff that lets them work, extend a fair bit be
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They exist. They just aren't as cheap.
Why have a bezel? (Score:3, Interesting)
Seems like the bezels could be modular caps so you could snap the monitors together. You could have a flexible joint under the bezel cap or have some sort of adapter that would plug the monitors together at a fixed angle. I don't know why no one's done this yet.. The bezel is really not necessary in the middle of the screen. Someone could probably mock this up with a few flat panels and a dremel and a hot glue gun, any takers?
Once that's done, you could further enhance it with a mesh network bus for video and audio. Audio would be especially cool coming out of the center of the monitor panel. You could address it geometrically in 3d space and it could just come out of the right monitor speaker.
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Oh, they have curved lcd's [engadget.com] now too, geeze, I am behind the times.
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Oh, they have curved lcd's [engadget.com] now too, geeze, I am behind the times.
DLP I believe
The solution is simple: (Score:2)
Use multiple video projectors - no bezels.
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Re:The solution is simple: (Score:5, Interesting)
The commercially available setups all tend to require specialized software and one or more cameras(for automatic feedback and correction). This raises the cost substantially above that of the projectors alone. Always a bad sign about the price when you can't find a price sheet [scalabledisplay.com]...
Hopefully, things like Eyefinity, and the falling costs of projectors and webcams, will drag this stuff down into the realm of the affordable at some point in the fairly near future. The software required for edge and geometry correction, particularly automatic machine-vision based stuff, isn't trivial; but it really only has to be written once(the core logic, probably a lot of nasty platform-specific glue that will need doing repeatedly) and the cost of decent projectors and cameras good enough for automatic calibration purposes has been falling over time. If it can go from niche to mass-market, it could become fairly cheap.
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Bezel problems (Score:4, Funny)
To eliminate the unequal bezels problem you only have to use 12 441 600 monitors of 1x1 pixel resolution.
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Driver circuitry is left as an exercise for the reader.
Cabling is left as an exercise for anybody who isn't me.
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They are called LEDs. And “There’s a driver for that!”! (Can I coin that as a new motto for Linux? ^^)
Race Drivin' Panaorama! (Score:4, Interesting)
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This is a bit newer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWnNtUCngXw&feature=related [youtube.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtUBv_UOCXM&feature=related [youtube.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kid%C5%8D_Senshi_Gundam:_Senj%C5%8D_no_Kizuna [wikipedia.org] :).
Really ? (Score:1)
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he is also sitting back 8 or 10 feet from the screens. If the idea is for immersion and peripheral vision, then you need to be up close and surrounded. Sitting back there just means you have very high resolution with shit in the way, and you cant really see the resolution at that distance anyhow ... or at least you wouldnt notice lower res.
Advanced UI (Score:3, Interesting)
Until monitors without bezels are ubiquitous, and affordable, I can't see someone enjoying a game played like this.
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What kind of game would require entire screens of statistics and graphs? I mean, other than EVE online?
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hmm, moving all the UI to other screens, and the market screen, items, cargo containers would be nice.
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Most MMORPG's could take advantage for things like inventory, abilities, chat logs, damage statistics, group party members... I can think of some bad-ass things you could do with simulator games too. Like mimicking the cockpit of a military vehicle, ect.
multiple monitor is a good idea (Score:3, Interesting)
but not to display a higher resolution, but to display more information. For instance, I would definitively love to play starcraft with several view point on multiple screens. Or display detailled city/empire statistic on a secondary screen in civilization. Or a tactical RPG display character statistics (as in FireEmblem DS). Having game that allow you to do this kind of things would really be AWESOME to me.
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^^ This.
I play a bit of WoW. I raid a little, playing a ranged damage class. Raid-support information is a humongous source of screen clutter. With full raid displays enabled, over 50% of my display is raid-related information graphics, not combat scene. If I have to engage a target off my visual centerline, it probably formed under the raid graphics and I have to repoint to look at and select it.
It would be massively nicer if the raid-support info-graphics could be well off to the side, off the battlefield
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God just what i need, A dedicated Monitor for healbot.
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Look into Supreme Commander, it supports multiple monitors
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For instance, I would definitively love to play starcraft with several view point on multiple screens.
That would be awesome, though probably tricky to control. The main problem with that is that it would never be allowed in tournaments - too much of an unfair advantage. Even your friends would probably rage at you. :)
suggestion (Score:4, Interesting)
stagger the monitors depthwise so that adjacent bezels overlap from the point of view of the user. this will cut your bezel problem in half.
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Just a trend (Score:2)
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At the normal distances you sit from a computer monitor, there's only so big you can make the monitor and keep the stuff on the edges readable.
Nobody is complaining of roof pillars in cars... (Score:2)
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thanks to parallax, pillars in a car or plane only block the view to the extent that they exceed the distance between your eyes. on top of that you can just move your head side to side a little bit and see if anything is in your pillar-induced blind spot.
this doesn't work with monitors because the pixels are about the same distance from your eye as the bezels. a head-tracking display would help, but that wasn't mentioned in the article.
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Big difference: In the car or airplane, you can shift your head slightly to see what may have been blocked by the roof pillar or window frame.
You cannot do this with the computer display. Its image is 2-dimensional, so there is no parallax possible.
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Nobody is complaining of roof pillars in cars...
Actually, the front pillars on cars are implicated as a major cause of motorcycle accidents [mccofnsw.org.au]. I can't dig up the original article I remember reading, but there are restrictions on the width of the front pillars of cars sold in the UK, except if there's a window in it. Modern car designs now often feature extremely wide pillars for rigidity and to hold side-impact airbags, so small token windows to get around the law are pretty much the norm.
The top picture in the article I linked demonstrates the problem ver
Tried SoftTH? (Score:1)
Geez Windows catches up with... (Score:1)
MacOS 6.X
It's been possible to do this on Apple's 'open slot' machines since NuBus was the sh*t....
Cheers