Displayport-compatible screens needed for Eyefinity?

[SunSp*t]

I think it´s safe to say if AMD/ATI from the start had set out to make Eyefinity available to the masses (IE people with DVI/HDMI connections) the cost per card for doing this would have been almost negligable compared to the current $100 we have to fork up now for an active 3rd party adapter.
...
To me Dave´s comments about ATI talking to 3rd party developers about active adapters now just confirms my thoughts about Eyefinity and the DP-solution being somewhat of an afterthought in the 5800 design process. If this was the plan from the start, shouldn´t they have started these "talks" waaay back and made sure there were active adapters available en masse at launch?

You will find that if anyone is the villain in all this, it is probably me.

We had a pretty strict budget for the cost of the product, a budget that I am responsible for setting and holding everyone accountable for. When we (mostly myself and one other guy) came up with the Eyefinity idea, the budget was oversubscribed, and I was pruning features. The only way I could get Eyefinity in at all was make it as close to zero cost as I could. The cost per chip is not negligible - additional timing sources were in all probability a complete deal-killer. While I have some latitude about what goes into a chip, in the end I have to justify everything I do. I had a choice, and you know which one I took

As for working with external sources for active adapters, it's a bit more complicated. Eyefinity was kept under very tight security, which made it very difficult to work with anyone outside of AMD. Who created and oversaw this security regime, and limited outside contacts? Ummm, that would be me again. AMD gave me quite a bit of freedom as an Eyefinity creator, and one of the things I insisted on was very tight security within the company and almost no-one outside the company knowing about it. I deliberately did not support external developments in the name of security. There were many other folks, including Rick Bergman, who wanted more public engagement. I was rather obstinate about not allowing that.

I was willing to take the risk that some supporting developments would come later in the interests of having a competitive surprise.

You can justifiably criticize me all you want for the results of the preceding. My prediction is however that most of these issues will be solved by market forces in relatively short order.

SunSp*t

[Samiad]

No comments other than a deep thanks for joining in with the discussion on the forums SunSp*t, it's very refreshing to have such an insight into the whole product development. I definitely get the impression that Eyefinity is something of a labour of love and it's very interesting to hear how it's approval was gained in the company.

[kiselk]

SunSp*t, you are ignoring me and my questions, aren't you?

[Magic Man]

SunSp*t, you are ignoring me and my questions, aren't you?

Take a chill pill please.

We have two guys who work at the heart of Eyefinity willing to take the time and effort to post here when they can and answer questions and, hopefully, take back suggestions. We want to keep them interested in our views not hack them off.

Please don't alienate them for the rest of us by personalising any issues and thinking that you are the only one here of importance.

[kiselk]

[quote]SunSp*t, you are ignoring me and my questions, aren't you?

Take a chill pill please.

We have two guys who work at the heart of Eyefinity willing to take the time and effort to post here when they can and answer questions and, hopefully, take back suggestions. We want to keep them interested in our views not hack them off.

Please don't alienate them for the rest of us by personalising any issues and thinking that you are the only one here of importance.

Actually I was just wondering whether I should send him flowers and a box of whiskey to make him act no so offended by my criticism :)

[Paradigm Shifter]

[quote]SunSp*t, you are ignoring me and my questions, aren't you?

Take a chill pill please.

We have two guys who work at the heart of Eyefinity willing to take the time and effort to post here when they can and answer questions and, hopefully, take back suggestions. We want to keep them interested in our views not hack them off.

Please don't alienate them for the rest of us by personalising any issues and thinking that you are the only one here of importance.
This. ;)

The insight that both have provided has proven enlightening so far. :) I want to know more. ;)

[wumba]

Wow I am pretty impressed with all the AMD community support here, I guess you guys really know your user base. :)

Now that we have established the following:

- Yes you need an active adapter.

- No, its not gonna get fixed on the chip.

- Yes, its all sunspots fault for wanting to give us this cool feature. How dare he anyway? :)

Can we move on to a different topic? I'm tired of pages and pages of active adapter comments with no real info.

For those who saw the FERMI prototype it looks like a 2 port solution. I seriously doubt Nvidia is offering any competition in this arena. So unless you want to pay $200+ for a Matrox "adapter" limited to 3840x1024 or want the performance hit of SoftTH guess your gonna go with AMD. Maybe we can move on to the real questions now ... please!?

