ATI Eyefinity - A wider look

Two weeks prior to the launch of the Radeon series 5800 graphics cards ATI dropped a bit of a bomb on the industry by introducing a new feature on their future generation graphics cards, starting with the Radeon series 5800.

Of course we are going talk to you about Eyefinity today. Eyefinity in short is having the ability to connect multiple monitors to your graphics card and create an extreme native resolution.

The current available Radeon HD 5870 card come on average with four display output connectors which you can combine, utilize and literally group all of them to create one big funky screen resolution. Not only is this fantastic news for profession and desktop users as you can expand your work environment, but also for you as a gamer. Quite a number of games will support this technology out of the box, and if they are not supported you can rest assured that in the upcoming year that's going to change with the newer titles.

Why would you want to use more than one monitor ? Well looking at myself, I'm sitting in front of two 24" monitors right now. More monitors will increase productivity. But also in a more SoHo or personal environment, how nice is it to have a video stream displaying say the news on one screen and your spreadsheet in the other. That idea you can now expand to say three, four or even more monitors.

Guru3D however is targeted at you guys, the gamers and if you are an avid Guru3D.com reader, then you'll very likely have read our Matrox TripleHead2Go reviews as well. I'm afraid that this release from ATI is a death blow for Matrox's TripleHead2Go series as what ATI is offering is more advanced, has a larger userbase and is cheaper as it comes native in the graphics card. People no longer have to spend 250 to 300 USD for this feature while gaining much better monitor resolutions. The one remark here though is that that games must be, or get, supported with the somewhat unusual and massive screen resolutions.

Over the next few pages, we'll chat a little about Eyefinity, look at hardware and software setup. Obviously we'll show you some photo's, but to make it really interesting I pointed a High Definition camera at our test setup so that we can actually show you a thing or two visually .. as that really is what it is all about.

Next page my man ... have a peek.