Don't upgrade yet

slowlydownwards

Looking to upgrade soon... Sit tight for another bit and put away another chunk from your next pay check, this looks good.

Copy n paste job here, a lot of you have seen this today. For those who haven't, here it is:

http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/10/ati-radeon-eyefinity-unveiled-up-to-six-monitors-on-a-single-ca/#continued

5uspect

Great, now I'll need to pay for 5 more monitors too...

StopNotWorking

The eyefinity thing looks like garbage to me, I have 2 screens and I think thats enough(If not overkill a bit). I'm in work so I dont have the links handy but from what I can recall off hand ATi will be releasing the:

5870 1GB-$299
^^ 2GB-$399
5850-$???

I'll be getting the 1GB 5870, supposedly it's better than a 295! Benches wont be out till the end of the month but the transistor count for it is 2.1 billion. A good 4-500 million transistors more then the 295(I think,I'm working off numbers in my head) and a clock speed of 875Mhz(I think). Like the 4xxx series this will most likely go up to 1Ghz with the release of factory overclocked cards and better coolers. Also the new cards are of a 40nm production so they will run cooler and use less power.

The 5870 uses 6+6(I believe thats the same as the 4870?) I know my 4850x2 uses 6+8pin connections. I don't have the pictures with me but its a love hate looking card, some will consider it very ugly while others will think its great. It's about as long as a 4890 and has 2 DVI-D, 1 hdmi and another connection (The mac one, visualport? something like that).
EDIT: Found a pic.

Slutmonkey57b

Looks like garbage?
You're missing the point.
The major selling point is not just "massive pixels off one card", it's seamless multi-monitor desktop/application space, hardware agnostic. That means mixing your old monitor with a new one (or a second hand one). Drag that old CRT out of storage. Ati just fixed a massive windows flaw.

StopNotWorking

I would hardly consider it a massive flaw, how many people do you know that moan about not being able to stretch their desktops over 4kx3k resolutions? IMO its a contradiction in itself. Most people dont need(Or hell even want) another screen, waste of power and space. Those people that would really want to use eyefinity(for gaming as I cannot see any other function for it) would have to run 3 or 6 screens so they avoid issues with the screen bezels getting in the way of crosshairs/central items.

I just dont see the point in it, windows native support for monitors has always been enough for me. I don't see the need for something like this. The GPUs look great but eyefinity to me just looks like another fad tacked on for extra sales.

Nehaxak

World of Warcraft multiboxers will like this card I guess, will save on the need for a KVM.

Slutmonkey57b

StopNotWorking wrote: »

I would hardly consider it a massive flaw, how many people do you know that moan about not being able to stretch their desktops over 4kx3k resolutions? IMO its a contradiction in itself. Most people dont need(Or hell even want) another screen, waste of power and space. Those people that would really want to use eyefinity(for gaming as I cannot see any other function for it) would have to run 3 or 6 screens so they avoid issues with the screen bezels getting in the way of crosshairs/central items.

I just dont see the point in it, windows native support for monitors has always been enough for me. I don't see the need for something like this. The GPUs look great but eyefinity to me just looks like another fad tacked on for extra sales.

Windows multi-monitor support is two seperate desktops on two monitors, with the "child" desktop being crippled, which leads to all sorts of incompatibility problems. This is much the same as having multiple "virtual" desktops, another solution that annoys me for the simple reason that having to switch between desktops to get at an application is no different to having to switch between full-screen apps on the same desktop. Previous display-spanning options like this have required multiple cards (all the same type), matched monitors, and suffered a major performance hit.

Who wouldn't want to dig out one of their old monitors (or buy an ancient CRT for about €30) to get twice as much screen estate? Even if you're not using it for gaming, anyone that like to have more than 3 apps open at a time is going to have a use for this.

PogMoThoin

Yes, for the last few years we've been pushing up to higher resolutions, but now we're beyond HD its moving to multi screen. I've had dual screen for quite a while, I nonestly would hate to go back to a single screen, I'd even consider a third. There are also dual screen laptop on the horizon


Gizmodo

Eyefinity looks great, all we're waiting for now is monitor manufacturers to perfect the monitor with the extra thin bezel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzGtxlaPQqY

5uspect

I can see it being a hit with the Flight Sim community and other niche groups. I doubt it'll be on the top of most peoples wanted list.

