AMD Eyefinity promises 'six panel, one GPU' gaming
Nurse, the screens
AMD's marketing team is obsessed with optics, it seems. No, not the devices used in British bars to accurately dispense measures of spirits, but the transmission and detection of light.
Yesterday, we had AMD Vision, the chip maker's new brand that PC makers can use to indicate 'good', 'better' and 'best' laptops, and today we have Eyefinity.
It may sound like Jar-Jar Binks' description of George Lucas' bank balance, but Eyefinity is actually about multiple monitors. Alas, the reality is a more modest complement of screens than the brandname implies: six, to be precise - the number of screens one of AMD's upcoming DirectX 11 graphics chips can drive at once.
Each screen can run at 2560 x 1600, so that's a whopping 24.7 million pixels in all, or 7680 x 3200 in total.
Shame it can't do anything about the thick grid of black bezels that nudging six monitors up close inevitably introduces.
The DX11 chip has 2.1 billion transistors, AMD said, together capable of 2.5 billion floating-point operations per second.
To put that in context, Intel's upcoming eight-core Nehalem-EX server chip contains 2.3 billion transistors.
AMD is saying no more until it launches the part later this year. DX11 itself won't arrive until Windows 7 does, on 22 October. ®
Bootnote
AMD may wish to proceed with caution. Eyefinity is a word already used by a Sheffield optician and, more importantly, by a US company that produces software for opticians. Does no one in AMD's marketing department use Google?
COMMENTS
Link Simulation
has been doing this for a while. They have an interesting product. The original used Pentagonal LCD panels (somebody had to manufacture them.) and they now have an hd system that uses 18 projectors. This is a company that does military and commercial flight simulation systems. If they can purchase pentagonal displays, so can we.
@JC2 - wider viewpoint is the key
If you want to check out a similar technology now, go google for 'softth' - triplehead in software on two adaptors.
The advantage is basically an enhanced viewpoint, which may or may not be a good idea depending on the game.
In an RPG like Oblivion, you can see more to the sides of yourself when creeping through caves. In flight sims the sides of the plane are visible.
In the case of softth the visually quality is actually worse, because it may be necessary to run at a lower resolution to render on all three monitors at a reasonable frame rate, but the increased immersion may be worth it.
Whether an enhanced viewpoint is cheating or not is a discussion to be held elsewhere.
I'm really looking forward to this. Assuming the card isn't horribly hot and noisy, I can upgrade from two cards to one faster card.
One small problem
Such a vast display will be of no benefit when reading El Reg, which will appear as a thin stripe down the middle two screens, with acres of unused space to the left and right.
*Now* do you see why it is such a bad idea to fix the width of a web-site?
Trademarks
@Rob Dodds - it is so exciting, there is another trademark-obsessed Register reader out there.
Or should that be there is another trademark-obsessed The Register(R) reader out there?
The Register is a registered trademark or trademark of Situation Publishing Ltd in the European Community and other territories.
