Widescreen Gaming Forum

Would that be someone willing drop in around here every now and then? If not, where would be the best place to keep up to date on his EyeFinity press releases and communication? Does he blog like SunSp*t and you do?

He Tweets actually - @CatalystMaker. Thought I'll probably report here as well when something is ready to be said.

In the 4870x2 a feature called "sideport" was always shown on the slides and whatnot but never implemented, and it was widely believed that if sideport were to be enabled the 4870x2 could have surpassed Nvidia GTX295 (since the sideport was a direct interconnect between both GPU cores and may have helped performance greatly). Well, it's been ages since anyone has even spoken about it, but what will happen to Sideport? Will it be enabled on the 5870x2 and the 4870x2 at the same time?

I'll steal the same answer from the one I gave Guru3D:

This is simply a case of our software capabilities catching up to our hardware capabilities.
When the initial design of the RV770 was taking place and concepts such as Sideport were being kicked around our ATI CrossFireX™ software wasn't in the place it is right now, so there was a much higher reliance on inter-chip communication.

While having lots of bandwidth is rarely a bad thing, the ATI CrossFireX communication bandwidth between two discrete cards is less than local bandwidth - even though Sideport doubles the inter-GPU communication bandwidth on an X2 type solution it's still not significant enough to really change the disparity in local frame buffer and inter-GPU bandwidths.

The software work that occurred in the space of time between the RV770 design and product saw significant improvements in inter-GPU communication. Internal to the driver we now have a number of "alternate frame rendering" (AFR) profiles, with many parameters that can be tweaked in order to control how the rendering behaves over multiple GPU's and reduce the inter-GPU communication as much as possible. By the time we put two RV770's on a board and started testing Sideport, the current ATI CrossFireX software capabilities delivered more than enough bandwidth, obviating the need for Sideport.

If this feature was enabled, it would save alot of hassle and money in having to buy an active adaptor, which then could be spend on a 2nd ATI card for better performance, (CrossFire 5850's > 1x5870 + active adaptor)

To do this type of setup you'd need a genlock/framelock type connector that is typically a workstation feature. Without this it would make the timing/syncing of the panels between card particularly difficult and you'd be getting "panel" tearing.

[quote]If this feature was enabled, it would save alot of hassle and money in having to buy an active adaptor, which then could be spend on a 2nd ATI card for better performance, (CrossFire 5850's > 1x5870 + active adaptor)

To do this type of setup you'd need a genlock/framelock type connector that is typically a workstation feature. Without this it would make the timing/syncing of the panels between card particularly difficult and you'd be getting "panel" tearing.
I guess this would be the case even if the number of cards & number of screens were symmetrical ? (i.e. 2 identical gfx cards, 2 screens, one on each card or 3 cards , 3 screens & so on ... )

To do this type of setup you'd need a genlock/framelock type connector that is typically a workstation feature. Without this it would make the timing/syncing of the panels between card particularly difficult and you'd be getting "panel" tearing.

I guess this would be the case even if the number of cards & number of screens were symmetrical ? (i.e. 2 identical gfx cards, 2 screens, one on each card or 3 cards , 3 screens & so on ... )
Probably, because the rendering workloads would be different between the boards.

With the new 58xx and 57xx cards, can you have separate colour profiles for each monitor? Is that a feature that is in the works?

If not, would I need to have 3 video cards and maybe 2 DVI switches if I wanted to switch to Eyefinity for gaming?

Question: Is ATI SurroundView still supported with the HD5xxx?

Dave can you confirm if the 5870x2 will be a 6 port card? Some people have said the 5870x2 will be just like the current 5870 with support for 3 monitors. What will be the 6 port card be then. I heard that there will be a 2 gig ram card also. I really want to be able to use 3x1 landscape and the 1 extended monitor to have teamspeak and temp monitors running and visible. I always host a 8 man lan on thursdays and it is so much easier when you can monitor teamspeak and hamachi on a visible monitor. That is why I stayed away from sli for the longest time. I think that the 2 gig ram card will help for the big resolutions but I also think it will not have the horsepower to run the image quality we would like on games. Almost all the people that are waiting for the 5870x2 are doing it because they think it will be a 6 port card and hoping it is 2 gigs ram per core. I am expecting and ready to pay $500to $600 for this card. I am a 45 yr old gamer and have been waiting for 4-5 years for some mulimonitor gaming but the matrox triplehead has not been the solution that I would want. It is to much work to configure for my tastes. Thanks for reading this long post and thank you for the reply!!!

Hey Dave,

do you know if we will be able to Xfire the eyefinity 6 version of the 5870 with a regular 5870?

Thanks

Thanks for previous answer Dave. :) Its good to see that AF have come that far.

I have another question:

Will ATI provide with an option to use our previous gen cards (4000 series) with the new 5000 series? I am thinking spesifically Havok and Bullet on Opencl, GPGPU related tasks etc.