ATI Eyefinity: The Eyefinity Technology Laid Out

Breakthroughs and principal milestones within the PC graphics experience actually develop fairly seldom. The last principal update was a move to multi-GPU rendering: Crossfire, Dual GPU cards, and nVidia's SLI technique. A drawbacks to these technologies are pretty apparent. More than one motherboard is required for both Crossfire and SLI configurations, and dual GPU cards are prohibitively costly for all but the most hardcore enthusiasts. Another concern, obviously, is the fact that you end up consuming two cards worth of power more than one.

When it comes to applications, you end up with a choice: you can span a desktop across multiple screens, thus running several applications across one or more displays, nonetheless, generally, spanning an application across greater than one monitor implies that it could not be accelerated. So you ended up with a non-enviable choice: speed or size. Unfortunately, you couldn't possess both.

Well, times have altered, my friends. AMD's Eyefinity technology is that succeeding level in mainstream, multi-monitor output. Eyefinity enables the user to possess up to six screens controlled from a solitary card, and hence enabling a massive region of more than 24 megapixels. If you take a chance to peruse AMD’s documentation on Eyefinity, it says that “we are inexorably on the road to the ‘holodeck’ (as conceptualized on Star Trek).” Given that the Star Trek holodeck had involved in it concrete feedback based on force fields and such, this could be reaching a bit much at the moment, yet none-the-less, the technology is certainly moving along.

With Eyefinity, one video card can drive up to six monitors, according to the type of the card, of course. AMD's attitude is that all 5000 series video cards will support Eyefinity. The trick here is that it falls to the graphics card manufacturer to generate a verdict whether, and how, Eyefinity will be implemented on that particular card. As of September 2010, the time of this text, only the ATI 5800 model line of video cards have Eyefinity enabled in CrossFire mode. The HD 4000 string of cards, and all of their predecessors, don't support the Eyefinity technology. As fantastic as that string of cards was, they simply do not have the horsepower, or the output connectivity for displays, needed to fuel more than two hi-res monitors.

So, how do we get three displays running off of a solitary video card, precisely what is this new DisplayPort we keep hearing about, and exactly why do we desire it? For many years, Dual-Link DVI has been the professional multi-monitor interface of choice, but that is about to change. Being digital, DVI doesn't have the requirement of a digital-to-analog converter per monitor that VGA requires, on the other hand does need that there be a committed clock source for each screen (this element is also accurate of HDMI). According to AMD, the signaling load of DVI demands so many I/O pins that come from the video card that extending the screen past two screens was plainly impactical. Engineers recognized this at ATI back in 2004, and started developing some ideas to eliminate and move beyond the DVI restrictions

So, do you require a DisplayPort connector in order to run EyeFinity? Will you need to obtain new screens? No, you will not. There exists DisplayPort to DVI and also DisplayPort to VGA adapters, frequently called dongles. There are two kinds of dongles for Eyefinity: passive and active. Just like any other sort of dongle for your notebook, these adapters adapt one kind of connection into another style of connection. Conventional video port types are based on a technique named Transition Minimized Differential Signaling (TMDS) and use either DVI or HDMI interfaces. The situation here is that TMDS is almost totally different than DisplayPort. For just one example, TMDS uses raster scanning, while DisplayPort is packetized. The protocols are pretty different. Also, the power specifications are clearly different: TMDS typically runs at about 5V where DisplayPort is only 3.3V.

Passive dongles drive non-DisplayPort signals through the DisplayPort connectors by shifting signals from one configuration to the other. The graphics card is able to discern that a passive dongle is attached to the DP connector. At that point, instead of passing a 3.3V DisplayPort stream, the card outputs a 3.3V TMDS signal through that port and the passive dongle shifts the voltage level up to meet the TMDS spec.

Active dongles are made up of a DisplayPort receiver (which attaches to the graphics card) as well as a TMDS transmitter, which integrates a digital-to-analog converter (DAC) for VGA output. That’s really the focal difference between both types. Power is regularly supplied by a cable that connects to a USB port. With an active dongle, the adapter looks similar to a DisplayPort to the graphics card, so the card transmits DisplayPort signals natively. In the passive case, the card outputs TMDS for HDMI or DVI monitors.

So the pimary thing to know about Eyefinity and dongles is that there’s a hard limit of two TMDS output streams, period. There's no give here. So, if you want to play with Eyefinity to set up a 2x1 “array” (yes, dual-screen Eyefinity looks a bit silly, but that’s how the driver sees it), it doesn’t matter what you hurl at the card. Two VGA screens? No issue. You maybe could use a VGA adapter on a DVI port and an active VGA dongle on a DisplayPort connection. Just keep your legacy output stream count in heed as you scale beyond two screens. “If you’re already using two DVI connectors on the board, you can’t use a passive dongle since, in theory, that would be a third TMDS signal stream,” says Roger Quero, technical director at AMD’s GPU Technologies unit. “You can have two passive dongles, and the rest of them have to be active. Just like, if you’re pondering about the six-output card, that’s six mini DisplayPorts. Two of those connections could be passive, putting out TMDS over those ports, then the rest have to be active so that we think it’s a DisplayPort display.

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Donald Fountain draws on over three decades of computer hardware and programming knowledge, managerial experience, and two Bachelor's Degrees, as well as six Associate's degrees for his writing. He is the founder and publisher of PlanetEyefinity.com, and DisplayPortMonitors.com, as well as a support supervisor for one of the largest web hosting firms in the nation.

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