New build- 3 monitor display eyefinity question

someone on another forum mentioned that I can set my monitor to 1920 by 1080 with 1:1 scaling so that there will be slight bars on the top and bottom of the screen. then I can use eyefinity at 1920 * 1080 *3 monitors. when i'm not gaming I believe I can disable eyefinity and use window native multimonitor support and use the P2310 at their native 1920*1080 and the U2410 at its native 1920*1200

any thoughts? make sense?

Does anyone have any recommendations on where I might be able to get an answer?

That sounds unfavorable. When you are gaming you will have the monitor border plus those black strips on each side. sucky.

poker around in here, prob lots of info from ppl with the same questions

http://game.amd.com/us-en/crossfirex_about.aspx

i appreciate your comments however I won't have black strips on the sides unless I am using all 3 monitors in portrait mode. if I use them in landscape, they will be on the top and bottom of my center monitor only, and should be negligible. as for the bezels (monitor border) there is really no way around this- if you want multimonitor gaming then you have bezels. manufacturers apparently have many super small bezel monitors being developed for this purpose.

I have heard that when in immersed in a game, the bezels basically aren't noticed. I haven't experienced it myself (never played with multi monitors)

I found the same question on the amd forums. For gaming you would have to change the monitor with the higher resolution to match the resolution of the other monitors. For regular desktop work you can have the monitors at different resolutions. I don't have an answer about the monitors being IPS and TN. Hopefully someone can answer that.

thanks for the confirmation, that is also what I have gathered from the research i have done

as for IPS and TV together, don't think there are any system issues, the only ones I can really imagine are that it might be hard to color match, and the TN panel might have less lag which means the lag on the monitors might be slightly different.

I looked around the amd forums a little more. Not sure if you are aware of this, to use eyefinity with three monitors one of the monitors would have to be connected to the display port. You can use both dvi ports and the display port or dvi port, display port and hdmi port.

Yes thanks I am aware. all 3 of my monitors have both display port and dvi so I should be okay!

I am also trying to do this - in my case using an existing Dell 2407WFP 1920x1200 IPS LCD in the center flanked by two newly bought cheap 23" 1920x1080 TN panels. This way I only had to buy 2 cheap monitors to achieve eyefinity.

Although I got it to work, it was a hassle (mostly because I couldn't figure out the monitor timings). Because I had to force custom timings by overriding the auto-detected driver, it's difficult to switch back to 1920x1200 for non-gaming work (it requires a reboot and driver reconfig each time), so I basically leave the center panel at 1080. Due to this, my advice is just to buy three monitors of exactly the same size and rez, and be done with it.

On the other hand, ATI may add support to the catalyst driver to allow setting of custom options for scaling and maybe even resolution for each of the individual monitors in the group. Then 'mix and match' of all types would be easy. The eyefinity support currently seems very basic.

If you still want to try it - the only way I know of is by creating a custom monitor.inf driver file for the center monitor, to trick the driver into thinking the bigger monitor only supports the resolution of the other two. The approach is described here, with some tutorial info: http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/forum/viewtopic.ph...

In my case, I did finally get this to work, where the 2407WFP is running at 1280x1200, but with only 1080 active lines. I just changed 'v active lines' from 1200 to 1080, and 'v blank' from 35 to 155 in the Phoenix EDID designer (see the link), created and installed my own .inf file. This puts a 120 pixel thick horizontal blank bar at the top of the center panel, keeping my display at 1:1 pixels for quality, and the screen at about the same height as the other two, side monitors, for good eyefinity. The pixels are a tiny bit bigger still on the dell, so the center image is slighly taller. No big deal (but again, if you just got 3 identical monitors, they'd line up perfectly).

It almost worked right out of the box - when I use 'extended desktop' without the eyefinity group, all 3 images all look about the same height (the center monitor is running at 1920x1280, native 1:1 pixels, no GPU or monitor scaling - for 'extended desktop', you can tell each monitor whether to do GPU scaling or to stay centered, and you can have them all at different resolutions).

But when I turn on the eyefinity display group, the center image stays at 1920x1080 pixels, but the GPU scales it up to stretch across 1920x1200, which not only makes the center image too tall, but also blurry due to the interpolation of 1080 lines across 1200 pixels. Ugly!

I must have spent ages serching for a way to get 3 monitors online and in span mode. I finally achieved it by watching this vid.
I am running a HD 5770 and my system being a quad core, means my frame rate got pretty average when playing crysis on 3000 something resoultion. I hope this points more people in the right direction with this.

Remember a lot of games dont support these really high resolutions and your left with a chopped screen. Crysis was the first one that ive tested. But ive seen plenty of vids on youtube with bad company 2 and doom 3. But games realeased in 2010 onwards should be fine, like transformers (which is as confusing as hell on 3 screens). Tombraider underworld wasnt too bad to play, but it really made poor lara look really fat.

So the point here is that my 2x 17inch monitors flanking my center monitor of 21.5 inches works ok. But the resolutions of the smaller monitors brings down the larger monitor's resolution. When playing games you dont tend to give more than a glance on the side monitors. But the bezel effect is definetly there.
Remember to check out that vid to get eyefinity to work. it tells you how to group the monitors.

Hmm given the superior CF scaling going from HD 5k to HD 6k i would really suggest a min HD 6950CF for 5760 x 1080 Eyefinity for best results

HD 6K: Cayman Crossfire in Eyefinity scaling
http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/wiki/AMD_Radeon_69...