by Rob Williams on May 17, 2010 in Graphics & Displays
When AMD launched its ATI Eyefinity technology, it helped redefine high-end gaming, and effectively made 2560×1600 look like child’s play. In this article, we put the technology to a good test across 18 different games and on both 3×1 (5760×1080) and 3×2 (5760×2160) display configurations to see just how worthy Eyefinity is.
Five out of the seven current games we use for testing are either sequels, or titles in an established series. F.E.A.R. 2 is one of the former, following up on the very popular First Encounter Assault Recon, released in fall of 2005. This horror-based first-person shooter brought to the table fantastic graphics, ultra-smooth gameplay, the ability to blow massive chunks out of anything, and also a very fun multi-player mode.
Three-and-a-half years later, we saw the introduction of the game’s sequel, Project Origin. As we had hoped, this title improved on the original where gameplay and graphics were concerned, and it was a no-brainer to want to begin including it in our testing. The game is gorgeous, and there’s much destruction to be had (who doesn’t love blowing expensive vases to pieces?). The game is also rather heavily scripted, which aides in producing repeatable results in our benchmarking.

Out of the 17 games we tested Eyefinity with, only 3 had strange issues. Modern Warfare 2 was one, and this one is another. As you can see by the screenshot above, the gameplay area didn’t actually fill the entire screen, but rather only the majority. I’m unsure of what causes this, but FEAR 2 wasn’t the only game to do this, as Dark Void was another.
Manual Run-through: The level used for our testing here is the first in the game, about ten minutes in. The scene begins with a travel up an elevator, with a robust city landscape behind us. Our run-through begins with a quick look at this cityscape, and then we proceed through the level until the point when we reach the far door as seen in the above screenshot.


The omission of a 5760×1080 run was due to the game not scaling properly. At that resolution, the game is only confined to the center display, meaning that even though 5760×1080 was the chosen resolution, what we saw was actually 1920×1080… a single display.
Am I the only one who’s surprised that a couple of games actually work better on six displays than three? I sure didn’t expect that.
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5760×1080 – Single GPU
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N/A
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N/A
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N/A
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5760×1080 – Dual GPU
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N/A
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N/A
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N/A
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5760×2160 – Single GPU
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Max Detail
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21
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41.929
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5760×2160 – Dual GPU
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Max Detail
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41
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67.997
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Although this title accepts 5760×1080 as a resolution choice, the game will only display in the center display, effectively making it a 1920×1080 resolution.
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At maxed-out settings, the game was completely playable, so once again, our best playable graph can relax and merely soak up the results from the graph above.