The Verdict
I have to be totally honest here, I very much like Eyefinity and sure, I understand that an application like this is not valid or just too expensive for 99% of you guys, not to mention power consumption. But the brutal honesty is that if you stick to a three monitor setup with one monitor in the middle, the experience is grand.
You'll play your games much more immersive as you'll have so much screen resolution to work with. Especially for flight simulators , racing games and strategy games where you like to have a big field / area to play in it enhances visibility, and that's just really grand. 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.
What are the biggest downsides ?
Now I also have to state that Eyefinity is not ideal for any game out there. Sometimes titles can behave a little erratic and spread out the resolution a little weird (aspect ratio), other's simply do not work. Examples here are the New Resident Evil, which supports the resolutions, but then scans completely wrong so badly that you can't even exit the menus. It's stuff like this that you guys will deal with a lot for the time being as aspect ratios simply are not yet compatible with this technology. You'll end up editing around with game setup files and configurations.
But yeah, that's just the choice you make. Should a game not be supported (and that change is fairly moderate) you can always select one monitor at say 1920x1200 and game as you are used to play. The graphics driver will recognize this and you'll play at the middle screen.
Another downside, well, the Bezel of course, if it's fat and thick on your monitors it might annoy you a little. This is why you should go for three screens, it's less obvious with a monitor in the middle and then one to the left and right, just like in a car.
But sure, the biggest challenge is that several games unfortunately do not support extraordinary resolutions. And that's something that ATI will need to push. But I'm confident that the new resolutions will be added in upcoming game patches, for the games that do not already support it out of the box of course.
- Expensive ? Yes.
- Overkill ? Yes.
- Incredible fun ? Yes
- Would I personally opt to go for a solution like this ? Yes.
I like it, I so very much do like it -- and everybody that I have shown this setup shares that opinion. So try to forget about power consumption of all the monitors and the sheer graphics power and money you need to drop on a setup like this and the sheer amount of desktop space you'll need :) And then you realize .. that this probably is something we all would like to own very much. When a game properly works, the gaming experience is wicked and beats anything out there.
So I need to recommend this technology with caution. Games will need the support the uber widescreen gaming resolutions and aspect ratios better, and you certainly need a bucket load of raw GPU rendering power to make this happen. But we feel the adaptation rate for game support will evolve fast. This is easy stuff to deal with for game developers. But we foresee a wide future for Eyefinity ... very wide.
Update: initially we popped in two 5870 cards expecting that Crossfire would work. Unfortunately at the time of launch, Eyefinity will support only single-GPU configurations for gaming, but we are informed that CrossFire support will be coming some point in the near future. So all our results are based on single-GPU performance of a Radeon HD 5870.
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