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No one’s talking about it and while I haven’t had the chance to test it myself a number of people have confirmed that in CrossFireX setups Eyefinity performance has really skyrocketed. In most situations you’re talking about going from not playable to playable.

One person reported that Metro 2033 went form a slide show to an average of 130 FPS.

Metro 2033 has copped a pretty bad rap since launch since most enthusiasts are using ATI cards and the game has struggled with the setups, that could all about to change now.

If you’re running Eyefinity and a CrossFireX setup feel free to drop a line down the bottom and let us know you’re experience with it. I’ll be sure to check it out myself sooner rather than later.

Make sure you go grab the latest 10.5 Drivers from the game.amd.com website here.

I stumbled across this on twitter today which one of the AMD guys posted; it’s really cool and gives people an actual idea of how gaming in Eyefinity differs to just using a single monitor.

To be honest trying to explain things sometimes can be a bit of a pain but this little page means that you no longer need the words; unless they’re words to the website.

At the moment I’m a real Bad Company 2 fan and I’ve spoken in my reviews at TweakTown about just how different the addition of two side monitors are in the game when it comes to noticing people in your peripheral vision.

This does a better job of showing exactly what I mean though with the ability to switch on the fly between one and three monitors in a moving scenario which again paints an even better picture then just a screenshot.

Props have to go to ATI for doing this. Way to increase awareness on Eyefinity while at the same time showing its benefits.

I’ve been hunting down a stand for my Eyefinity monitor setup for ages. The biggest issue with three monitors on your desk is the amount of space that get’s taken up. It’s not even so much the amount of width the monitors take up but more so the stand.

Getting a good quality monitor stand has been impossible though in Australia. Even going onto eBay finds ones that promise support for 24″ monitors but when you get them they don’t fit. Lucky I wasn’t the person who found that out the hard way; instead it was someone else.

Recently I saw a company show up called Proluma in Australia who specialized in Monitor stands, unfortunately though I discovered *sarcasm* they were so specialized they didn’t even have a triple monitor one.*end sarcasm*

Oh well I thought to myself, there goes my chance of getting a triple monitor stand, that was until only a month later I saw the company announce that a Triple monitor stand was coming into the market. At $369 AU it’s hardly a cheap product but considering it’s something that you shouldn’t really have to upgrade it’s not a bad investment.

I hate paying for computer parts though, there’s few items I pay for when it comes to my computer and that’s simply because it’s one of the perks of doing this job for over 7 years. I don’t review monitors and I don’t review monitor stands so that wasn’t in my favour. I do write for one of the largest tech websites in the world and I can knock over a review very fast when I want or need too.

Putting on the charm the guys over at Proluma hooked me up with a Triple monitor stand in exchange for a review which is standard practice. Since we don’t return samples anyway this company wasn’t putting any more or less in to get a review. The guys actually put themselves more out of pocket though for me and shot a unit direct from Taiwan to me so I could get it sooner.

Today after about an hour of work I have a nice new monitor setup. Now I’m not going into any more detail as I’ll be moving from this blog post onto a review of the stand for TweakTown. So keep an eye out but for now I felt I needed to show off my sexy new monitor setup while giving people in Australia a heads up about the units due later this month.

DisplayPort doesn’t bother me, I love it for the simple fact that my three Dell U2410s all offer it. If anything I’m more annoyed at ATI that I don’t have a card that has three DP connectors, instead I have to have two ugly ass DVI cables each side of my sexy DisplayPort.

For most though DisplayPort is an issue; and I don’t mean it’s an issue in the sense that people don’t like it but it’s an issue in the sense that if they have two monitors already and want to get a third; unless there’s a DP version of the monitor you use they’re not going to have a nice clean looking Eyefinity setup.

At the moment you’ve got two options for using a non DP monitor as the third screen, use a VGA adapter which means quality drops off as you go from a digital to analogue connection or use an expensive active DP to DVI connector at around $120 US.