:?: Linux support? :?:

:?: Future possibility of 4960x1600 SLS with P L P configuration in Linux/Windows? :?:

Thank you!
:) :D :lol:

[Darthdingo]

:?: Linux support? :?:

:?: Future possibility of 4960x1600 SLS with P L P configuration in Linux/Windows? :?:

Thank you!
:) :D :lol:

Totally agree :) We need full Linux support on the 5800 series ASAP. Just good 2d will do for now, but that's not even available yet ?

And for sure we need Portrait + Landscape + Portrait mode to work. I know tons of 30" Display owners that would love to add 20" monitors flipped upright in Portrait mode to allow for all three displays to have a 1600 resolution vertical height. Just don't understand why that is such a big problem ?

[BHawthorne]

[quote]I think it´s safe to say if AMD/ATI from the start had set out to make Eyefinity available to the masses (IE people with DVI/HDMI connections) the cost per card for doing this would have been almost negligable compared to the current $100 we have to fork up now for an active 3rd party adapter.
...
To me Dave´s comments about ATI talking to 3rd party developers about active adapters now just confirms my thoughts about Eyefinity and the DP-solution being somewhat of an afterthought in the 5800 design process. If this was the plan from the start, shouldn´t they have started these "talks" waaay back and made sure there were active adapters available en masse at launch?

You will find that if anyone is the villain in all this, it is probably me.

We had a pretty strict budget for the cost of the product, a budget that I am responsible for setting and holding everyone accountable for. When we (mostly myself and one other guy) came up with the Eyefinity idea, the budget was oversubscribed, and I was pruning features. The only way I could get Eyefinity in at all was make it as close to zero cost as I could. The cost per chip is not negligible - additional timing sources were in all probability a complete deal-killer. While I have some latitude about what goes into a chip, in the end I have to justify everything I do. I had a choice, and you know which one I took

As for working with external sources for active adapters, it's a bit more complicated. Eyefinity was kept under very tight security, which made it very difficult to work with anyone outside of AMD. Who created and oversaw this security regime, and limited outside contacts? Ummm, that would be me again. AMD gave me quite a bit of freedom as an Eyefinity creator, and one of the things I insisted on was very tight security within the company and almost no-one outside the company knowing about it. I deliberately did not support external developments in the name of security. There were many other folks, including Rick Bergman, who wanted more public engagement. I was rather obstinate about not allowing that.

I was willing to take the risk that some supporting developments would come later in the interests of having a competitive surprise.

You can justifiably criticize me all you want for the results of the preceding. My prediction is however that most of these issues will be solved by market forces in relatively short order.

SunSp*t

I can definitely understand the need for non-disclosure. Really, it's a moot point now though. What is done is done and everyone has the reasoning for it. With that out of the way though I think it would be a good target goal to seek a third party that would be capable of making cost effective DP/mini-DP to Single-Link DVI active adapters. On the 6-port card, $400 in adapters is still a bit "out there" as far as enthusiast pricing. If the street price for a single-link active adapter could be out sourced for $30-35 all the controversy and issues are then gone. I am definitely looking forward to the 6-port card.

I set up my first 2 projectors yesterday and get the 3rd delivered tomorrow. The current 12x7 foot wall sized projection is mind blowing. I'm typing this message on the projection setup. Adding that third projector tomorrow will give me 180 degree 13x6.5 foot circular projection for my gaming room. All I'm waiting for now is the 6-port card and some cheap adapters. Simulator games are going to be great with this. I was playing World of Warcraft last night on the setup too. WoW can do 180 degree FOV, so it'll be ideal. :wink:

[Mach1.9pants]

Yeah remember the Fermi board was a hack-job cut up fake tho! So we have no idea as to the outputs it will have. Still, as I have Win7 working at 5040, I will now wait until Fermi info is more firm (bom bom!) until I go to EF. However NV will have to work bloody hard to beat EF, I can stomach a 100 US adaptor. And maybe by the end of the year the cheaper single link ones will be out?. However, as it stands, the 5870 doesn't beat my 280SLI and cross fire isn't available. So I can wait.

And Sunsp*t, thanks for sticking your head in, Dave B. too. We appreciate your insight :D

[BHawthorne]

Yeah remember the Fermi board was a hack-job cut up tho! Still, as I have Win7 working at 5040, I will now wait until Fermi info is more firm (bom bom!) until I go to EF. However NV will have to work bloody hard to beat EF, I can stomach a 100 US adaptor (and maybe by the end of the year the cheaper single link ones will be out?) to get 3x1920x1200. However, as it stands, the 5870 doesn't beat my 280SLI and cross fire isn't available. So I cna wait.

