ATI Eyefinity will run six monitors off one card

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By Darien Graham-Smith

Posted on 10 Sep 2009 at 21:00

ATI has demonstrated new GPU technology, dubbed ATI Eyefinity, that can drive up to six monitors from one graphics card.

Eyefinity will be built into the company's next generation of cards, and works by grouping monitors into a single virtual display at the driver level. This approach means games and productivity applications will see the group as a single device, and should automatically support the full resolution of the grouped monitors.

Screens can be used in landscape or portrait orientation, and multiple groups can be exposed to the OS as multiple displays. The only limits are a requirement that each group be rectangular and a maximum resolution of 8,000 x 8,000 pixels per group.

At the launch in London, ATI demonstrated various games running seamlessly across a three-by-two grid of 1080p monitors, yielding a resolution of 5,760 x 2,160 with a much wider field of vision than conventional screen shapes. Partner Samsung also demonstrated monitors with extra-narrow bezels designed specifically to be grouped together.

I don't expect the whole market to go to three monitors, but nowadays a lot of people have two monitors, so it's not such a stretch.

Though Eyefinity is designed to support six screens, mainstream consumer cards will use a cut-down interface that supports a maximum of three displays.

Speaking at the launch, senior marketing manager Sasa Marinkovic admitted that six-monitor gaming was a technological demonstration rather than a realistic vision of the future: "We wanted to shock you with how much stuff we can output. But I think there is going to be a halo effect," he predicted, anticipating that consumers who were impressed by the six-display system would be more likely to invest in a three-monitor setup.

"I don't expect the whole market to go to three monitors," he acknowledged, "but nowadays a lot of people have two monitors, so it's not such a stretch. I think there's going to be a percentage of those people going to a third one."

Though technical details of the graphics card itself remain under wraps, the company has confirmed that it will be possible to use up to four cards in a CrossFireX configuration.

Eyefinity can't spread display groups across cards, but with software support it should in theory be possible to run 24 monitors from a single machine with a resolution of up to 16,000 x 16,000.