What you might not know though is that those current active DP to DVI connectors are Dual-Link DVI versions which means they can output 2560 x 1600. Sometime between the end of March and beginning of April we should see single link versions of these active adapters come out which will retail for around $30 US.

This is fantastic news for people who are looking for a nice 1920 x 1200 or 1680 x 1050 tri-screen setup.

Let me give you a bit of an idea of how this will work out for the better. If you wanted to get into a nice clean looking Eyefinity setup that gave you 5760 x 1200 you would want to buy something like a set of U2410s. Looking at the Dell US website you’re looking at a cost of $1617 US for three.

Now let’s say you have a pair of Samsung 2443BWT-1s, working off the current price they would’ve set you back $800 for two. Now you don’t want to have these two nice looking monitors and then stick a Dell smack in the middle (It’s not that the Dell is ugly, but more so that it will look different and ruin what could be a really nice clean looking setup), at the same time you don’t want to have to buy another one then fork out another 25%+ of the monitor for an adapter. With the new Single-Link Adapter the setup would work out to around $1230 US.

This is an expensive 24″ as well, if you’re running a newer 1920 x 1080 display and something like a Samsung 2494HM at $250 US each. You’ll be able to get into an Eyefinity setup for $780 US with the new adapter. Now while with the current adapter you could get into the setup for $870 US which isn’t all that bad there’s no way you would be able to justify the cost of an adapter that is 1/2 the price of one of your monitors.

Hopefully we’ll see these adapters sooner rather than later and more and more people will jump onto the Eyefinity bandwagon.

Let me start by making a few things clear, the first is that I use Eyefinity technology in my day to day usage, the image you can see above is my desk and that’s three Dell U2410s hooked up to a HD 5970. Second I know that I really gave surround gaming a beating the other day, but the reasons in that post though are why NVIDIA is going to lose the battle.

Today though I’m going to tell you why ATI and the Eyefinity branding is going to lose the war when compared to NVIDIA. Multi Screen technology is the future for computing in many ways, the biggest problem at the moment though is that both companies are spending too much time focusing on the gaming aspects of the technology and not the productivity aspect.

NVIDIA concentrating on the gaming side I can understand, the bottom line is that the way they are implementing Multi Screen Technology is flawed, and the reason it’s flawed is because it was added at the last minute. When NVIDIA discovered the technology in ATIs new HD 5000 series Video Cards it became clear that this is going to be the future, for that reason NVIDIA found a way to offer the same kind of technology, because Fermi was so far along though going back to the drawing board wasn’t going to be an option which meant we were going to see limitations.

Now the information we have from NVIDIA about the Surround Gaming technology is a bit limited at the moment, it does give us most the information we need though and even if a few surprises do pop up it doesn’t look like the technology can beat out Eyefinity.

Eyefinity is fantastic, I use it daily and love every second of it, I moved to my 3x 24″ setup from a single 30″, at one point thought I was using a dual 30″ setup, on a whole that setup just felt kind of stupid, it was massive and when I wanted to game a giant bezel down the middle did nothing for me, so I ended up back at a single 30″ which I thought gave me the desktop real estate I needed.

Towards the end of December thought I got WOWed by Eyefinity, and not in person, of course ATI didn’t let me know of any events where I could see the technology in person, albeit I give them some of the most quotable lines in my reviews which have shown up in their meetings and the fact that I review probably more video cards in a given year than anyone else. We won’t worry about that though. I got WOWed by screen shots and YouTube videos of people playing HAWX, World of Warcraft, Call of Duty and more.

Thinking back now I don’t know why I let these videos persuade me because I barely have time for games, the bottom line is these videos and screenshots did persuade me. Since I have more Video Cards then I can poke a stick at getting into Eyefinity was only going to involve the cost of monitors (I don’t really review monitors and asking a company for three of anything is generally hard). When I finally set it up thought, fired up Sims 3 which seems to be the only game I have installed and realized that it looked completely crap at 5760 x 1200 I thought I had made a mistake with the purchase of these monitors.

