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NVidia Eyefinity

F1aw1ess

F1aw1ess

F1aw1ess

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Joined
15 Oct 2009
Posts
560
I had already bought 5870 and a 5970 and had dreadful driver problems with both so I am going to buy 2 x GTX470's once the new upgraded cooler versions are released.

I am going to buy another 2 monitors to eyefinity (ati's name for it) my question is do nvidia do it in their drivers already or is it something coming in the future and do I still need that expensive active displayport adaptor?
 
I'm gunna get SLI, One GTX470 isnt really much of an upgrade.

Can anyone confirm that is correct, no displayport adaptor is required for NVidia Surround?
 
For nVidia surround you can connect upto 2 displays per GPU - so you could just connect up using the stock DVI, VGA, etc. ports on them and not touch display port - i.e. the 3rd display would be on the DVI port on the 2nd GPU, etc.
 
Nvidia Surround is an afterthought and not a hardware solution like eyefinity.

It is a software solution and will perform as such.

keep your ATi cards if you want more than 2 screens.

As for ATi drivers im using the 10.4 preview driver, 10.5 and 10.6 caused issues for me.
 
Its not a "software" solution in the sense your inferring. The only thing lacking in hardware is the possibility to drive more than 2 displays off the same card - and thats not really a big issue as 1 card wouldn't have the performance to sensibly drive 3+ screens anyhow.
 
RavenXXX2 said:
You're limited with rez with surround, not true of eyefinity.
Click to expand...

Not true.

Eyefinity has a theoretical limit of 8192x8192 - sure thats better than the current nVidia limit of 3x 2560x1600 but even thats more than enough for most people... and its not like eyefinity can currently work too well performance/capability wise with that many displays anyhow (5870 with 6 displays is gonna suffer badly on many recent games until proper crossfire support is enabled). Not to mention all the issues with display port.

EDIT: One thing I haven't seen much about - but will be an issue - quite a few games use buffer objects that are limited in size to a max res of 4096x4096 for some post processing, etc. so I'd imagine a few games are going to have issues with resolutions over 4096x on both solutions.
 
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Rroff said:
Not true.

Eyefinity has a theoretical limit of 8192x8192 - sure thats better than the current nVidia limit of 3x 2560x1600 but even thats more than enough for most people... and its not like eyefinity can currently work too well performance/capability wise with that many displays anyhow (5870 with 6 displays is gonna suffer badly on many recent games until proper crossfire support is enabled). Not to mention all the issues with display port.
Click to expand...

Well as the technology continues to evolve it's worth noting that ATi has that support now, and makes it generally workable. Sure Nvidia will eventually extend that support, but for now, assuming that there will be full crossfire support in the near future (I imagine that there should be some very natural configurations for crossfire) ATi appears to be ahead of the pack due to this limit.

It's worth noting that 8192 squared is far greater than 6 2560x1600 screens, so in terms of the technology that is available (that i know of at least :p) it is effectively unlimited..


EDIT: Just saw your edit, an interesting question. Further to that, I wonder if you know, where does the limit actually occur in the rendering?
I ask because I'm curious about the render path. Given that ATi has (finally) reintroduced support for supersampling, what this would mean in terms of making me completely wrong about the limit being "effectively unlimited"
 
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While newer games will probably scale upto the max texture buffer dimensions (which is currently 8192x8192 typically and probably hence the theoretical limit on eyefinity) a lot of older games just assumed the max texture buffer dimensions were 4096x4096 (or even less some older games are probably capped to 2048x even).

EDIT: I'm not sure with regard to super sampling but I'm assuming it would break horribly on high resolution eyefinity setups (and likewise on nVidia).
 
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