Date:
Tuesday , January 05, 2010
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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AMD's ATI Radeon Eyefinity Performance Review

We’ve covered AMD’s ATI Radeon Eyefinity in terms of the experience provided, and now we will evaluate how Eyefinity actually performs across the entire line of ATI Radeon HD 5000 series video cards. From the Radeon HD 5970 down to the Radeon HD 5750, we review the performance of Eyefinity in some new games and some old.

Introduction

If you aren’t familiar with AMD’s new ATI Radeon Eyefinity technology, you should be. Multiple display gaming isn’t a new idea; we’ve been evaluating performance in such configurations for a while at HardOCP. However, there have not been many elegant solutions. AMD has made multi-display gaming technology accessible and mainstream for gamers everywhere. No special software is required to get your game running. Most games support these new multi-display resolutions natively. AMD’s Catalyst Control Center does all the magic behind the scenes to span your display and make this work. While it is still lacking some features gamers are demanding, Eyefinity is currently working great for new and old games alike. Many people are currently using Eyefinity for gaming every day, including many of the editors at HardOCP.

We’ve written several evaluations on Eyefinity since its introduction, giving you a glimpse and trying to relate to you what the gameplay experience is like. We even held a special event in concert with AMD to demonstrate this awesome gaming technology. Through all of this, we haven’t yet evaluated the performance associated with running such high resolutions down the line of AMD video cards. This evaluation is an attempt to relate to you performance on the most common configuration we have come across with AMD’s ATI Radeon Eyefinity technology.

Configuration

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The configuration we will be utilizing are three Dell 2408WFP digital displays. These 24" displays support a full size DisplayPort and DVI connections and have a native resolution of 1920x1200 each. Having at least one LCD with DisplayPort is required to run a 3x1 display configuration. The Radeon HD 5750, HD 5770, HD 5850 and HD 5870 all contain one full size DisplayPort connector on the backplane, and two dual-link DVI connectors. The Radeon HD 5970 (dual-GPU video card) is unique however. It has one mini-DisplayPort connector and two dual-link DVI connectors. With this video card it is required (if your display doesn’t support mini-DisplayPort) to use a full size DisplayPort to mini-DisplayPort adaptor. Do not confuse this adapter with an active DVI to DisplayPort adaptor; they are two very different things.

Today we are evaluating the highest playable Eyefinity settings on every ATI Radeon HD 5000 series card that currently exists. Obviously, the lower end video cards are slower and the performance it is going to be less at the high resolutions with Eyefinity. What we want to find out is what we have to sacrifice to get playable performance and which video cards help us fully enjoy Eyefinity. We are going to concentrate on six games that benefit well from using Eyefinity technology, i.e. there is great benefit in seeing past the middle and having side displays.

On the following game pages we have included the ATI Radeon HD 5970, Radeon HD 5870, Radeon HD 5850 and Radeon HD 5770. We have put the Radeon HD 5750 on its own page, showing only the playable settings because quite frankly its performance was dismal at 5760x1200 which is to be expected.

As stated, our configuration is comprised of three Dell 2408WFP displays, which gives us an Eyefinity resolution of 5760x1200. We feel this is a common configuration and while we’d like to show you all every possible Eyefinity resolution combination, it is just not feasible. Many folks, included our Editor-in-Chief, Kyle Bennett, runs his monitors in a 3x1 portrait mode giving him 3600x1920 resolution. At the end of the day, it is most the same though. 5760x1200=6.912 million pixels as does 3600x1920. Do keep in mind that 5760x1200 is going to give you a much broader view though which you will likely find very handy in driving sims and first person shooters.