Idle monitors on ATI Eyefinity GPUs (HD6990 specifically)

[commissarmo]

I have an HD6990 which has 6 mDP outputs, on which I run 5 monitors, 3 of which are WQXGA (30''; 2560x1600) resolution.

I was digging through some of the white papers on AMD's new idling technologies, and I've gathered that if monitors are in sleep mode (or off) the GPU will NOT render to them, and thus won't heat up, for instance, if the monitors are inactive.

What I have not been able to determine though (Presumably I could just run FPS benchmarks with a game to test this in vivo) is whether when say, 4/5 monitors are OFF, DOES THE GPU CONCENTRATE PROCESSING on rendering the solely active monitor?

Presumably if I UNPLUG all the monitors except 1 it would render that one completely, so essentially I'm asking whether or not the card 'detects' a monitor that's plugged in but sleeping/off and is 'smart' enough to put the full rendering power of the card into the monitors that are active?

 

[drums101]

I doubt that it only renders the one monitor in game if all of the other monitors are off....I say this because in the game you have it set to a resolution that includes all of the monitors (an eyefinity setup) so the gpu renders that screen and spits it out to all of the monitors but if the monitor is not on to receive it then it just doesn't get displayed but is still rendered. Now if you have the ingame resolution set to the size of only one monitor then the other monitors will be idle but they dont take any rendering power from the gpu anyways because they are just at desktop

 

[commissarmo]

Ah ok, that makes sense - I neglected to mention, I don't actually run an Eyefinity desktop, I just use the card to power the 5 independent displays.

 

[drums101]

ahh ok then what will happen in game is the game will be displayed on your primary monitor and at the resolution you have chosen....all the other monitors will be at desktop basically sitting idle but I would guess that (never having dealt with a newer ati card) the monitors would stay on and the card wont stop sending signal to them