Just thought I'd post a quick thread to relate my experiences with Ati's new flagship.

After getting carried away by ATI's Eyefinity hype, if finally decided to switch my 2 power-hungry Nvidia-based XFX GF8800GTX XXL 768 Mb SLI for a single ATI/AMD Radeon HD 5870 from Asus.

I did some checks on various forums to make sure I won't run into any compatibilities, as the makers of my Mobo's chipset are not really best friends with the makers of that new GPU. No problems reported there.

So after a quick purchase of the card, together with a 3rd 23'' LCD, I happily replace the 2 old ones with a shiny red new one (Not without some trouble, that card is simply huge). Power up the PC, and nothing happens, just a gentle whirring of the ventilators filling the emptiness of the moment.

Several attempts later, moving the card to the other PCI-X slots, I end up getting a post beep in the 3rd PCI-X 8x slot. The card works, but the 8x limit clearly shows when running a benchmark. So more swearing, switching to one of the old GF8800, switching back to the 5870, etc...

FINALLY: I start up the PC with the ATI card in the first pci-x slot and go get a coffee. a little over one minute later, I hear a beep coming from my office, it finally posted. In an Nvidia SLI slot, that card takes over a minute before we get anything on the screen.

Conclusion: Drink more coffee.

PS: Yes, I'm also part of the group of people who did not read AMD/ATI's fineprint concerning the third monitor requiring a displayport. I feel stupid as well as soiled, as I had to order the active DP/DVI converter form the APPLE Store!

I forgot to mention: Performance has gone through the roof. SLI is really not worth the extra cash.

Well first off I am glad you got it working...however to say SLi is not worth the cash is a bit of an empty statement, perhaps what you should have said is that SLi is not worth it for YOU in your experience.

However I know two peeps and have read more online that with the right hardware and luck (drivers) it can be very doo indeed. You were running old hardware aswell, the sweet spot for SLi at the moment is apparently a pair of GTX260's OC editions and they ROCK.

But yeah you could say that I am running SLi aswell with my GTX295 and its not without its problems....but a pair of high end GTX cards is well worth hassle if working well.

Post some more taughts on the new card mate....congrats again

Ok, I admit the when I first got it, the SLI did add a nice little extra in performance, but the problems caused by this tech had a rather large impact on the joy of playing. combined with the price of such a setup as well as the non-negligible power consumption, I'm having some considerations on the (pleasure*performance)/price ratio side.

Then again, if there's no one to pioneer the use of parallel GPUs, there'll be little progress in that area. I just decided to let the others carry that torch for a while

I'll update the thread with some impressions on Eyefinity once I get it running.

As Promised, here's some more details on my Eyefinity experience.

In short: It's awesome. The following page has a few pics that should give you a good idea, but you have to sit in front of the 3 23'' screens to really get that incredible immersive feeling. http://oberhaensli.net/wide/

Now for the rant: It's a bit of a challenge to get this thing running, as the impression you get when trying to do so is that of a technology in early QA testing, somewhere between Alpha and Beta. As usual, Ati's driver's suck (as usual) and the interface is made to punish the user who is used to standardized user interfaces. Having moved from Nvidia's rather efficient control panel, it particularly shows how bad interface design can get without proper user acceptance testing.

The worst is the absolutely random behavior of the driver: While it’s very stable, enabling Eyefinity does not follow any logic. You keep following the same steps from ATI’s website over and over again, each time to end up with a completely different result, except the one you’re trying to get. For example, the plan was to get the 3 screens to assemble into a 3x1920x1080 resolution, in other words, one gigantic 5760 pixels wide desktop:

Attempt 1: Three cloned 640x480 (Waaah! my desktop icon layout is all gone!)
Attempt 2: One Central 1920x1080
Attempt 3: One wide 3200x768 (getting close, but that’s not it)
Attempt 4: Three Cloned 1920x1080
Etc…

So after approximately 1h15 of playing around with the settings, I end up with my 5760x1080. Pro tip: Make sure to save that as a profile (Hidden in “options” menu on the right side of the Catalyst control panel) as you can be certain that within in the next 3 system boots, you will lose that setting. To enable a saved profile, you just have to select it between 3 and 4 times in a row, until your display looks like what you actually saved it as.

The reward for the effort remains luckily very consequent. Performance with that card is simply amazing, noise development minimal and any game spread over 3 screens turns out to be absolutely gorgeous. One comment concerning the Apple (Ewww!) mini displayport adapter: Besides its rather high price, I did not encounter any of the problems reported by other users. Once it was plugged in, I did not have to worry about it again; No going out of the monitor’s range, no BSODs, excellent image quality. It may show a .5 sec delay when switching to a new display mode, but that’s absolutely acceptable.

In short: Was it worth all the trouble? Hell yeah!

Pro tip 2: http://www.widescreengamingforum.com really helps with the setup and tweaking of the various games. As you may guess, not all were made for extremely wide resolutions and require some playing with their .ini files before providing satisfactory results (Except for the Source engine. Valve rules. Except for L4D2).

I like the fact the new HD 5800's can Bit-Stream High Def Audio to a digital receiver

Wow that must be very cool to have. So, no problem in games when using that disgusting resolution?

care to post some benchies

So with the final resolution of 5760x1080....... does the game need to be able to support this resolution so that the scaling doesnt get weird.... Or do you get some squishing and stretching. Kinda like if you were trying to force the game resolution of 1280x1024 into a monitor that runs 1680x1050 where the result would be the image getting squished....

Concerning the games resolutions and proportions: the resolution 5760x1080 itself is natively supported by almost all recent games.

However, how they handle these extreme proportions is the critical point:

- Several will simply "stretch" the image in a hideously wide fashion, rendering the game just unplayable. There sometimes are some tweaks in the graphic engine's config files to adjust this.

- Others will cut the picture vertically resulting in a narrow, "zoomed in" rendering of the scene, keeping the same View width as with the normal 4:3 or 16:10 propotions. I understand that this is known as "Vert-" and it seems to be the "lazy developer's" solution, as it can prevent the player form seeing things he isn't supposed to. This can work OK for strategy games where you're able to zoom in and out as you like, but for FPS and racing games, it's creates a claustrophobic ambience that players rarely enjoy.

- Finally, there's the games that expand the view on the sides, technique known as "Hor+". This results in a nice surround view of the environment you're playing in and it really helps immersion. For example, all Source engine based games allow for this natively (Horray for Valve if it wasn't for that damn L4D2)

In short, Surround screen playability depends on the possibility to adjust the FOV.(Definition here: http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/wiki/index.php/Field_of_view) Once you get some experience playing around with it, you can get most of your favorite games to run in these monstous proportions.

For the benchmarks, I hope to update the thread soon. Any preferences on the apps I should run?

Fraps and a screen shot would be nice