Widescreen Gaming Forum

Buy a 7970. If the screen tearing bothers you then buy an DP 1.2 MST hub (once they're available) and 3 DP->SL-DVI adapters. Buying a 6950 at this point to drive a 5760x1080 setup is bordering on foolish. I'm running a 5870E6 right now and can't wait to upgrade (it's about 5% shy of the 6950 you're considering).

M.

You know I don't see why the flex cards would produce tearing because electrically DVI and HDMI are equivalent.

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Buy a 7970. If the screen tearing bothers you then buy an DP 1.2 MST hub (once they're available) and 3 DP->SL-DVI adapters. Buying a 6950 at this point to drive a 5760x1080 setup is bordering on foolish. I'm running a 5870E6 right now and can't wait to upgrade (it's about 5% shy of the 6950 you're considering).

M.

Thanks M, that's helpful. You know, I could just get a 7970, buy 2 DP->SL-DVI adapters and hook up the other monitor to the DVI port. Then, when the DP 1.2 MST hub comes out, I can buy that and get another DP->SL-DVI adapter. That way, I do not have to wait before buying a 7970. However, do DP->SL-DVI adapters cause input lag? I've already got 14ms on my monitors :/

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You know I don't see why the flex cards would produce tearing because electrically DVI and HDMI are equivalent.

If you read carefully you will see I said: "Getting a Flex card means I do NOT have to worry about tearing.

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Music is my life. You are my music.

No, I don't think they'll introduce any notable lag. The adapters should only have enough memory to hold at most a few DP Transport Units (way less than a raster line). To put more memory in the adapter would just cost more with no benefit at all.

So I guess it's obvious I should buy and 7-series and then a Displayport hub.
1. Should I wait for a 7-series Flex edition is released (not the 6gb one) or should I just buy the 7970?
2. How long before a DP 1.2 MST hub is released?

Thanks, Moose

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Music is my life. You are my music.

I'm in a similar position as Moose and I was thinking of going with the 6G and three dp2dvi adapters ... Pricy option but should be on the safe side regarding tearing.

Does anyone know whether they'll be releasing an AMD 79xx or 78xx 3GB with three mini DP ports? Cause I'd reckon for three screens 3gb should be enough.

Also, if I buy an AMD 7970 I'd probably have tearing on one of the monitors because two are connected via mini DP and one is connected via HDMI/DVI. Is there anything that can be done about this? I believe tearing is caused by rapid fluctuation of ingame FPS. Turning V-Sync on would seem like a solution, but in order for that to work you'd have to reach the 60 fps first. Am I getting the right conclusions here, and is there any other workaround to prevent tearing?

If buying a hub which connects three DVI/HDMI ports to one mini DP port is the only solution, could you add an estimated price and release date with that?

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Music is my life. You are my music.

Not sure if you get Tearing on a HD7970 !
1. It's a new GPU generation.... i thought HD6970 vs 5870 was a major improvement with Tearing issues.
2. There is a mini-DP to DVI Adtapter included! IF AMD manages to produce a Adapter which will produce flickering! nah.... quality control just CANT let something like that happen! Would be realy disapointed by AMD!


but.... are there realy Mini Displayport hubs out there? always hear romours bout them. but never saw one!

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Ok, so I don't think the tearing is due to rapid fluctuation of in-game FPS. My day job is design and verification of DP/DVI silicon so I may know what I'm talking about. My best guess is that the DP and HDMI/DVI pixel clocks aren't in sync. DP 1.1 runs at 1.62Gbps or 2.7Gbps and the pixel stream is packed into transfer units with filler bytes. While DVI/HDMI is a different rate depending on the resolution. If 2 links are DP and one link is DVI then they aren't necessarily running in lockstep. The aggregate effect is that while the DP monitors may be running at 60Hz the DVI could be at 59.97Hz (for example) and it will appear as tearing on the DVI monitor since the frame buffer won't switch to the next frame for all monitors during the vertical blanking period.

The solutions are to:

i) use 3 matched ports that are synchronous to a single clock
ii) use a DP 1.2 MST hub
iii) have AMD clock the DP pixel clock with the DVI link clock inside their chip (which is likely impossible due to some hardware constraint)

The last chip I worked on supported DP and/or DVI links. From a purely data output perspective we'd have the same screen tearing problems (ie: we don't clock our video output links from a single clock) but we get around it with a *complicated* image engine/buffer.

Note: I don't work for nVidia or AMD.