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Playing with six monitors—is that a “full deck?”

First notes on working with AMD's Eyefinity.

Robert Dow

Here at Mt. Tiburon Testing Labs we’re testing a lot of stuff as usual. However, the one system that will get a lot of attention from us and our readers is the six-headed ATI-based EyeFinity.

The system consists of six 22-inch 1920 x 1080 displays – yes, that’s 5760 x 2160 resolution in a 3 x 2 array 61 x 24 inches, backed up by a 2GB GDDR5 graphics board, running on a 3.7GHz 4GB RAM, SSD, Nehalem system, with of course, great sound.

When the system is first brought to life it is six duplicate displays

Initial start up

The next step is to set up the system in extended mode using ATI’s Catalyst control panel. Catylyst has a grouping set of controls so you can have various configurations, I choose 3×2.

Expanded desktop

After the system is setup (and we’ll have more detail on all this after the 29th when we’re allowed to go completely public) you pick the screen res in the app and away you go. We choose Game World’s S.T.A.L.K.E.R Call of Pripyat because it’s a DirectX 11 game and can make use of all the features of the ATI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition AIB.

Looking at the ship

We’re dealing with beta drivers and so things are a little unstable, but we’ll get the final release before the 29th and then give you the whole story.

In the mean time we’re trying to get our brains to adjust the this new giant world. It’s amazing in H-A-W-X, the new super flying game from Ubisoft.