The holidays came to an end and it was time to get back into work, feeling a bit bummed that I didn’t take full advantage of Eyefinity I was a bit concerned that $2,000AUD had been dropped for no reason. The launch of the HD 5670 changed this though, and in a big way since it was time to get back to work.

I consider myself a bit of a multi tasking master, I run two VNC windows on my machine, one to my server which has my MSN and all those useless programs that you don’t want clogging up your main PC and my laptop which runs my email so when I go away I don’t have to transfer files or that, I shut my laptop down and away I go. I have all past emails on my hand and when I get home I open it up, let it log onto the network and away I go again.

Not only do I have those two windows open all the time but when I’m benchmarking I have an excel spreadsheet for all my TweakTown graphs that takes up a whole monitor, along with that I will have a review or blog post open in word, folders to my main documents open, websites to double check pricing and specifications of models and images of the product I’m reviewing.

The nature of the three monitor setup opened me up to a new world of desktop real estate that I didn’t think existed. With Eyefinity this was done with one card and with ease. Productivity is at a new level, I’m more excited about all the windows I have open on my screen then I ever was about the gaming side of things.

The sad thing is thought that I had to discover this myself, sure ATI put how Eyefinity can expand productivity in between gaming and entertainment but every image you look at is about gaming, it’s Dragon Age on three screens and HAWX on six screens, it’s how this game works at 5760 x 1200 and that one at 7680 x 1600. Talking to editors after Eyefinity events they said, WOW it looks great, but it’s so gimmicky.

It’s true, and when you combine the fact that it’s expensive to get into an EyeFinity gaming setup it’s clear that the market is going to be a niche. You’re not catering to a market that is just gamers, you’re catering for a market that is for gamers who have serious cash to blow.

The focus of Eyefinity needs to change, it needs to be pushed as a tool. It needs to be pushed as something that is going to increase productivity, make multi tasking easier. ATI / AMD need to tell people who multi task that Eyefinity is the end to Alt Tabbing. NVIDIA can’t do this at the moment, they can’t push a technology that is aimed at people who have productivity in mind with a solution that requires two cards, or is resolution limited (We can’t confirm we’re limited to 1920 x 1080, but it’s the feeling we get from the white paper).

I spoke to someone today and they told me, ATI are going to hold an event pushing the productivity with the HD 5870 2GB card. This is the worst thing they could do, you don’t want to show people that you can do Eyefinity with a $500 card and then say it can also be done with a $99 one. People are going to think that clearly there’s going to be something wrong with the $99 solution. ATI / AMD, Manufactures, Wholesalers and Retail Stores need to show people who want productivity a setup of Eyefinity with a $99 card, on a box that costs less than $1000.

Gaming got my attention because I have the luxury of putting a HD 5970 into my own machine for less than it would cost most people to buy a HD 5670. The lack of time I have for games though let me discover what Eyefinity was really about, or at least should be about. A CEO, CFO, Stock Broker, Marketing Manager, Office Manager, e-Tailors and more aren’t going to see gaming though and go that would be great for my office.

I like ATI, I probably like ATI more than NVIDIA, there seems to be a certain attitude that people who work for NVIDIA have, they seem to think that we should bow to them because they are NVIDIA. I don’t hate that though, I understand it, I’m proud that I work for TweakTown, one of the largest Tech Websites in the world, if you tell me you work for JohnsAwsomeHardware.com I would probably have the same attitude.

NVIDIA can have this attitude though because they’re smart, they’re only pushing the gaming side of things at the moment because that’s all they can really offer you, if they promote productivity ATI / AMD would win because of a single card solution, the fact that a wide variety of prices are covered thanks to a huge model line up and more.

