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Breakthroughs and major achievements to the Personal Computer graphics experience in fact occur pretty seldom. The last main update was the move using multi-GPU rendering: Crossfire, Dual GPU cards, and nVidia's SLI solutions. A drawbacks having these technologies are quite clear. More than one motherboard is required for both Crossfire and SLI set ups, and dual GPU cards are prohibitively costly for all but the most hardcore enthusiasts. Another issue, obviously, 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 several screens, therefore running multiple applications across one or additional displays, nonetheless, commonly, spanning an application across greater than a single screen means that it could not be accelerated. So you ended up with a non-enviable choice: speed or size. Unfortunately, you couldn't have both. Well, times have changed, my friends. AMD's Eyefinity technology is that subsequent plateau in mainstream, multi-monitor output. Eyefinity enables the consumer to possess up to six screens controlled from only one card, and hence enabling a massive area of more than 24 megapixels. If you take a chance to study AMD’s papers 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 involved in it concrete feedback based on energy fields and such, this could be imagining a bit much at the moment, still none-the-less, the technology is certainly moving along. Having Eyefinity, one video card can handle up to six monitors, depending on the type of the card, of course. AMD's position is that all 5000 series video cards will support Eyefinity. The trick here is that it falls to the graphics card manufacturer to generate a choice whether, and how, Eyefinity will be implemented on that particular card. As of September 2010, the time of this text, only the ATI 5800 model line of video cards have Eyefinity enabled in CrossFire mode. The HD 4000 series of cards, and all of their predecessors, do not bear the Eyefinity technologies. As fantastic as that chain of cards was, they plainly do not have the horsepower, or the output connectivity for displays, needed to fuel more than two high resolution displays. So, how do we get three displays running off of only one video card, what exactly is this new DisplayPort we keep hearing about, and just why do we want it? For countless years, Dual-Link DVI has been the premium multi-monitor interface of choice, but that is about to change. Being digital, DVI doesn't have the need of a digital-to-analog converter per monitor which VGA requires, but it does require that there be a committed clock resource for every single monitor (this element is also true of HDMI). According to AMD, the signaling strain of DVI involves so many I/O pins that come from the video card that extending the display outside two monitors was just impactical. Engineers recognized this at ATI back in 2004, and started developing a few ideas to eradicate and move beyond the DVI restrictions So, do you need a DisplayPort connector so as to run EyeFinity? Will you need to acquire new screens? No, you will not. There exists DisplayPort to DVI and also DisplayPort to VGA adapters, normally called dongles. There are two different kinds of dongles for Eyefinity: passive and active. Much like almost every other variety of dongle for your computer, these adapters transfer one variety of connection into another type of connection. Conventional video port types are based on a technique named Transition Minimized Differential Signaling (TMDS) and use either DVI or HDMI interfaces. The problem here is that TMDS is almost completely different than DisplayPort. For just one example, TMDS uses raster scanning, where DisplayPort is packetized. The protocols are utterly different. Also, the power requirements are clearly diverse: TMDS typically runs at about 5V where DisplayPort is only 3.3V. Passive dongles drive non-DisplayPort signals through the DisplayPort connectors by shifting signals from one format to the other. The graphics card is able to sense that a passive dongle is attached 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) along with a TMDS transmitter, which integrates a digital-to-analog converter (DAC) for VGA output. That’s honestly the focal difference between both types. Power is regularly supplied 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. In the passive situation, the card outputs TMDS for HDMI or DVI monitors. So the critical thing to realize about Eyefinity and dongles is that there’s a hard limit of two TMDS output streams, period. There's no give here. So, if you want to play with Eyefinity to set up a 2x1 “array” (yes, dual-monitor Eyefinity seems a bit stupid, but that’s how the driver sees it), it doesn’t matter what you hurl at the card. Two VGA screens? No issue. You might 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 mind as you scale beyond two screens. “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 leader 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 thinking 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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