Wednesday 13 July 2011

3 Monitors - Using eyefinity

Hey guys and girls, I have been really busy lately with other things so the blog has unfortunately taken a back seat in recent days, I am hoping to find more time to remedy this.

Anyways, lets get back to it!

Right, for those of you that don't know what eyefinity is (or 3d surround in the case of nvidia) I will give you a brief description followed by some advice.

"Supporting multiple independent display outputs simultaneously, AMD Eyefinity technology delivers innovative graphics display capabilities enabling massive desktop workspaces and ultra-immersive visual environments for the ultimate panoramic computing experience." .... amd.com

So first of all, if you are considering going with eyefinity, this is a little "heads-up" to hopefully save you some time / effort / money (if you didn't do your homework like me).
First of all, the eyefinity setup must use one of the displayport outputs on the graphics cards (don't ask me why) and then any other 2 connections on the card.

Choosing your displays

When choosing your displays you have to bear in bind a couple of things,
1 Price.
2 Space.
3 The width of the bezels.
4 Adapters.

1. Monitors with the displayport socket built in, from what I found have tended to be more expensive than those without.  Please note that this is not the mini displayport found on macs, it is the bigger brother. It is slightly bigger than an HDMI plug however as you can see, only 1 of the corners is rounded.
The Displayport is infact a superior form of display lead however it has not seemed to have become an industry standard (as yet).




2. Having 3 monitors on your desktop will take up alot of room, as I found out after ordering mine. I had to go out and get a new desk the same day as the side monitors were only half on. So measure the space avaliable to you, and either get monitors that will fit in the space you have available or get a bigger desk :P

3. The width of the bezels! This is an important factor when it comes to eyefinity. When you have your monitors side-by-side the width of the bezels are doubled which can be somewhat unsightly. I bought 3 x Iiyama ProLite B2409HDS which has to be said are outstanding monitors; however not only the width of the bezels but the thickness of the lcd unit its self is a bit of a pain (I will explain how my monitors are set up to make this a little more clear).
My center monitor sits forward and each side monitor's bezels sit behind the bezels of the center monitor (to lessen the non viewable area) however as said above, due to the thickness of the panels the side screens look alot more pushed back than I would have liked.
My friend bought 3 LG monitors which I have to say look stunning. Very thin screens and a nice clear, sharp image were a much better choice than mine.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0042D5DGC/ref=oss_product

4. If you are using DVI cables with your monitors and you do not have a displayport on any of the monitors then you will need an ACTIVE displayport to DVI adapter. For some reason (and I'm sure they have a good reason), ATI graphics cards can only run 2 monitors via any other means than a displayport such as DVI or HDMI. The active dongle does some of the work for the GPU and seems to give the monitor some kind of "power on" signal which in turn enables it in the operating system. Without the ACTIVE displayport adapter, you will only be able to use a maximum of 2 monitors.


Right now that all 3 monitors are up and running, you need to set up the operating system to see the monitors, not as 3 seperate displays but rather just a high resolution which spans over all of them.
With 3  1920x1080 monitors, the resolution you should be looking for is 5760 x 1080, however including the bezel compensation, it may be higher than this.

For more information on the setting up of eyefinity, you can watch the following youtube video.


Thanks for reading, I hope this has helped some of you and maybe saved you some time and effort. Happy gaming!

And just a quick example of some gameplay that I have found also:

6 comments:

  1. Thanks for this info man. Gonna save it for the future

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  2. You should try Eyefinity with projectors :3

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  3. lol now wouldnt that be nuts

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  4. I didn't know about eyefinity, thanks for this post!

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  5. Saw this on the CD of a popular video game magazine in Germany and these setups are especially cool for racing games. Thank you for this tutorial!

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  6. You are welcome, thank you for your comment

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