Over at TechEye they take AMD’s latest Eyefinity-6 for a test drive with some popular CAD packages, and contrary to what I originally expected, find it to be surprisingly scalable across 6 screens.
Starting out using Solidworks and using one monitor with the ATI FirePro V9800 brought in a graphical score of 3.81. The next sequence was four monitors running the application and two showing just the windows desktop. To our surprise the actual graphical score of 3.67 had dropped only by 0.14. Finally we pushed the whole six displays into one 5760 x 2400 unit and the final run took us by surprise again, showing a fine drop of only 0.13 with a graphical result of 3.54. The overall monitor increase only saw a very minor decrease in the final graphical output, an exceptionally good result.
I really suspected some pretty heavy impacts on framerates due to the extreme number of pixels you have to push. That resolution is full HD (1080p) across all six displays, great for most people, and to see it only drop by .27 when scaling from 2 to 6 is simply amazing. It seems to indicate they aren’t fill-rate limited, but I’ld like to see some tests with varying geometric complexity to see how it scales out. If extremely large models perform as well as simple ones, then.. Just wow.
