AMD Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition: One Card, Six Screens
Three Monitors (5760x1080): One/Two Cards
Here’s the thing about gaming across six displays: unless the game you’re playing doesn’t center its action in the middle of the desktop surface, it’s outright distracting to cope with 1.5” of bezel right where you’d expect the barrel of your rifle to be. DiRT 2 is perhaps the only exception in our benchmark suite to this tendency toward centralization.
At least until Samsung’s thin-bezel LCDs emerge, hopefully restoring the suspension of disbelief you get when playing through your favorite title, it’s frankly more realistic to play across three screens in one display group while leaving the other three independent or in a second display group (AMD’s Catalyst driver facilitates multiple display groups).
Thus, we also ran benchmarks with three monitors at 5760x1080. In almost every case, you see a single Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 handling that resolution without a problem. CrossFire doesn’t buy as much additional performance, but it’s still able to serve up impressive boosts in Bad Company 2 and Far Cry 2, especially.
The scaling here is a little less pronounced than the six-display results presented a page ago, but we’re still seeing increases where they matter most.
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phantomtrooper I would hate playing with that much black area between screens. I will stick with my 1080p monitor thank you.Reply -
megamanx00 Glad they compared the 1GB and 2GB cards in a 3x1 setup. Glad I got my 5870 instead of waiting for a 2GB card :D. Even so, I want some thin bezel monitors before I hook up three of them. The bezel on my HP LCD is just to think so I'm not keen on buying another two.Reply -
duk3 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125322&cm_re=5870-_-14-125-322-_-ProductReply
Immediate availability? Yes.
Even in stock! (When linked :P ) -
ltcommander_data So I guess Apple's miniDP connector is quite useful after-all and is now seeing adoption outside of Macs.Reply
It's too bad you didn't test GTA IV like you used to do. I believe GTA IV at max settings exceeds 1GB of VRAM usage so perhaps 2GB graphics cards may be of some use assuming the game isn't still CPU limited despite 12 threads with the Core i7 980X. At the very least, I'm guessing Liberty City at 6048x2276 would be amazing. -
oldscotch Obviously, the best solution is a 3x3 grid of displays to make sure your centre focus is not interfered with.Reply
Lesse, that'd be 5760 x 3240.
No sweat ;) -
So, I guess if you already have a 1GB 5870 and 3x1 Eyefinity setup, the only advantage of the 2GB version is being able to pile on the AA/AF effects and still have a playable frame rate.Reply