Performance loss with Eyefinity and 8 monitors.

[Thomas Leong]

Doubt if it is the power supply. The usual symptom for lack of power is a sudden re-boot of the computer rather than loss of frame-rates.

One symptom of a graphics card’s GPU slacking is that the video frame-rate would slow down relative to the audio, i.e. audio and video gets out of sync pretty early. Is that the case with your tests?

Haven’t tried Eyefinity cards myself. New territory for most I guess.

The main problem with 2 cards’ outputs would likely be gen-lock between the two, i.e. does whatever is on-screen remain in sync or does it break-up (horizontal or vertical tear depending on your arrangement of the parts relative to the outputs from the 2 discrete cards). Think the player used also matters.

I have tried successfully 4 mpeg-2 playback out of my one desktop with 2 older non-Eyefinity Radeon cards (X-series). Looped them all day and frame-sync remained perfect over the 4 full-screen outputs (2 from each card). I am using a dongled software sold specially for multi-display playback though I was using it beyond its advertised 2 full-screen outputs. Therefore suggest you test more with video playback or something close to what you would be using the 8 outputs for.

Thomas Leong

[Walter Soyka]

[Aaron Kiersky] “The setup works alright to the eye for the most part, but when I run a
simple framerate test (a bunch of dots generated with Processing) I find that my framerate gets cut in half if the app window is spanning both cards’ screens.”

There are a lot of variables here. The problem might not be the displays — it could be Processing. How does the sketch work? Is it using OpenGL?

If you play a movie spanning screens (outside of Processing), do you see it dropping frames?

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
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