Setting up Eyefinity was, in years gone by, a seemingly impossible task. With so many variables to compete with AMD was regularly chastised for having a broken technology. Years of driver development has now seen setting up Eyefinity evolve into a very simple task.

Using the latest Catalyst driver and Control Centre (14.6) it is simply a means of clicking on the Eyefinity tab and then being walked through a step-by-step configuration.

The traditional method of creating an Eyefinity user group is as follows:



3 screens of equal dimensions bunched together to create a single large display. AMD however understand that many of us have upgraded our displays with the old ones now gathering dust. Thanks to the new CCC we can use these old screens to expand the real estate of the new one thus:



So you no longer need 3 screens of equal resolutions or size to create a believable/realistic Eyefinity setup. The process of creating such a configuration using mixed screens is similar to the previous Eyefinity configuration however there are a few new items which we have included below:



As previous, the configuration software takes you through the basics such as screen positioning.



Then we can start making adjustments for the modular screen setup by telling our graphics card how we want the screens to display. We have 3 options here: Fill, fit or expand. 'Fill' is the traditional method (and one which we still prefer - more on this later).

'Fit' will basically changes your largest height screen to the lowest height of the three, in effect chopping the top or bottom (or both) to make the screen look linear with the remaining two screens. We can see the advantages of this as it keeps the perspective of the three screens linear however most, if not all will have the largest screen in the centre which will be the focal point of the gamer, not the sides. Personally, we would prefer more real estate on the centre screen.

Then we have 'expand' which works opposite to fit by having the monitors acting as windows into the game surface.

We would recommend having a play with all three as what suits one gamer will not suit another. We felt that 'Fit' looked odd, as if the image was 'squashed'. Of course this wasn't the case but this is how it appeared due to the cropping involved. Expand worked very well but it also highlighted the fact we were using odd height screens. So then, despite this new feature set we still preferred the Fill option which felt more natural. We can see the benefits of both Fit and Expand though but this will obviously be dependent on your own screens and your own perception of what looks and feels right to you. Indeed, we have had this discussion internally and we couldn't agree on what was best as each of us liked different setups! AMD are to be commended therefore for giving the end user this option as with this type of setup there clearly is not 'one size fits all'.



The tweaking does not end there though. Screen alignment is crucial to getting that realistic feel and again, the method of solving this is very simple via use of the CCC.

There are of course further advanced options to fine tune your setup. Perhaps the most pertinent of which is the bezel compensation function. Anyone who has switched to multiple screens will tell you that this is a key function to ensuring smooth operation be it in desktop or gaming mode. The last thing you want is your crosshair or cursor jumping from one screen to the next or indeed having screens slightly misaligned. The bezel compensation and alignment function eradicates these problems by a simple means of lining up a Scalene triangle to ensure both the hypotenuse and adjacent sides line up correctly as so:



With that done and after having lots of fun trying out numerous desktops it was time to get back to work and run some benchmarks to so how much pressure we could put on the Sapphire R9-290X...