Performance and test setup notes

Performance and test setup

Before we begin some actual testting, we obviously need to address performance. The Radon HD 5870 was just announced (read our review already?). If you create a multi-monitor setup you need to be aware of the fact that you'll need a beefy graphics card as well.

Let's say you are connecting three 24" monitors with a screen resolution of 1920x1200 and place them horizontally next to each other. Now you will end up with a 5760x1200 pixels screen resolution. That my friends is 6912000 pixels thus nearly 7 Mpixels of resolution that need to be refreshed at least 30 times per second.

With modern game titles this immediately already poses a threat to the 5870 as we have increased the load on our graphics card three times more than usual. So yes, in the end you must consider and opt CrossfireX if you plan a project like this for gaming with modern titles.

Unfortunately at the time of launch, Eyefinity will support only single-GPU configurations for gaming, but we're informed CrossFireX support will be coming at some point in the future as well. 

In total we recorded six video's showing off Eyefinity with three monitors setup in Landscape mode.

Since we are using such a high resolution, we are not CPU bound whatsoever and to demonstrate this very point I've been evangelizing I will use a mid-range system made out of the following items:

Hardware:

• Radeon HD 5870 1024MB
• MSI AMD 790FX motherboard
• Phenom II 955BE Processor
• 2x2GB DDR3 memory 1066 MHz
• Samsung 500 GB HDD
• Dell 2408WFP (x3)

Software:

• Windows Vista 64-bit SP2
• DirectX 9/10 End User Runtime
• ATI Catalyst RC6 Cypress beta
• HAWX
• Company of Heroes
• Anno 1404
• Devil May Cry 4
• Crysis
• Call of Duty 4

So yes really dog ... that's all we'll be using. A very affordable PC, remember we are GPU bound at a massive resolution of 5760x1200, not CPU or system bound. Alright, let's start it up.