• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

AMD Eyefinity 3-panel Mixed Resolution review

Caporegime
Joined
12 Jul 2007
Posts
43,201
Location
United Kingdom
A look at the Eyefinity changes brought forward in the new 14.6 drivers from Guru3d.

Good times, that is fun gear to play around with! Well, it's time to wrap up things and have a look at the good and the not so good. Eyefinity 3x1 works with different size monitors, and hey -- it actually works really well. The recent driver changes allow you to combine monitors and apply the power of multiple GPUs (Crossfire) to them. When we touch the topic of Crossfire, then we have to say this, you are probably going to need two cards if you want to play modern age games in a 6K x 1K resolution, as yes ... we are gaming with a resolution of 6 MPixels, and that's roughly three to four times more than your average 1920x1080 monitor. Overall performance with the help of Crossfire / R9 295x2 the most modern titles played extremely well. With older games you can certainly flick on even higher AA levels as well.

The new Eyefinity update has been thought through well. You create your preferred setup, install catalyst drivers, sort your screens and alternatively correct Bezel management. I really have to give props here to AMDs driver team for doing a superb job done there as it works well, a very proper implementation with a UI that requires very little configuration. Overall from a productivity or entertainment point of view the 3x1 monitors function really well, it's certainly the widest desktop I have ever worked with. It's kind of like having your own command / operations center at home, with each screen showing relevant information.

Gaming wise the setup is a heck of a lot of fun, but the reality also remains that with most first person shooters, the Bezel in the middle poses to be a cruel issue. So you do need to take that into account. There are lots of monitors with very thin bezels of course, but they will always be visible in some way or form. Find monitors with very thin Bezels. Non first person shooters will mostly work the best. Though I have not recorded the title, Anno 2070 has an incredible field of view. Eyefinity of course is very well suited for flight simulator and race fans as well. In the end though, as good as the technology really is, the biggest annoyance will remain the monitor Bezels, you either dislike them, or can life with them. Bezel aside, make no mistake: you'll play your games much more immersive as you'll have so much screen resolution to work with. The experience of playing games, in our case with three screens is simply put fantastic, the first minutes you'll feel a little confusion as your brain actually needs to process so much information it can hardly keep up. Once you get used to it (few minutes really) the 'wow' factor kicks in and the experience is just lovely.

Eyefinity does guarantee a lot of e-peen, great x-factor and a whole lot of fun in unprecedented resolutions. And now you can combine different sized monitors as well. It is a pleasure to play around with. So just to test, grab your old monitors and give it a go, it is a-hell-of-a-lut-of-fun !

Full Article
http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_eyefinity_3_panel_mixed_resolution_review,10.html
 
Last edited:
While I fully understand why some people don't get on with Eyefinity/Surround, I fell in love with it in 2010 and find playing on a single screen like playing with blinkers on.

Still don't understand why some AAA games either don't support it properly (Watch Dogs) or actively stop it working (Call of Duty - none of the series work properly but Black Ops 2 actually deliberately broke it). In an era when even Goat Simulator worked properly on multi-screen, is there really any excuse for AAA games not?

The annoying thing is that I ran 2 x 1920x1080 (24") and a 1920x1200 (26") screen in Eyefinity for years, then switched to 3 x 1920x1080 (24") a year or so ago because of having to run the 1200 screen at 1080 in games. Now I've changed setup, they bring out a driver that would have been perfect for my old setup! Typically good timing on my part. :rolleyes:

Good to see AMD are still improving Eyefinity though. I remember when mixed resolutions was requested early on and we were told it wasn't technically possible. Seeing as PLP got the same answer at the time, I guess there's always hope for that too.
 
What is this PLP issue i keep seeing mentioned?

ccc does not support configuring the monitors in portrait-landscape-portrait mode only all portrait or all landscape, i would like to put two small monitors in portrait each side of my 27" 16.9 as all 3 in landscape was just too wide and narrow for my liking
 
ccc does not support configuring the monitors in portrait-landscape-portrait mode only all portrait or all landscape, i would like to put two small monitors in portrait each side of my 27" 16.9 as all 3 in landscape was just too wide and narrow for my liking

Thanks mate. I'll do some digging.
 
it can be done, im not sure what software you need but to much fafing about for my liking but if i could just use the ccc eyefinity then i would go for it
 
Still they refuse to support it when its NOT HARD

The fact that it's such an often requested feature and not been implemented suggests your statement about it not being hard may not be true. Would be an awesome addition to the capabilities of a GPU, so fingers crossed it happens one day.
 
AMD ignore a lot of feature requests for seemingly no reason so it's within the realm of possibility that they could add it relatively easily.
 
Surely your eyes wouldnt want different refresh rates? (I can see why it might lighten the load on the graphics cards - but I would have thought most eyes would complain bitterly lol)

well when you play eyefinity, your eyes are focused on the centered screen, never the other 2, it's just pereferal vision, never had eyefinity so im just speculating, and with this mixe resolution thingy, i was wandering, if having 120hz center moinitor, with couple cheap 60hz monitor would work, or if all the monitors will run at 60hz ?
 
I remember one of the recent drivers had great bezel compensation where you could adjust the vertical position as well as the bezel width, but I forget which driver it was and it seems to have disappeared from all subsequent drivers I have tried.

I know I could try again to align my monitors correctly, but I just can't be bothered with the physical effort and taking apart of things....
 
ccc does not support configuring the monitors in portrait-landscape-portrait mode only all portrait or all landscape, i would like to put two small monitors in portrait each side of my 27" 16.9 as all 3 in landscape was just too wide and narrow for my liking

Thanks mate. I'll do some digging.

CCC does support configuring the monitors in portrait-landscape-portrait mode, Eyefinity does not, just to clarify.
 
well when you play eyefinity, your eyes are focused on the centered screen, never the other 2, it's just pereferal vision, never had eyefinity so im just speculating, and with this mixe resolution thingy, i was wandering, if having 120hz center moinitor, with couple cheap 60hz monitor would work, or if all the monitors will run at 60hz ?

Your peripheral vision is actually more sensitive to higher temporal frequencies so that may be worse :P
 
gotta love eyefinity, the system works great, and when you get a title that it doesn't take 3rd party applications to make it work properly [skyrim, assasins creed, far cry i'm looking at you] its lovely. although with fixers a lot of stuff works well [but cmon, we shouldnt need to hack things to make it work]

epic for doing proper work on too.
 
Unless I'm being stupid, I can't get this to work correctly.

I have a pair of 20" 1680x1050 monitors on either side of a 24" 1920x1080 one.

The bottom edges are aligned, but I just can't seem to get it to look right across all 3 - I had hoped this would be the answer! Maybe it's the different pixel densities between the screens which are causing the issue in my case?
 
I have been waiting for PLP support since they released Eyefinity.

Still they refuse to support it when its NOT HARD

Hum its actually really hard.
its technical issues with how the screens are made and created.
if it was easy then Nvidia would have done that right?
 
Back
Top Bottom