And Sunsp*t, thanks for sticking your head in, Dave B. too. We appreciate your insight :D

The only thing nVidia could do to combat it at this point late in the development cycle would be to unlock SLI Matrix mode for the Geforce line. They'd have to retool it a bit to be directly competitive, because as far as I can tell it can only do 4 displays. One thing it can do that EyeFinity can't yet is bridge GPU/cards though. As SLI Matrix mode was targeted at some extremely expensive hardware, I have low expectations that this'll be brought to the Geforce line even though it's been in every driver for nVidia for awhile now. Keep in mind I'm just purely guessing about the nVidia side of things.

[wumba]

Yeah remember the Fermi board was a hack-job cut up fake tho!

Was it? Doesn't surprise me too much, I'm guessing their yield claims are exaggerated as well.

With all of the new launch specs I would think that they might have mentioned multi-monitor support. Their focus seemed to be CUDA, CUDA, and more CUDA. Not to say the tech isn't exciting but we are all here for a different reason, right? I'd speculate the percentage of people wanting to game on three monitors or run Linux Compiz on 3 monitors is probably an abysmally small market share. I am actually pretty shocked that the eyefinity product exists and even more shocked that they are coming to these forums to chat it up. :shock: :D

As to the point BHawthorne made about 4 x $100 for active adapters, I must admit I do agree. Seems a bit much esp considering it will take 4 USB ports! BTW BHawthorne I would love to see pics/video of your setup!!!

Still wish ATI wasn't AFK everytime I ask a Linux related question in any of the forums covering Eyefinity... :roll:

I loved my x1950 and I would come back to ATI camp but I wont until they fix the reason I left, Linux support!

[BHawthorne]

As to the point BHawthorne made about 4 x $100 for active adapters, I must admit I do agree. Seems a bit much esp considering it will take 4 USB ports! BTW BHawthorne I would love to see pics/video of your setup!!!

Yep, once someone realizes there is a pre-existing market just waiting for the product I think it'll be a lot easier for us to find these adapters. It's not going to happen overnight though. My guess it'll be a few months before something cost effective shows up on the adapter market. Just like any other electronic component it needs dev time.

The 4 USB ports isn't really an issue because most current mobos have 2 or 3 mobo connectors for USB backplates which gives plenty of extra USB capability. Not many people use those though.

As far as pics of the game room setup, it's nothing worth looking at yet. The room hasn't even been framed yet and I'm projecting on an unfinished cement wall to get a rough idea of where the projector mounts will need to be (which are still in the middle of being shipped to me from monoprice). I have a 5-day weekend coming up Friday-Tuesday though with my community college taking a fall break, so I expect to make a lot of headway on the room. I have another seperate thread on this. It's in this same forum under title about EyeFinity circular projection. I don't want to derail this topic any so I'll keep my projection stuff over in that thread. :wink:

[Jimmmy]

[quote]
:?: Linux support? :?:

:?: Future possibility of 4960x1600 SLS with P L P configuration in Linux/Windows? :?:

Thank you!
:) :D :lol:

Totally agree :) We need full Linux support on the 5800 series ASAP. Just good 2d will do for now, but that's not even available yet ?

And for sure we need Portrait + Landscape + Portrait mode to work. I know tons of 30" Display owners that would love to add 20" monitors flipped upright in Portrait mode to allow for all three displays to have a 1600 resolution vertical height. Just don't understand why that is such a big problem ?

I just want to agree that Potrait + Landscape + Portrait mode is very important, but more importantly the ability to combine multiple monitors in various orientations will be essential to its success in my opinion..

I currently own a 30inch Dell and (2) 20inch Dell IPS panels, and I have spent the last week trying to put together 3 identical (3X2407WFP's) as well as inferior monitors so I can run Eyefinity.. I went to my friends house where he has it up and running, and I didn't like the 3 24inch montior presentation personally.. So I stopped trying to make Eyefinity work, until it supports my set up..

Jumping to the 5870 (from GTX 280 SLI) without complete Eyefinity support is a lateral move at best so I can't justify the card until my configuration is supported, BUT the moment I can run Eyefinity with my current configuration say goodbye to the Green Goblin FOREVER! It's that simple.. I would never look back, and I spend on average a $1000 on video cards a year, every year since the 8800GTX..

If ATI wants to corner the high end enthusiast market it must do it quickly with greater compatibility....

[BHawthorne]

I just want to agree that Potrait + Landscape + Portrait mode is very important, but more importantly the ability to combine multiple monitors in various orientations will be essential to its success in my opinion..

