The new ATI Eyefinity system has created quite an online buzz. Otherwise sane-sounding people have been openly drooling over the idea of combining six monitors into a vast 7,680 x 3,200 display; and, in fairness, if you just focus on that really big number it is quite seductive.

But, while I hate to be a Negative Nancy, I think that excitement needs to be cooled down with a few caveats.

The most obvious one is that multi-display systems are nothing new. Back at the Spider launch in 2007, ATI demonstrated an eight-monitor gaming setup which made everyone go “ooh” — and which was then never heard of again. Admittedly, that system required four graphics cards, but the enthusiast gaming market isn’t known for penny-pinching. If people genuinely wanted to play games on six monitors, they’d be doing so already.

And ATI clearly realises this, as the six-monitor capability is to be reserved for specialist models (of which, we may safely assume, not many will be made). Mainstream cards will be limited to three displays.

The rule of three

But then three is an awkward number. You can’t make three screens into a grid, obviously. If you line them up in a row you get a screen that’s five times as wide as it is high, which is frankly weird. Stack them vertically (with a special stand) and it’s like using a widescreen monitor on its side. Your best bet is probably to rotate three monitors into portrait mode and push them together, for a viewport that’s similar in shape to a normal desktop monitor but with three times the pixels.

Even then, though, your huge multi-monitor display will have two big, dark bezels cutting right across the picture.

That’s not just a superficial complaint. Yes, the overall graphical effect is cheapened by the intrusion of thick plastic bars across the playfield. But bezels also introduce very particular problems when game elements stray across them. A perfect illustration was provided by the flight simulator that ATI used to demonstrate its six-monitor setup, in which the speedometer and altimeter, in the middle of the display, ended up split across two screens, leaving them basically illegible:

(Let’s not get into the problems you’d hit if you tried to use an Eyefinity monitor group to run a productivity application like Word or Excel.)

Lethal bezel

Bezels can cause more general gameplay problems too, as objects moving at regular speeds suddenly leap forward by an inch or more as they pass from screen to screen. That certainly doesn’t help the player to track opponents with the precision required to target / overtake / frag them.

A workaround in some cases could be for the software to insert virtual gaps between screens corresponding to the bezel width, to produce an effect like looking through a window frame. This would bring its own problems, though: it would make it fully impossible to read the flight simulator instruments, for example, and would open up the possibility of bullets and enemies hiding in the “dark” area between screens.

Basically, there’s no proper solution with current hardware —— and I suspect that means that multi-monitor gaming isn’t going to catch on with real people any time soon. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed watching the Eyefinity demos as much as anyone, and the idea of a huge display certainly does appeal. But, sad to say, I think it’s going to take a slightly more creative development than this to make it a reality.