Volitions Advocate on 20/10/2010 at 05:15
Video links at the bottom of the post.
Last year the video card race finally had a dramatic change of pace. Finally it wasn't only about price and performance, but there were actually completely different features on offer from the major companies. I remember first hearing about eyefinity and thinking that it was just a gimmick and would never go anywhere. Then Nvidia came out with its 3d solution and after a few reviews and watching some 3d movies at futureshop on the 3d tv, I made my decision.
I think 3d gaming isn't going anywhere. Most of us who play the type of games where 3d would actually benefit the experience, would be playing for hours on end, or at least longer than a few minutes of minesweeper or freecell. I don't think my eyeballs or my brain could handle it for too long. I'd probably end up with a migraine. The same way I feel in the theatre after watching a pixar movie. There are too many things that get in the way, and the colour definitely suffers.
So I thought.. why not Eyefinity? ATI lets you do a multimonitor setup with only one video card. You can get Nvidia to do the same setup but you have to do it in SLI. Which is a lot more money if you factor in the price of another video card on top of the extra monitors.
So. here are my thoughts on Eyefinity.
When I first bought my videocard I only had 2 monitors. So one day I tried setting it up anyway and putzed around in Crysis for a bit. It was impossible to play because the centre of the screen was right in the middle where the monitors met. BUT I was really surpised at how much I liked the view, even with just 2 monitors. I thought the view surrounded me like I couldn't take it all in. Crysis, being the pretty game that it is, probably added a lot more to that than a game with a duller colour palette would have, but I digress.
So this summer I finally had the funds to buy myself a monitor with Displayport and I set it up. I can use this setup for more than just games since I do a lot of work with audio, but for the purpose of this review I'll keep it to games.
It doesn't work with every game, but having said that, there is nothing at all that says it will only work with new games that it was designed for. In the video I took I played on several games. Only 2 of which were released after Eyefinity. Some games work with it natively like AvP 2010. The FOV widened along with the resolution, so it was accurate. At 3x1680x1050 (5040x1050 48:10) the FOV should be somewhere just over 140 degrees, that is the consensus on WSGF anyway. The side monitors are always stretched a bit kind of like when you move your FOV greater than 90 on a 4:3 monitor. This works though, you might get the urge to look to the sides directly but I find this doesn't actually help much. If you treat the side monitors like your periphery then the experience actually works. A lot of people complain about the borders of the monitors, but honestly you have to try it for yourself before passing judgement. I find that it is a lot like driving a car. Once you know how you just block out the fact that you have blind spots where the side windows meet the windshield, it's kind of the same concept.
A lot of games have adverse effects when running at the high resolutions. Some games will not even give you the option to run at a resolution that high, but I found that most newer games do a good job of detecting your desktop resolution. Having said that, so far the only game I own that works without flaws is AvP 2010. Everything scales properly and the HUD remains on the centre monitor. In Crysis everything scales properly and the FOV adjusts properly, but the HUD moves to the outer screens, which makes them quite difficult to keep track of. This was also the problem with AvP classic (which otherwise worked flawlessly, go figure).
Stalker had another completely different reaction to the aspect ratio stretch. Everything rendered in 3d scaled properly, including the FOV, but the HUD graphics were horizontally stretched. Just the graphics though, not the text. I'd assume that any iD Tech 4 game would do the same, just like Doom 3 does when you run it in widescreen, because they use all the same graphics for Hud elements in different aspect ratios.
Arkham Asylum worked well and everything scaled properly except for the scripted sequences (including the main menu). These all ended up being rendered vert- That is the image was stretched to fit the width of the display, but not scaled to the proper aspect ratio, cutting off a large portion of the top and bottom of the screen, this was not the case during actual gameplay however, and I think that might have to do with how the cameras are scripted for movies (probably constrained to a specific FOV during movies). Unfortunately my camera ran out of batteries and I only had a few seconds recorded of my playing it. Which is okay because I hadn't played it in a while and forgot how to do it, so I sucked at it.
NOTE: Batman: AA is the ONLY UE3 game I got working. Bioshock. UT3, Alien Breed etc. all had Vert- in game. I did get R6 vegas to work, more on that:
Vert- is the most common problem in games that I have tried. It will usually display across all screens, but it is only displaying the middle 3rd of the picture. There are a couple of games that have hacks that you can do to .cfg files that mostly work (farcry1) but with a lot of bugs, some work fine once you've hacked them. Others require hacked .exe's to make it work (Rainbow 6: Vegas 2). which thankfully worked even with the steam version. This however sucks.. because you can't log into the ubi servers with a hacked game to play online with your largely advantageous 140-ish degree FOV.
