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.
