[Guru3D] AMD Eyefinity 3-panel Mixed Resolution review

[Final8ty]

Play your games in Eyefinity ... on different monitors

AMD recently added a new feature to their Catalyst 14.6 Beta drivers, you can now mix several monitor resolutions and still create an Eyefinity (multi-screen) gaming setup. Funky stuff as you can now finally put these old dusty monitors on your attic to use, and yeah we just had to check that out ourselves. So we will take two Full HD monitors and combine them with an odd WFHD (2560x1080) resolution monitor to see if AMD's story holds up. The end result we'll show you is something wide, very wide. To be able to actually games on such a massive resolution we will pair the setup with the beastly AMD Radeon R9 295x2 and will show you that multi-monitor experience.

In the past if you wanted to create an Eyefinity setup, your monitors all had to be of the same size and resolution. Back it up even further into the past and the monitors even needed to be of the same series and brand. A lot has changed and now with Catalyst 14.6 Beta this new driver brought a couple of interesting features to all ya gurus including Mantle support for laptops with Enduro configurations, JPEG Ddecoding acceleration and expanded color control capabilities. In this article however we'll talk about Eyefinity setup in 3x1 solely, yes with Catalyst 14.6 AMD brings mixed resolution support to the table.

But Hilbert - what exactly is mixed resolution support ?

Simply put it allows you to create a single Eyefinity display group while each monitor runs at a different resolution. The feature has become available as with this update Eyefinity received two new display modes, Fit and Expand, which join the traditional Fill mode. With Fit and Expand mode AMD can now adapt to and compensate for mismatched resolutions by creating a 'virtual' desktop that has a different resolution than the monitors. Obviously there are some ground rules to follow, but we will address these in this article. So yes, we'll look at Eyefinity3, we'll build fairly simple multi-monitor setup that entails three monitors out of which one has a different resolution.

Now we'll also show some performance numbers as we'll use that uber-sexy Radeon R9 295x2 dual-GPU marvel of a graphics card, and sure this is Guru3D.com my man, we're all about the numbers man. The end result will be creating a monitor resolution of 6720 x 1080 pixels (yeah baby!). As such we'll record some rather very wide high-definition footage and show you gaming videos in that MASSIVE monitor resolution.

Hawt darn .. this is going to be fun ! But first meet the threefold setup showing it all ...

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_eyefinity_3_panel_mixed_resolution_review,1.html

 

[Lonyo]

Amazing, the official solutions from hardware manufacturers has finally caught up with what could be done by some random dude many years ago with SoftTH.

 

[wand3r3r]

Awesome, now I can dust off my third monitor to have peripheral views. I can't wait to try this out.

 

[Final8ty]

Amazing, the official solutions from hardware manufacturers has finally caught up with what could be done by some random dude many years ago with SoftTH.

Not quite as SoftTH can do PLP.

 

[ElFenix]

this would be a pretty killer flight sim setup with a 34" WQHD monitor in the middle flanked by 2 27" QHD screens on each side.

 

[KaRLiToS]

this would be a pretty killer flight sim setup with a 34" WQHD monitor in the middle flanked by 2 27" QHD screens on each side.

I agree, but it would require a lot of GPU power :twisted:

That is 12,326,400 Pixels / 12,3 MegaPixels -- (3440x1440)*((2560x1440)*2)

 

[jackstar7]

I agree, but it would require a lot of GPU power :twisted:

That is 12,326,400 Pixels / 12,3 MegaPixels -- (3440x1440)*((2560x1440)*2)

Sorry for the bump, but has anyone done or seen this? I could find nothing in my googling, but I'm very curious to see if I could make a couple 290s or something push this out for Valve games and other non-intensive games that could look HUGE!

 

[KaRLiToS]

Sorry for the bump, but has anyone done or seen this? I could find nothing in my googling, but I'm very curious to see if I could make a couple 290s or something push this out for Valve games and other non-intensive games that could look HUGE!

With 3 or 4 R9 290, you will be fine. I have 3 x 1440p with 4 x 290x and I cannot say anything negative outside of the newest games are always running like crap the first month or two. (Referring to COD Advanced warfare, AC: Unity and Far Cry 4)

Most games will work fine out of the box, but recently in the past month, I'm really disapointed at the developpers.

 

[jackstar7]

Okay... then my path is getting clearer... just need to see freesync reviews in a couple months along with whatever nV and AMD are bringing in the spring.

Pick up another cheap 27" along with a center 34" and enter the silly zone.

 

[Elfear]

Sorry to necro this thread but it's right on point with my question about a 34" Ultrawide flanked by a pair of 27" 1440p monitors. Has anyone tried this setup yet?

 

[digitaldurandal]

Sorry to necro this thread but it's right on point with my question about a 34" Ultrawide flanked by a pair of 27" 1440p monitors. Has anyone tried this setup yet?

If they are both 1440p height I don't think it will be a problem for the drivers.

2x290s are not going to cut it though. That is going to be many more pixels than 4k so you will be looking at medium settings and little or no AA.

Maybe 2 Titan X's

 

[Elfear]

If they are both 1440p height I don't think it will be a problem for the drivers.

2x290s are not going to cut it though. That is going to be many more pixels than 4k so you will be looking at medium settings and little or no AA.

Maybe 2 Titan X's

I'm thinking 2x290 will be insufficient for modern games at max settings but should be fine for slightly older games. If they prove too slow, I'd look into a pair of cut-down GM200s or 390Xs.

What I'm really after is impressions of such a setup. Seems like it would probably be too wide but it sounds pretty cool in my head.

 

[bystander36]

The big question about such a setup is how games support it. How many games will accept these mixed resolutions? Does the height of the flanked monitors need to be the same as the center one, so they just scale the outer ones to match the center, or will it also be able to handle different sizes too? The latter would seem unlikely to be supported by games.