AMD/ATi Eyefinity and Lucid Hydra Technology
By
Father Xmas,
Posted on: 2009-09-23 23:39 in ALL ACCESS Gameplay Technical Issues Bugs
You can already use multiple display if you have an extended desktop. Use windowed mode and just expand the coh window into the other displays... but ur right, it doesn't improve your field of view. That large and that high of a rez.. well.. that's just insanity! haha
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I'm not sure if you can at this point. On the older drivers of NVidia at least, I had to use single display mode on my GTX 280. On my first display (in windowed mode), I can stretch out my window to about 40% of the second display without issue. Any further and the window redraws black, until you rescale the window smaller again. This is on two 30" displays.|
Originally Posted by Master-Blade
You can already use multiple display if you have an extended desktop. Use windowed mode and just expand the coh window into the other displays... but ur right, it doesn't improve your field of view. That large and that high of a rez.. well.. that's just insanity! haha
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I haven't retested the various configs since then, I think it was 2 issues back and 18x series drivers on Vista64. Now I'm on the latest Nvidia driver and Windows7 64, and I'm leery of tweaking and breaking things, although getting things on 3 monitors would be a lot better since on 2 screens (the max number on most other single graphics cards) the seam is right smack dab on your toon, so an odd number of screens is best. I don't think anything but the 5870 would work effectively to drive 5120x1600, since CoX doesn't take advantage of SLi configs currently.
Since CoH uses OpenGL and not Dx for rendering so if either are a Dx only we're out of luck (which looks to be the issue with Hydra).
Note with Eyefinity, the HD 5xxx series can't currently run in CrossFire mode. So what you get is a very powerful card but pushing as much as 24 million pixels per frame, not an ideal solution at all for gaming.
And as Master-Blade points out, CoH's lateral field of view is fixed. Unlike a racing game or flight simulator which may recognize that a 48:10 ratio screen means a wider lateral FoV is desired. Here such a display would seriously reduce what you see vertically in a 3:1 monitor configuration. Might as well go first person mode and pretend you are looking out of the eye slit in your MK 1 armor.
Father Xmas - Level 50 Ice/Ice Tanker - Victory
$725 and $1350 parts lists --- My guide to computer components
Tempus unum hominem manet
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I thought that it was a DirectX wrapper over OpenGL calls mostly, except for a couple of weirdo function calls. Still, it would likely give these virtualized rendering device managers fits. The only reason why I think things might have improved is that since the the Mac port has arrived, there might have been some good impetus to clean up some code for cross platform compatibility.|
Originally Posted by Father Xmas
Since CoH uses OpenGL and not Dx for rendering so if either are a Dx only we're out of luck (which looks to be the issue with Hydra).
Note with Eyefinity, the HD 5xxx series can't currently run in CrossFire mode. So what you get is a very powerful card but pushing as much as 24 million pixels per frame, not an ideal solution at all for gaming. And as Master-Blade points out, CoH's lateral field of view is fixed. Unlike a racing game or flight simulator which may recognize that a 48:10 ratio screen means a wider lateral FoV is desired. Here such a display would seriously reduce what you see vertically in a 3:1 monitor configuration. Might as well go first person mode and pretend you are looking out of the eye slit in your MK 1 armor. |
As for the FoV issue, I hope that they would go back to allow an i3 (nearly unlimited) FoV, but I also understand that it would give a competitive advantage in PvP. I seriously doubt the devs could justify allocating resources specifically for the small number of users who would use Eyefinity/Hydra, but you never know.
One of the problems I foresee is based off of the poor support ATI has had for quite some time with OpenGL. Those problems can better be explained by Bill Z Bubba, but they are the reason ATI users currently need to tweak down some settings or use the CCC to control other settings. Things such as Bloom, Depth of Field, Water Effects, Anti-Aliasing, Anisotropic Filtering, and all of the other fun things that are problematic with ATI driversl
If the game spit out 20 dollar bills people would complain that they weren't sequentially numbered. If they were sequentially numbered people would complain that they weren't random enough.
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Default generic Vista drivers implement OpenGL this way, via a Dx wrapper (which is limited to V1.4 of OpenGL) but for native hardware support graphic card companies, notably nVidia and ATI, provide an installable client driver in their graphics driver package which I believe both support at least OpenGL V3.0.
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Originally Posted by PumBumbler
I thought that it was a DirectX wrapper over OpenGL calls mostly, except for a couple of weirdo function calls. Still, it would likely give these virtualized rendering device managers fits. The only reason why I think things might have improved is that since the the Mac port has arrived, there might have been some good impetus to clean up some code for cross platform compatibility.
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Father Xmas - Level 50 Ice/Ice Tanker - Victory
$725 and $1350 parts lists --- My guide to computer components
Tempus unum hominem manet
Any word on whether CoX will support either of these two technologies?
AMD/ATi Eyefinity link. Tiling output from multiple displays while the game sees a single display of full resolution. First model will be 5850 and 5870. Shipping now. Up to 6 30" displays possible. 3x30" gaming shown at 7680x1600.
Lucid Hydra link. Forcing multiple GPU support into 'any' game, using different generations and brands of GPUs. MSI Big Bang will be first motherboard at the end of October 09. Nvidia GTX 260 teamed with ATi 4890 shown.
Support is supposedly 'automatic', based on DirectX (version?) compatibility, but not all games were fully functioning.
Field of view of CoH would need to opened up (back to i3 levels) in order to fully take advantage of multi display tiles.