I guarantee you when NVIDIA release then generation of Video Cards after Fermi Multi Monitor Technology will be pushed, and it will be pushed to every user, from that person who sells on eBay and has photos, emails, websites and more open at a single time to CEOs of mega corporations where multi tasking is part of their everyday life.

Eyefinity will already have this stigma that it’s for Gaming, NVIDIA won’t have this, at the moment it’s called Surround Gaming, it won’t be called that in the future. When they can offer everyone a single card solution Multi Screen Technology or MST will become a name for the technology, something that doesn’t sound like a technology that only caters to one segment.

Eyefinity is a good name, it doesn’t sound like something that gamers will only use, ATI / AMD though need to change the way the technology is perceived though. Be that via creating an arm off Eyefinity that is something like Eyefinity Production+ or just push more than gaming under the Eyefinity name.

Sure, go to E3, setup Eyefinity with the hottest games, but make yourself present at tradeshows in which companies who could use this technology are, setup in front of the New York Stock Exchange and let brokers know this is the future of buying and selling shares, because you know what? NVIDIA will make sure they don’t miss out on this market.

Eyefinity do better what Matrox has done for years, now when we talk about Eyefinity we say things like “Yeah, Matrox use to do something similar but it wasn’t as good as Eyefinity.” What ATI / AMD need to do is make sure that in twelve months time we’re not saying “Yeah ATI had a similar technology but I love how NVIDIA offer the technology for my office.”

Today I understand that Eyefinity is a fantastic tool for productivity, I only truly understood this after taking the leap on the technology for gaming, something that most people won’t do.

I don’t want people who want to increase the way there business works wait twelve months for NVIDIA to release the same technology and market it better. I’m going to become a one man marketing team for Multi Screen Technology. I have two goals:

One is to make sure that people understand that Eyefinity isn’t just for gaming, this is a technology for anyone who is on a computer hours upon hours a day for work, people who have to Alt+Tab between screens, people who bought 30″ monitors because they needed more desktop real estate.

Second I want ATI to improve the technology, and I want NVIDIA to hit the market hard with it. This setup is going to be more useful then 3D Vision will ever be for NVIDIA.

We need to see more companies offer DisplayPort monitors, more companies offer three and six arm 24″ and 30″ monitor arms, we need manufactures, wholesales and salesman understand the technology so when they get asked a question they can give an answer.

This is a big post, but I have a plan, a goal, an agenda! Over the next few weeks there’s a few things I want to do to help bring this technology to an audience outside of gamers. So keep posted because while ATI / AMD will win this first battle in Multi Screen Technology NVIDIA will win the war because they’re hungry for success.

It doesn’t matter what you call it, be it GF 100, Fermi or 300 series the new line up of NVIDIA cards are coming, albeit a bit later then we had hoped. What NVIDIA has done though over the past week is added some information on their website about the upcoming series. To have a look at what exactly is going on you can see the page here.

What we’re seeing are two bits of information, you can check out the white papers that are linked towards the bottom which will give you information that you’ll probably not understand or not be interested in. After reading it you’ll end up with still no idea what kind of performance you can expect from the series.

The other piece of information is normal marketing talk to make the new series sound exciting. To be honest if you’re into computers you don’t need this as you’re probably already getting excited about what NVIDIA is going to offer.

The reason behind this post today though is to quickly talk about NVIDIAs new surround gaming feature and the issues I think it’s going to have when compared to the competing technology from ATI, EyeFinity.

I’m only going to give you a quick run down here for two reasons, one I don’t have the card, and two information on the whole thing is still limited. What I will say though is based on the information we have, of course by the time the card launches this could change.

The biggest pro behind the way NVIDIA have implemented the setup is that it seems you don’t need to have a DisplayPort monitor. With few companies really offering the connectivity, read only Dell really! this is pretty cool. It means you should be able to get into the technology for less from the monitor side of things as the chances are you already have a monitor that doesn’t have DisplayPort. Instead of having to buy three new monitors with DisplayPort so they all look the same you can buy just two more of the monitors you have.

