With most of us utilizing at least two monitors these days in our day to day operations, six monitors, while an awesome thought, might seem a little too excessive. After all, do we really have space for multiple video cards?
AMD has a new setup in their testing lab that is running six Dell 30inch displays at 7680×3200 through a video card holding six DisplayPort connectors.
Maximum PC has the scoop on the setup, and they say that this single GPU will be coming out on AMD’s DirectX 11 capable chips. Details are slim with the amount of video RAM, speeds and cost not known at present.
Think of the possibilities! Trade shows are one thing, but how about a video wall at home for gaming and movies? How would you use the six monitors shown above? Be sure to leave your ideas in the comments.
o.0 Why did they multiplex that? you would have to be so far away to not care about the huge gaps in your vision.
“How would you use the six monitors shown above?”
I’m gonna speak for most of us here and put it simply: Big Porno.
This would be quite bad for playing video games since your crosshair would be between two monitors. The solution is 3×3 monitors! Although we have the same monitor setup at work but it needs 3 video cards to work.
It’s completely impractical for home entertainment, save for maybe a flight sim. The only real use for this would be for trade shows, or maybe if you are doing professional things, like producing movies or music, in which case they’d most likely be placed be side by side. I feel a need for continuity in a screen for fullscreen movies or games.
DAMN! someone beat me to the porn display.. how bout a webcam display to replace the window you covered up
you should check out the movie gamer,the main player got a “all around bended” screen,tall as a wall,that would be kinda freaky^^
and on top,It’s some sort of contact less touchscreen^^
6 HD Projectors! WOOT
With multiple monitor support becoming so popular and used. Games need to start coming out with peripheral vision for the left and right monitor more.
As much as I hate projectors, I’m with GROM on this one, no bezels if you used 6 projectors.
I can’t wait until we see crysis benchmarks at that res, then they’ll talk about seconds per frame.
I have to agree with xGROMx: While we’re being excessive, why NOT 6 HD projectors multiplexed together? Solves the ‘gaps in the screen’ problem, and you’d likely get a screen the size of a building instead of a measly wall.. ;)
It might be cool to use this display configuration in conjunction with a video projector, using the projector to project the missing parts of the image onto the bezel between the monitors. Of course, you’d have to offset each image in each monitor so part of each image would be missing…
1st screen – hackaday
2nd – facebook
3rd – email
4th myspace……..haha. Be a dream setup.
I run a multi-monitor setup at work, although it’s only one row… sure would be interesting to have another row ;)
I guess screen real-estate is like garage space… the more you have, the more you’ll eventually fill.
SUP-COM!
sweet!
If you remove the bevels on the monitors, it would be very possible to play gams with the setup. I wouldn’t recommend it for serious gaming, but for messing around with your friends, it would be perfect. AND if they are all projectors? you could set them up seamlessly and play games with a nice resolution on your projector.
Projectors FTW.
All those full-flight simulators use projectors.
The Eyefinity system lets you set up to 6 monitors per card any way you want. Apparently if you have more cards (and more monitors) you can treat them ALL as one big display. They had some 24 monitor single PC monstrosity playing WoW at some daft res, and it looked great.
having 3 by 1, or 5 by one would be best for most FPS, anything odd.
Cant wait
I can see this being very useful for people who do trading. They’re the ones that can always fill up 6 screens worth of stock info that they need to see at a glance and not have to Alt+Tab through each window. HD projectors would be nice too.
I gotta agree with you for the m{ost|ain} part, nicely put.
I have 2×3 using dmx, and then some.
Will I buy one of these? In a heartbeat, except I I fear the drivers will be windows-only.
Q: How many monitors do I need?
A: Just one more.
I use three monitors for web development. One for my IDE, one for browsers, and one for my debugger.
@Random: http://www.stocktradingtogo.com/2007/08/29/the-ultimate-trading-system-a-24-monitor-setup/
You can take off all the plastic bezels and shit and only have a couple millimeters of gap between the displays. Make some kind of mount to make it work….
6xHD projectors, the heating off and all 15.000 photographs of iPhoto finally in one view, ready to be sorted ;-)
Setups like the one shown with the bezels have been used in the past in combination with Fresnel lenses to hide the gap. That might make a more affordable solution than 6xHD projectors.
How come people complain that goofy arduino based projects shouldn’t count as hacks, but no one complains about a direct endorsement of an off-the-shelf product?
Five for work and one for porn. Well maybe four for work, one for porn and one for gaming.
