ATI Eyefinity (a 6 head card!)

[arwes]

Any one else looking at the ATI Eyefinity stuff for the future? I'm wondering what all the possibilities are for a church and a six head video card.

Here's a demo video of four Eyefinity cards pushing a wall of 24 monitors, playing X-Plane on a Ubuntu machine:

CMN Player - YouTube - Extrema Eyefinity Tech Demo on Linux -...

Some more from ATI's blog:

http://blogs.amd.com/home/2009/09/10...re-keep-watch/

[tedanderson]

This seems like it will make video wall applications cheaper and easier to set up.

[arwes]

Looks like they're expecting the Eyefinity cards to release next month, using the HD 5xxx series.

[Gracetech]

They have been out for over a week.

crt

Update: I guess i should clarify. The 3 head cards have been out for a bout 2 weeks now you can see the ones offered at NewEgg here.

Pretty much any 5000 series card from ATI will support either the 3up or 6up Eyefinity.

I've been tracking this for about a month. Now i need to find some $ to buy one and check it out. It would be quite cool to slap 4 of these on a mother board and get 24 discrete outputs.

[arwes]

I'm definitely looking into this for EasyWorship 2010 if we have a new music minister by then and if he's not partial to any other worship software. I know Jeff has mentioned the requirement for single card processing for stage display video, and not everybody's a huge fan of the matrox stuff.

[[Admin] osborn4]

Originally Posted by arwes

I'm definitely looking into this for EasyWorship 2010 if we have a new music minister by then and if he's not partial to any other worship software.

Side note: I've never figured out why the music minister would care what worship software you ran, unless he is setting up and/or running the programs himself.

Sorry. Just had to get that off my chest.

[arwes]

Offtopic: Yeah it's weird, but that's how our church administration has been. Our interim's requests for sound system upgrades are finally falling on open ears (it's an 11 year old install with a 18 year old mixer that lost the dust cover ages ago). She's been jumping up & down about it for a little less than a year now, and our late music minister had me researching mixers early last year. But the answer is always, "I want to wait until we have a music minister in place before making that kind of decision". Miraculously, I still have a full head of hair.

[tedanderson]

the answer is always, "I want to wait until we have a music minister in place before making that kind of decision".

From my own personal experience, I can't say that I had ever taken over a position where the staff was awaiting my arrival to make a decision- church, secular business, or otherwise. IMHO it is not a good business practice to make decisions based on what other people might do. But at the same time I can understand wanting to include everyone in the decision making process. It's just that sometimes you have to go with what you have in order to keep moving forward.


Oh, but not to get too far off topic here, is this 6 head video adapter a PCI card or AGP? And if it is an AGP card, do they make motherboards with 4 AGP slots?

[arwes]

Hey Ted, it's a PCI Express card. For multi card configs, I know nVidia has SLI, I think ATI calls theirs Crossfire. They have special motherboards that have multiple PCI Express slots on them.

[zactommo]

I'm not sure of the technical specs of what a pci-x bus can do, but my first thought was is the bus capable of handling 6 channels of say 720p simlutaneously. Seems like a big ask, but who knows.

If someone could develope some good software to ultilise this card, then it could bring the capabilites of something like watchout to the poor people like us who can afford 6 computers, and outragous software costs!

[tedanderson]

my first thought was is the bus capable of handling 6 channels of say 720p simlutaneously.

I can't imagine it being too far fetched being that most modern video adapter cards have their own CPU and RAM right on the circuit board which frees up some of the system resources.

[STEALMYBUCKS]

OK, I know this thread is old, but I have an eyefinity card running in my home pc. The eyefinity setup is NOT for church use! There are way too many problems with drivers from ATI, the drivers are not stable. Also, for the person who wanted to run four of the ATI 5870's all with 6 mini display port outputs, there is only one person who has currently made that setup work who is not ATI! Eyefinity is cool and great for gaming, but I personally see no real application in a church setting.