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Breakthroughs and principal milestones within the PC graphics experience actually arise pretty rarely. The last main incidence was the move using multi-GPU rendering: Crossfire, Dual GPU cards, and nVidia's SLI technique. The drawbacks with these technologies are rather obvious. More than one motherboard is essential for both Crossfire and SLI configurations, and dual GPU cards are prohibitively pricey for all but the most hardcore enthusiasts. Another issue, clearly, is the fact that people end up consuming two cards worth of power more than one. When it comes to software, you end up with a choice: you can span a desktop across many screens, thereby running several software across one or extra displays, nonetheless, frequently, spanning an application across above and beyond one screen implies that it could not be accelerated. So people ended up with a non-enviable choice: speed or size. Unfortunately, you couldn't have both. Well, times have altered, my friends. AMD's Eyefinity technology is that next plateau in mainstream, multi-monitor output. Eyefinity enables the consumer to have up to six monitors controlled from a single card, and hence enabling a huge region of more than 24 megapixels. If you take a chance to read AMD’s documentation on Eyefinity, it says that “we are inexorably on the road to the ‘holodeck’ (as conceptualized on Star Trek).” Given that the Star Trek holodeck had worked into it tangible feedback based on energy fields and such, this could be reaching a bit much at the moment, but none-the-less, the technique is certainly moving along. With Eyefinity, one video card could handle up to six monitors, depending on the type of the card, of course. AMD's view is that all 5000 series video cards will support Eyefinity. The trick here is that it falls to the graphics card manufacturer carryout a judgment whether, and how, Eyefinity will be implemented on that particular card. As of September 2010, the time of this prose, only the ATI 5800 model line of video cards have Eyefinity enabled in CrossFire mode. The HD 4000 chain of cards, and all of their predecessors, don't bear the Eyefinity technology. As fantastic as that series of cards was, they plainly do not have the horsepower, or the output connectivity for displays, needed to fuel more than two ultra resolution screens. So, how do we get three displays functioning off of only one video card, what is this new DisplayPort we keep hearing about, and just why do we want to get it? For several years, Dual-Link DVI was the top multi-monitor interface of choice, but that is about to alter. Being digital, DVI doesn't have the need of a digital-to-analog converter per panel which VGA requires, nonetheless it does need that there be a devoted clock source for each and every monitor (this element is also accurate of HDMI). According to AMD, the signaling strain of DVI needs so many I/O pins that come from the video card that extending the screen outside two screens was simply impactical. Engineers recognized this at ATI back in 2004, and started researching a few ideas to remove and move beyond the DVI restrictions So, do you need a DisplayPort connector so as to run EyeFinity? Will you need to obtain new panels? No, you will not. There are DisplayPort to DVI and also DisplayPort to VGA adapters, usually called dongles. There are two styles of dongles for Eyefinity: passive and active. As with any other style of dongle for your laptop, these adapters adapt one kind of connection into another variety of connection. Conventional video port types are based on a technique called Transition Minimized Differential Signaling (TMDS) and use either DVI or HDMI interfaces. The situation here is that TMDS is almost completely different than DisplayPort. For just one example, TMDS uses raster scanning, while DisplayPort is packetized. The protocols are totally different. Also, the power specifications are patently diverse: TMDS typically runs at about 5V whereas DisplayPort is only 3.3V. Passive dongles drive non-DisplayPort signals through the DisplayPort connectors by shifting signals from one layout to the other. The graphics card is able to discern that a passive dongle is hooked up to the DP connector. At that point, instead of passing a 3.3V DisplayPort stream, the card outputs a 3.3V TMDS signal through that port and the passive dongle shifts the voltage level up to meet the TMDS spec. Active dongles are made up of a DisplayPort receiver (which attaches to the graphics card) with a TMDS transmitter, which integrates a digital-to-analog converter (DAC) for VGA output. That’s genuinely the focal difference between the two types. Power is often given by a cable that connects to a USB port. With an active dongle, the adapter looks similar to a DisplayPort to the graphics card, so the card transmits DisplayPort signals natively. Included in the passive case, the card outputs TMDS for HDMI or DVI displays. So the pimary thing to get about Eyefinity and dongles is that there’s a hard limit of two TMDS output streams, period. There's no leniency here. So, if you want to play with Eyefinity to arrange a 2x1 “array” (yes, dual-screen Eyefinity sounds a bit stupid, but that’s how the driver sees it), it doesn’t matter what you pitch at the card. Two VGA screens? No issue. You could use a VGA adapter on a DVI port and an active VGA dongle on a DisplayPort connection. Just keep your legacy output stream tally in heed as you scale beyond two displays. “If you’re already using two DVI connectors on the board, you can’t use a passive dongle since, in theory, that would be a third TMDS signal stream,” says Roger Quero, technical manager at AMD’s GPU Technologies unit. “You can have two passive dongles, and the rest of them have to be active. Just like, if you’re pondering about the six-output card, that’s six mini DisplayPorts. Two of those connections could be passive, putting out TMDS over those ports, then the rest have to be active so that we think it’s a DisplayPort panel.
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Donald Fountain draws on over three decades of computer hardware and programming knowledge, managerial experience, and two Bachelor's Degrees, as well as six Associate's degrees for his writing. He is the founder and publisher of PlanetEyefinity.com, and DisplayPortMonitors.com, as well as a support supervisor for one of the largest web hosting firms in the nation.
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