EyeFinity with 3 monitors - first impression

[Horrgakx]

I've been running 2 monitors for photo editing, single for gaming.
I decided to bit the bullet after reading ATI's info on EyeFinity as it looks pretty good. So I've had a chance to play around with it and I'm actually not hugely impressed at first glance.

It's posibly advantage for picture editing with Lightroom and Photoshop. Possibly a tad better because it's easy to get LR on 2 screens and PS on the third.

However gaming is disappointing. Because the graphics card has to shuffle a lot more pixels around the resolution has to be reduced from potential max and also the effects have to be turned down. Even on one notch below full res and the detail turned to the lowest possible, the frame rate still suffers.
And it's not a real advantage with the 'side' views either because of severe distortion of the perspective / parallax. Straight after I went back to a single monitor and found that I actually preferred the faster frame rate and better graphics of a single monitor.

First impressions are quite poor, not really worth the extra expense of another monitor. Perhaps 3 monitors should be run from two cards in parallel - but that is a very expensive way of doing it. Not as easy and visually impressive as ATI make out...

Then, don't mention the multi-stand for 3x monitors which is expensive. I'm balancing mine on; my amp, centre speaker, and the graphics card retail box.

This could be a £1,500 project to get three monitors working with 'passable' speed.
If you're using desktop apps then you could run six screens without problem. But three screens is a gaming disadvantage.

 

[rockyjohn]

What card are you using?

 

[Horrgakx]

Ah sorry - updated above.
It's an XFX branded ATI 5870 (1Gb).

 

[iwantamd7970]

It should have been obvious from the beginning that it takes quite a bit of horsepower to drive 3 monitor resolutions. At the very least crossfire 6850.

Secondly how is it a gaming disadvantage? It's a gaming advantage because you get far more FOV (you can see everything around you).

 

[Ninja Pants]

I personally think gaming in eyefinity is simply awesome. Not even sure I could go back to single screen and ever be happy. But I understand it is personal preference and I do have a colleague that prefers single screen gaming.

That said I think you may have overestimated what you could achieve, performance wise, on a 5870. And I agree with iwantamd6970, how is it a disadvantage?

 

[Horrgakx]

It's the weird distortion at the edges. I suppose there's no other way around, it's like when you stitch a very wide panorama.

Looking at some pictures of EyeFinity it's like looking through a window at the landscape. But what I've seen so far isn't like that, the edges aren't natural.

 

[iwantamd7970]

Meh - it's too bad ASUS, Acer, etc. don't make 40" monitors that can display ultra high (2160p) resolutions

 

[Horrgakx]

And another thing I forgot - the Catalyst Control Panel allows me to save presets but it won't remember the layout of the screens. Example; I change to a preset I saved but the mouse disappears off the left of the centre monitor to appear on the right monitor. That's a very basic thing - but extremely annoying.