Chillblast Fusion Eyefinity review

It’s not every day a new technology promises to run games at a resolution of 5,760 x 2,160 and across six screens, but that’s the aim of ATI’s Eyefinity. The process is surprisingly simple: multiple monitors are automatically grouped together by ATI’s Catalyst driver so the GPU sees them as a single, continuous desktop.

For its Fusion Eyefinity PC, Chillblast has picked an ATI Radeon HD 5870 card and, while this may not be the rare (we suspect non-existent) Eyefinity 6 Edition that can power six screens, it can still output 5,760 x 1,080 across three Full HD displays.

ATI claims Eyefinity’s increased resolution makes games more immersive and the average PC far more versatile; at first glance, it’s hard to disagree. Burnout Paradise’s palpable sense of speed is heightened with two extra monitors to show the world whizzing past, while the jungles of Crysis impose themselves far more when you’re hemmed in by them.

Potential problems are tackled at the driver level. The left- and right-hand images are very slightly blurred and stretched in the style of a fisheye lens (see below), with the effect more pronounced towards the far edge of the image. It’s a neat trick that does a decent job of replicating our peripheral vision.

The 18mm side bezels on the monitors weren’t as irritating as we expected, either. While it’s impossible not to notice them, especially when fast-moving images jump across the divide, we found our eyes merely adjusted and filtered them out, much as they do with a car’s A-pillars.

However, several niggling issues can’t be ignored. Heads-up displays in games were stretched across the full resolution of the screen, with mini-maps and gauges shunted to the furthest reaches of our peripheral vision. It’s possible to glance at these comfortably only if you’re sitting a fair distance back from the screen, which is both impractical and rather defeats the point of the surround experience.

In fact, we found that, while huddled up at a desk, we couldn’t concentrate on such a vast area at once. Where that’s the intention – such as Burnout’s blurred sense of speed – it’s not an issue, but details on those side screens can feel dislocated from the core experience.

ATI also claims Office applications benefit from Eyefinity, with the vast desktop space lending itself to multitasking. However, the extra video outputs are the only tangible benefit here over a traditional dual-monitor setup.

Eyefinity aside, the three 22in Dell Professional P2210H panels offer Full HD 1,920 x 1,080 resolutions, so three together makes for a long, narrow viewing area. With good image quality and accurate colours, they’re more than good enough for everyday use, even if the darkest black shades expose slight backlight bleeding at the bottom of the screens.