AMD Eyefinity Review

👤by Richard Weatherstone Comments 📅11-08-14
Eyefinity Technology

In its most basic sense, Eyefinity is a fairly straightforward technology. The goal of a graphics card is to covert the coding, putting all the pixels together in the right order and then to send that information to your monitor through a pipeline. A Graphics card will have at least one pipeline otherwise no picture would be sent to the monitor. So how does a GPU send information to multiple displays - more pipelines of course! This in essence is what AMD have done with their range of graphics cards now encompassing up to 6 pipelines allowing up to 6 displays to be used at the same time. This is of course a very basic explanation and clearly there is more to the technology than this!

Getting the right info to the right screen, at the right time requires a controller otherwise your 6 screen display would be an epileptic's nightmare with digital images mish-mashed and flashing across 6 screens making no sense whatsoever. To this end, an Output Crossbar is used to direct the pipelined images to the correct display output.



This, for the most part worked fine for displays that had matching resolutions. Most gamers will have upgraded their screens and with the old screens gathering dust it has fallen to AMD to enhance Eyefinity technology to allow gamers make use of these old screens by creating a modular Eyefinity setup. The 14.6 (beta) driver allows a few new options that allow the use of different sized screens to be coupled together and used as a true Eyefinity setup. We cover these new features more in-depth on the next page.

Of course, multiple display screen technology has been around for well over a decade now but before Eyefinity this technology comprised of just two displays being used. AMD are not the only company to furnish gamers with multi-monitor capabilities either. To a lesser extent Intel and Matrox also allow Multi-monitor use but it is AMD's biggest rival, NVIDIA, who have their own technology called NVIDIA Surround which is perhaps the biggest competitor to Eyefinity (which we will also be reviewing soon). AMD are however the only company which allows multi-monitor (3+) setups from one GPU without the need for additional hardware or graphics cards.

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