Slutmonkey57b

Edit: According to HardOCP it's DVI LCD panels only (needs displayport or DP.DVI conversion).
Damn you ati! Daaaaammnn yooooouuuu!

StopNotWorking

If you look hard enough you'll find pictures of the cables coming out of the 3 5870s into the screens they used for crysis(Think it was 12) You think mine or your cabling behind our desks look bad? You should of seen the amount of cables coming from those cards. At first I thought they were hdmi but they looked more like usb so I assumed they were displayport. Still looked very very messy.

Also MS flight sim has had multiscreen support for a very long time, one of very first games to do it(well).

TheDonMan

CryEngine3 looks very nice running on Eyefinity:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04dMyeMKHp4

Slutmonkey57b

Flight Sim having mutlimonitor support is an example of one app that had to code its own way around windows' setup.

How many monitors was Crysis running on? 6? Of course you're going to have some cables. To get the bandwidth to drive 24m pixels you're going to need more outputs - VGA/DVI wasn't designed for it.

Eyefinity has extended proper mutlimonitor to any application. No retrofitting, no recoding, no kernel work? The amount of money middleware companies scam^H^H^H^H make out of this market with KVM systems and display splitters and repeaters is incredible.

Apart from anything else, simply running games at the resolutions shown is impressive. There's absolutely nothing not to like here.

Apart from no support for CRT monitors.....

StopNotWorking

It was 24 screens, sorry if I'm coming across as trying to put down the feature. I'm not, I just cant see enough people using it to justify it being implemented. Kind of the same thing as CUDA/GPU physics, they are being accepted now slowly. Maybe this will run the same course.

EDIT: Ooops, sorry it was a flight sim on 24 screens, not crysis. Either way I was only making a point about the amount of cable and which ones I thought they were.

Slutmonkey57b

I can understand the skeptisim. I think multiple monitors is one of those things that until you actually use it, you can't appreciate the use for it. Everyone I know that's moved to two monitors says they can't go back - and that's with the borked windows implementation. CUDA/GPU compute is in the boat that until apps arrive to make use of it, it won't have a great impact, and I can't see people buying cards specifically for GPU compute - if they get a boost out of it all well and good, but it won't prompt an upgrade or influence which card they go for. This, however, is something that people will buy a new GFX card for, and specifically an ATI one.

jetski

why not just buy a 50" from harvey norman

5uspect

jetski wrote: »

why not just buy a 50" from harvey norman

Any TV you buy will be 1080p at the most.
Thats only 1920 x 1080 pixels. Eyefinity allows you to put together 6 monitors monitors (think 6 x 2560 x 1600). You'll need to buy 6 tellys in Harvey Normans.

jetski

Lol

thats serious serious cash for a small increase and besides u have to look at the out lines of the monitors... also ud need some system to run anything at that resolution

5uspect

jetski wrote: »

Lol

thats serious serious cash for a small increase and besides u have to look at the out lines of the monitors... also ud need some system to run anything at that resolution

Well that's the point. You need a new new ATi card that supports eyefinity to run at that resolution. I don't see the point personally but each to their own.

Interestingly enough nvidia seem to be going more for physics with their GT300 chip rather than extreme resolutions like this.

Overheal

How does that even apply to flightsim? It doesnt, really. MultiScreen FSX setups work on different in-game camera views.

bandit197

Overheal wrote: »

How does that even apply to flightsim? It doesnt, really. MultiScreen FSX setups work on different in-game camera views.

A good setup would be having the virtual cockpit spanned over three (or five, two on top in centre for overhead panel) monitors and the sixth for instruments. I believe any combination is possible with eyefinity?
If they bring in bezel managment support in the software like with the Matrox Triplehead2go this could be a huge hit with the virtual flying community.

PogMoThoin

Probably not gonna happen, AMD said that it is working with Samsung Electronics to introduce ultra-thin bezel monitors and compatible stands that can easily be tiled specifically for the ATI Eyefinity experience. Samsung are Amd's business partner in Eyefinity, google Samsung and Eyefinity and You'll see they're mentioned in every review

Griffin87

the arma 2 performance looks great

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2009/09/22/amds_ati_radeon_hd_5870_video_card_review