Fetus Grows a Peripheral Vision (Eyefinity Edition)

Small news here! Although I have quite a bit to say, so grab a coffee or skip this blog if multi-display does not interest you.. or you could simply watch the videos and images to see what I am ranting about ;p

I have finally concluded my rather expensive and secret adventure at having an Eyefinity setup on my computer! Yep, that's right, Eyefinity is within me.. or rather on my desk and it sure is eating up most of the space on it as well. Eyefinity is the name given to a multi-display setup when using ATI hardware, namely my Sapphire Toxic Radeon HD5850. Of course, you can do it with dual monitors, although you would rather have 3 or any other odd number, otherwise you will end up with the monitor's bezels in the middle of your display. Yep, a fetus has opened up his eyes and grown what is known as peripheral vision (I believe), everyone needs to grow up one day, don't we?

I am currently running on a 5760x1080 resolution and let me tell you.. gaming in such a resolution is quite amazing. I can't even think of going back to a regular 16:9 resolution of one monitor, although I don't always have the choice depending on the game I play. Let's take the story from the beginning.

Some of you may have seen my latest created topic in the PC & MAC forum entitled "Multi-Display or 3D?", which of course, hinted at what I was up to at the time. While I have experienced both 3D and multi-display, I found 3D to be an annoyance more than anything over time, to the point where I wish that 3D isn't part of the video game industry's future for too long.. at least until they can refine the technology a little bit. Multi-display though.. now that's something quite useful. Anyone with a dual-monitor setup will know that having more than one display can be useful and, depending on your usage, the more the better.

Being new to ATI and AMD, I decided to check them out and get informed on the different possibilities around them. That's when I learned of the new program called AMD Vision which aims at helping people choose computers, but more importantly, that's when I learned what Eyefinity was. Almost immediately, I tried it out on my own computer despite having only 2 monitors. I first tried it with DiRT 2 as it is ATI Validated for Eyefinity support, and then I tried it with Metro 2033. It took about 5 minutes and I was sold to the technology. Not only does having more monitors provide me with a better interface for video editing (one screen for file manegement, one for the editing, and one for a full screen preview in 1920x1080), but it could provide me with the most immersive technology I had seen in the video game industry in a long time. As humans, we are blessed with a quite impressive peripheral vision, something that was lacking in every single games until now.. When running a game in multi-display, the center monitor will display what you normally see and adds a type peripheral vision, or augments the field of view horizontally on each of the side monitors allowing for a better view all around and a more immersive and realistic 'ambience'. I then wanted to create such an amazing setup, which went a lot faster than I expected..


5760x1080 desktop.

Yes, what you see above is my actual desktop and my icons. Don't bother searching as I do not have any private or adult icons on there, I try to keep my desktop as clean as possible. The icons are displayed on the left-most monitor in reality, and the gadgets on the right-most one. Of course, I can change between a grouped 5760x1080 desktop to 3 or less seperate displays, each at 1920x1080. I used the wallpaper exclusively for this screenshot, as I don't even have it anymore.

Having such a resolution sure comes with problems, as usual, especially on ATI's side. With nVidia, to create what they call a 'Surround display', you need two graphics cards, in which you plug in 3 monitors via DVI. Where ATI eats up nVidia is how you can recreate the same but by using only one graphics card. Indeed, Eyefinity only requires one single GPU, but getting it up and running isn't as simple as using 3 DVI cables.

My own card, the HD5850, comes with 2 DVI-I ports, 1 HDMI and 1 Displayport. Due to the signal used by DVI and HDMI, you cannot use those 3 together to create an Eyefinity setup as it requires too much processing power or something, I'm not quite the expert, but I do know it has something to do with the signals used for DVI and HDMI. This means that you are required to use the Displayport by one of two recommended ways: With a native monitor that supports Displayport, or by using an Active Displayport to DVI adapter (passive ones don't work). This seems easy, but such adapter costs around $100 and up.. doesn't sound that much attractive now, does it? The worst is that a simple research on Internet shows that the vast majority of people experience problems with these adapters, whether it is the monitor now powering up, staying in sleep mode or flickering on and off endlessly. Oh noes!

Worry not! There is a fix, of course, as this flickering (that I personally experienced) seems to be caused by ATI's drivers. Going back to Catalyst 10.3 fixed my problem partially.. The flickering was gone, but the drivers themselves gave me a bunch of errors. In my endless search to a fix for the problem, I decided to try out something else.. something that is not validated by AMD: Displayport to VGA adapters. They cost around $20 to $30, much more appealling than our beautiful $100 adapter which doesn't work 90% of the time. What does it come with, though? Nothing but success. Of course, VGA cables don't offer the higher resolutions that DVI cables can achieve, but it sure can deliver some nice 1920x1080, which is the exact resolution for each of my monitors. Some say there is a quality loss in the image, but I honestly can't see any difference at all between the monitor hooked up to the DP to VGA adapter and the 2 other ones with DVI. My current setup:

Left monitor: DVI-D
Center monitor: DVI-D
Right monitor: Displayport to VGA

That`s pretty much it. I have my Eyefinity setup running flawlessly on the latest drivers and it looks marvelous. Some people believe that there is almost no games supporting it, but truth is, most of the games out there do support multi-display. For example, I have no problems playing Metro 2033 or Sniper: Ghost Warrior in 5760x1080, both of which are not validated or Eyefinity Ready. Even Aquaria, which is an independent release, can be played in this resolution. Some games have problems though, such as Borderlands, which does not scale correctly and cuts the top and bottom of the image, but otherwise most games I have will play perfectly fine using it. It is quite expensive, however, since you need 3 monitors, but overall I feel satisfied and definitely can`t think of going back to a simple monitor for PC gaming.

here I have 2 videos of DiRT 2, one recorded with FRAPs and the other with my camera, which means it is of an awful quality. I strongly apologize for the one recorded with FRAPs as apparently, the song playing in the game is blocked by YouTube, therefore they removed the audio from it. As for the one with the camcorder, you will notice that my left screen is different than the two others and rather slow in resolution changes after being turned on for a long time.. I do have plans on changing it eventually, but for the time being I spent enough money on this lol. Thanks for reading! (if you did).


DiRT 2 - Small Stunts (5760x1080)


DiRT 2 - Three Times The Size (Eyefinity)