The other pro is that the setup will support 3D Vision, only recently I wrote a big piece about 3D Vision and how I felt about it on TweakTown. To put it in just a few words; “I loved it!” For more information about the technology though I would highly recommend you check out the article I did at TweakTown here.

For the most part though this is where the pros stop, the lack of DisplayPort and the fact the NVIDIA cards will only offer two DVI ports means that you will require a SLI setup to make use of the technology. From my understanding it also seems that the technology will only support up to 1920 x 1080 @ 120Hz displays. This is the feeling I get from reading the white paper but really there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to run three 2560 x 1600 @ 60Hz displays off two cards.

I’m not sure if NVIDIA are choosing to just push the 1920 x 1080 @ 120Hz display support because these ones will support 3D Vision or because this is the limitation of the technology. I have a real hatred for 1920 x 1080 16:9 computer monitors after using 16:10 ones for a long time. For most people though this won’t be a deal breaker, the chances are from a cost perspective 1680 x 1050 @ 60Hz and 120Hz are going to be the most popular option.

One of the biggest cons for 3D Vision is the fact that when you’re using the technology the video card is essentially working twice as hard at that resolution. What this means is that a 1920 x 1080 screen with 3D Vision on will be more intensive then a 2560 x 1600 display without 3D Vision. Now if you’re running three monitors with 3D Vision at 1920 x 1080 the amount of power needed to run that setup would be more than a setup of three 2560 x 1600 monitors without 3D Vision.

We don’t know performance numbers for the next generation series from NVIDIA but you’re going to need some serious juice to push this kind of setup.

To quickly just recap the pros for NVIDIAs surround gaming experience the lack of DisplayPort monitors needed means that you can buy two more of your current monitors and have a really nice clean looking setup, the other big pro is that you’ll be able to use 3D Vision technology with the setup, from an immersion perspective this is just going to be insane.

The con list includes the fact you’re going to need an SLI setup to run surround gaming, be that with 3D Vision or not. This in turn will mean SLI compatible motherboard and bigger power supply which is going to hit the bank account. Now there’s also the fact that if you go for a 1920 x 1080 @ 120Hz Tri-Screen setup to use 3D Vision the amount of raw graphics power needed is going to be insane and exceed that of three 2560 x 1600 @ 60Hz displays, getting playable framerates isn’t going to be cheap.

One last con would be the fact that we’ve got this feeling that the maximum resolution for the technology is 1920 x 1080 @ 120Hz. What this means is that 1920 x 1080 @ 60Hz, 1680 x 1060 @ 120Hz / 60Hz and lower should be supported but not 1920 x 1200 @ 60Hz and above. I write this separate to the last paragraph because I think as we get more information on the technology this won’t hold true but at the moment it doesn’t change the fact that this is how it feels reading the white paper.

For so many people this isn’t going to be an issue as multi monitor display setups are still a rarity; it’s clear the reason NVIDIA has done it though is due to the simple fact ATI offer EyeFinity, unfortunately the solution from NVIDIA feels like a bit of a bandaid one, it’s simply done because the competition offers it, and since NVIDIA didn’t expect it and it was too late to go back to the Fermi drawing board the technology is how it is because it was added last minute.

The reason I’m speaking about it so much thought is that I personally use a 3x 1920 x 1200 setup via EyeFinity. Buying new monitors wasn’t an issue for me as I was moving from a single 30″ and I didn’t want to buy two more 30″ monitors due to the huge amount of desk space I would need.

At the end of it all though for most people the most important feature Fermi will offer is performance, if they’re able to beat ATI, offer stock and offer us a reasonable price it will be a huge win. For this reason I can’t wait to attach a Fermi or three to my 2560 x 1600 testbed monitor and let it tear up some of the latest games available.