A projector beats the setup on the picture…
Would make more sense to either work on better and cheaper projectors, or larger screens and video cards that handle them well..?
(the borders in between on the picture are in the way, to state the obvious…)
I have used a multiplex for driving now old skool CRT monitors, we used 3 banks of 9 monitors, the multiplex will distrubute a single feed to all nine and you have a frame edge toggle to adjust the amount of frame edge! This does provide a farely seemless screen although it does look like looking at a screen through a window!
Id use this for VJ setups but its a bit crappy as i like to have a hardware mixer before my final output! A well back to the multiplex!
Could i get 5 of these cards and run 30 screens to have a ridiculous sized display :)
Then i could maybe box myself in and have 6 below, 6 in front, 6 behind, 6 to the left and 6 to the right
just having 6 screens in front just isn’t enough for me
q[0_x]p
Everyone has already said that this would be useless for gaming, so surely the best use for this is monitors in different rooms? or monitors on different walls (why should the TV be the focal point of a living room when we can have the display on every wall (and the ceiling and floor).
This ‘hack’ is a bit pointless. Just use a projector. By the time you’ve bought 6 30′ dell monitors you may as well just have bought a high end projector.
@TheBadWolf: How can it be a ‘contactless’ touchscreen?… a touchscreen requires that you touch it, make contact. If its a screen you don’t touch its not a touchscreen – just a screen and the user interface is something else completely…
This post is HACKTASTIC! :P
I have 4 monitors running off an old matrox card in my work pc and whilst having 4 is nice I only use the bottom 2 the other 2 are on top.
Not sure what id use another 2 for LOL
Im not enough of a gamer to be bothered about multi monitor in games.
i like this idea , i wanted to make a wall out of ould laptops networked together is that posible has any one ever herd any way of doing this ?
Goodbye hackaday, enjoy your downhill slide.
I have a pc hooked up to a 42″ plasma, resolution goes down the larger you get, it’s good for movies and online viewing, but games? I tried one, i didn’t like it, too pixelated.
I have to agree with John, old news for one, and how is it even remotely related to a hack? I understand slow news days, but sometimes no news is good news.
@Sean “I wouldn’t recommend it for serious gaming, but for messing around with your friends, it would be perfect. ” Indeed, not for that mission-critical gaming, only the fun sort. FFS.
Considering that each of the screens is much higher than full HD, there’s not that much point in movies on it unless you have a *very* good source from somewhere. Cinema projection is only half of the display area, as far as I can see, at best.
ATI fixed Windows… info via TheRegister http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/09/11/amd_eyefinity/
I’m in the THIS IS NOT A HACK crowd too…. I already subscribe to a dozen or more general tech/gadget news feeds…. PLEASE do not turn HACK A DAY in to just one more!…
Yay slashdot…… er wait, my address bar says hackaday.
Porn.
Its probably already been said, but thats what I’d use 6 monitors for. Honestly.
im calling it, this is hackaday material if one has a hack for it. When i worked for a company that did custom homes for rich people we had touch screens in the walls that controlled everything in the home, each one was a little winCE web browser. With this homeboy we would’ve needed only one pc and way cheaper screens. kablam!
I smell a monitor project to remove the LCD housing!
great idea to have 6 multiplexed ports on one card and yes a LCD with a bezel is likely only good for split presentation of each functional window, it perhaps could be used with touch displays for order menu’s at a restaurant like mc-D’s or what have ya. and for gaming;uber idea yes projectors totally into that idea. Imax images whoa!! lol wrap around wall mhmmm yeah buddy ;)
xrazorwirex is right that you could, probably, shrink the amount of lost screen space by removing the plastic bezel entirely. The thing I’ve always wondered was, with flat panel displays, why people don’t just put alternating screens slightly behind their neighbor. That way you could put one bezel behind the other and cut the total amount of bezel in half. You could use the screen controls to compensate for any perspective issues and they would be even less of a problem if you took xrazorwirex’s advice and removed the plastic casing.
@Chankster
The region between screens are dead zones. At most, the cross will be split into two screens.
The only thing I don’t like about this is the borders around the monitors. The dead zones are pretty bad.
Oh, and also, 6 displays, 6 sides to a cube. Homemade CAVE, possibly?
Umm…I would probably use it like I do a video projector. Oh wait, my video projector doesn’t have a grid-like pattern to it because of all of the LCD frames! Sure, it might not have the resolution, but what games/movies actually support a resolution of over 7000×3000???