Along with its introduction of the HD 5830, ATI announced the HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 card yesterday, which predictably comes with six DisplayPort outputs and enables that hallowed six-screen gaming overload that the Eyefinity branding has been about since the beginning. Some lucky scribes over at PC Pro have been treated to a live demonstration of what gaming at 5,760 x 2,160 feels like, and their understated response was to describe it as “far more immersive.” No kidding. They did raise the spectral figure of those monitor bezels, however, pointing out that bezel correction — where the image “behind the bezel” is rendered but hidden making the overall display look like a window unto the game world — habitually obscured text and game HUD elements. In their view, the sweet spot remains a triple-screen setup, and we’re inclined to agree (particularly if they look like this). For those interested in getting their multi-monitor gaming up and running, we’ve linked an invaluable guide from HardOCP below, which breaks down how much you can expect from ATI’s current HD 5000 series of cards, and also provides a video guide to setting your rig up.
ATI’s much-rumoured Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition boasts six DisplayPort outputs – although it’s a standard HD 5870 under the hood – and ATI visited the PC Pro Lab yesterday to demonstrate gaming at a mighty resolution of 5,760 x 2,160. PC pro were pleased to see the addition of three monitors didn’t complicate the setup procedure; as before, it’s a case of loading up Catalyst Control Centre, telling the program that you’d like to use Eyefinity, and telling the driver how your panels are positioned. Once that’s done, you’re ready to go – and the initial effect is still very impressive. The amount of desktop space on offer is truly vast, and the main game we’ve tested on Eyefinity 6 – Race Driver: GRID –looked fantastic. The peripheral vision afforded by the increased space both horizontally and vertically meant for a far more immersive experience – we could see our side windows getting damaged, for instance – and the card was more than powerful enough to run the game on its highest settings across the huge resolution. Eyefinity, though, still isn’t without problems – and, in some cases, the increased number of monitors actually makes things worse
Take ATI’s bezel correction, which has recently been introduced in the Eyefinity driver and works by rendering the image that should be behind the bezels before blocking it out. The setup process is charmingly old-school – triangles appear across two monitors and we used an A4 sheet of paper and some on-screen arrows to line the shape up across the two panels – but, in practise, the feature returned mix results.
In-game action was the main beneficiary, with GRID’s various cars and circuits matching up perfectly across the system’s six screens. When compared to our previous encounter with Eyefinity – where objects were uncomfortably skewed across multiple screens – it’s a vast improvement.
The bezel correction tweak also improves the position of several HUD elements. One of our major qualms of the original setup was that maps, objectives and speedometers were position at the far edges of the screens, which made them near-impossible to view amid a busy Crysis firefight or slick Burnout: Paradise race. Now, though, HUD elements are kept closer to the centre of the image and were able to be seen without physically turning our heads.
This new feature doesn’t handle text, tables and menus particularly well, however. Even before the game was booted, we’d spotted problems: every Windows dialogue box, GRID’s installation wizard and the Steam login screen appeared directly in the middle of the image and, consequently, had to be dragged out of the way before they could be used.
These problems were more serious in-game. As our photographs illustrate, the bezels cut off half of the lap counter and numerous menu screens: we couldn’t properly view our race results, points allocations or many of GRID’s navigation screens. The bezels themselves also ran straight across the horizon, which proved more off-putting than the three-screen system and will surely prove off-putting in most games.
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