The last game I tried and put in the videos was Dead Space. And oh boy does it work awesome. I can't comment on HUD stretching and the like with this game because it is all rendered within the 3d space of the game itself. But it really added to the experience of that game. Being able to see from the sides like that adds a huge advantage over the tight claustrophobic feeling of the game. (that and a mouse with a DPI selector to up the sensitivity made this the best playthrough of Dead Space I've ever had. If we could all play this way, half the bitching about this amazing game on the PC would never have happened).
Onto the cons:
#1 Desktop usage. This sucks. The videocard tricks the computer into thinking that all 3 displays are one. So the taskbar goes across the entire bottom of the screen. Startmenu on the left monitor, system tray on the right. I guess that is comparable to the Hud displacement in Crysis. Windows is not optimised for it, which makes sense as it is being tricked anyway. Anytime you fullscreen a youtube vid, it blacks out all 3 screens and just shows on the middle one, if you are running a 4:3 or 16:10 monitor, this shows because the picture will poke into the other screens rather than letterboxing on your central one. There are profiles you can save, and I have 2 saved. 3 separate monitors and 3x1 eyefinity, they switch with a right click menu from the Catalyst Control Centre on your system tray, but switching back to eyefinity mode is a bit glitchy, and 9 times out of 10 I end up getting a 3 clone display instead of 1 big one, and have to end up fiddling around with settings and switching modes back and forth until it somehow miraculously works. If this worked as easily as 2 clicks like it is supposed to, I wouldn't complain, and I'd just turn it on for playing games.
#2 Price. I was lucky. My wife bought me a widescreen LCD 3 years ago for christmas to replace my old CRT. Then the next year I bought a new computer and gave her my old one.. So I bought a second monitor for her. Then the year after that, we bought bought laptops (I got a netbook and she got a big 17 inch Dell) and I gave my older computer to a friend and skyfed the monitor.. so I already had 2 16:10 22” monitors. So buying the third was no big deal. My video card is a 5970 XXX, and cost about 470 dollars. Combine that with 200 dollars per monitor and you're spending over 1000 dollars just to run this. Mind you there are cheaper cards that will do eyefinity.
#3 Displayport. In order to run eyefinity you need to have at least one monitor that uses display port, or to have an active displayport adapter. This is necessary and I understand why. Some people complained about the need to spend extra money on something ATI claimed was easy and cheaper than the competitors offerings. DVI, VGA and HDMI suck. Displayport is not just an opensource version of HDMI, it is totally different. To be able to run 3 monitors together this way they need to be synched. Much like my audio interfaces do when I'm recording. Otherwise it wont work. Displayport has a much better way of doing this, its dual link is faster and more accurate than any other protocol. There is a reason all macbook computers now are using displayport in its many forms. It is BETTER. And the rest of the industry needs to start adopting it or we'll continue to be inslaved by these dying protocols.
I hope this helps you make a decision if you plan on going ahead with your own eyefinity setup. I will add a few of my own thoughts about what to buy if you're in the market.
My card is an XFX. It has 2 DVI ports, HDMI and Displayport. I'm using LG and Samsung monitors on DVI and my displayport monitor is an HP Compaq, it's native, no adapter here. There are versions of the eyefinity cards (and I dont remember the manufacturer) that instead come with 6 mini-displayport ports on the back of the card and come bundled with all the adapters you need. Whether HDMI, VGA or DVI. I'm assuming these cards have internal adapters, because the cords that they come with are all passive. But this would work better because then you dont have to spend the extra money on an active adapter, or a fancy monitor like I had to.
Also I think the 6 monitor setup is pretty dumb. Yeah its cool that you can string them together. Because of the better resolution, but the aspect ratio gets changed again. And you're not really gaining any FOV. If you want to play with a 50” display.. go buy a 50” TV. You wont get the borders in your monitors. Personally I like the picture on my 42” LG better than my computer monitors while I play games. Occasionally I'll haul the computer up there to play and it looks fantastic (I think its 75Hz and that might be why). Way better than 6 smaller monitors strung together would.
Videos:
Note: I don't know what that annoying sound is. Some kind of interference I guess, but it goes away when there is more volume coming from the game so I figured people could deal with it. Also the HDR effect is bad, especially with the games that have HDR. the bloom on the monitor is exaggerated in the camera because of the lens's own HDR effect. Sorry but there's little I could do.
Part 1: (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eALSyXoX6cY&feature=youtube_gdata)
Part 2: (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgLEnJhO8sE&feature=youtube_gdata)