I tend to disagree. Doing an obscure combination of displays will not ensure it's success. My BS meter is going off when I saw that statement. Sure, there are a faction of multi-display people asking for this I've seen about a half-dozen alone in my reading, but it's not going to cause the failure of the feature just because it doesn't work for you (yet). :wink:

[SunSp*t]

No quoting or anything, and just a short comment or two. I am tired tonight.

KiselK:
I'm not dodging your questions - I just don't have time to address everything. I answer what I am most qualified to answer, and only one of those per night max.

Linux stuff:
Believe it or not, I don't know the answers to everything on Eyefinity. Linux is one of those things. Eyefinity is too big for someone to know everything unless that is their only job. I think it is so big right now, it may be that no-one knows it all. The software guys warned me this would happen, but as my wife will tell you, listening to warnings isn't a skill that I possess. It leads me to do things that maybe I shouldn't do. Like Eyefinity perhaps. My real job is defining our GPU roadmap and specifying individual CPUs. As DaveB can tell you, we were both on a CC today and didn't even finish addressing the topics of that CC. For me to get answers on Linux is going to be circumstance (e.g. when I have a spare 10-15 minutes). DaveB is likely going to beat me to it, and probably give you a more complete answer than I.

pLp display constellation:
That is on the list of constellations I'd like to see supported better. There is some support at present. Check out http://www.improbableinsights.com/2009/10/05/ati-eyefinity-and-three-displays/ and tell Loyd I sent ya.

Regarding cheap active adapters:
We are working on it, but if I could be so impolite: once you are past one or two, I don't get it If you are using the Six when that becomes available, and you need to buy new monitors, get DP capable ones. Use active adapters on a small number of old tech DVI monitors and any new monitors should be DP. For the Three, two monitors are DVI so at most one active adapter is need per card. Where does $400 come from in this scenario?

P.S. Dell currently sells P2310H 1980H 1080V for $209 and it pivots! And no I don't get a kick-back from Dell.

[Mesh]

Look at the ratio of displayport to dvi/hdmi monitors and then try to say it's no big deal.

Displayport is and will likely remain nothing more than a wannabe hdmi replacement.

It failed to get market ground and there's no sign that it will take off more then it is at current.

I don't even have a th rig and I can see where they can get 400$ tax to use the six. I've seen others with 4-5 monitors already in their rigs. That means on your six at least 2 would need active adapters. 4 would be needed if they added a 6th screen, unless they get one of the few available DP monitors.

And no offense, kickbacks or not, some of us wouldn't shop at Dell if they were paid to do so. They have crap support and even worse quality control.

[BHawthorne]

Regarding cheap active adapters:
We are working on it, but if I could be so impolite: once you are past one or two, I don't get it If you are using the Six when that becomes available, and you need to buy new monitors, get DP capable ones. Use active adapters on a small number of old tech DVI monitors and any new monitors should be DP. For the Three, two monitors are DVI so at most one active adapter is need per card. Where does $400 come from in this scenario?

I'm using three 0.6:1 short throw Optoma EX525ST projectors with the plan of eventually using five. There is no such thing as a DisplayPort enabled projector with a lens throw ratio of 0.6:1. In order to effectively pull off wall sized projection in a regular room for simulator games the lens throw needs to be very short. They only make DVI and HDMI projectors with that capability. Actually, I've yet to see a single projector of any spec that uses DisplayPort.

Yes, I realize my setup has no comparison to anything remotely standard, yet it would be nice if I didn't have to spend $100 an adapter after the first 2 passive ones.

[Dave Baumann]

With that out of the way though I think it would be a good target goal to seek a third party that would be capable of making cost effective DP/mini-DP to Single-Link DVI active adapters.

We are talking to two vendors at the moment on such an adapter, however its still in the discussion stages, so we are obviously a little ways away from the potential of having something in the market.

[Dave Baumann]

Displayport is and will likely remain nothing more than a wannabe hdmi replacement.

It failed to get market ground and there's no sign that it will take off more then it is at current.

Different specification, different market. DisplayPort is neither competing with HDMI nor is it aimed at the same thing as HDMI - and the latest HDMI specification further shows the divergence in the paths as a lot of them are just not useful for the PC.

DisplayPort is a VESA specification and it takes over from where DVI left off. DisplayPort is royalty free, where HDMI has license fees associated with it. Where the minority of PC panels carry HDMI, but the majority carry VGA / DVI you will gradually see those change to DP.

DP has been stuck in a chicken an egg scenario for a while. Features like Eyefinity will help kick it out of that cycle and as everyone starts offering DP on their graphics boards the panel selection will grow considerably.

DisplayPort is never going to be an HDMI replacement, and it never intended to be. DisplayPort is a DVI replacement.