AMD Eyefinity is a brand name for

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and maintains significant operations in Austin, Texas. AMD is a hardware and fabless company that de ...

video card A graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics accelerator, graphics adapter, VGA card/VGA, video adapter, display adapter, or colloquially GPU) is a computer expansion card that generates a feed of graphics output to a displa ...

products that support

multi-monitor Multi-monitor, also called multi-display and multi-head, is the use of multiple physical display devices, such as Computer monitor, monitors, Television set, televisions, and Video projector, projectors, in order to increase the area available fo ...

setups by integrating multiple (up to six)

display controller A video display controller (VDC), also called a display engine or display interface, is an integrated circuit which is the main component in a video-signal generator, a device responsible for the production of a TV video signal in a computing ...

s on one GPU. AMD Eyefinity was introduced with the

Radeon HD 5000 series The Evergreen series is a family of graphics processing unit, GPUs developed by Advanced Micro Devices for its Radeon line under the ATI Technologies, ATI brand name. It was employed in Radeon HD 5000 graphics card series and competed directly w ...

"Evergreen" in September 2009 and has been available on

APUs Apus is a small constellation in the Southern Celestial Hemisphere, southern sky. It represents a bird-of-paradise, and its name means "without feet" in Greek language, Greek because the bird-of-paradise was once wrongly believed to lack feet. ...

and professional-grade graphics cards branded

AMD FirePro AMD FirePro was AMD's brand of graphics cards designed for use in workstations and servers running professional Computer-aided design (CAD), Computer-generated imagery (CGI), Digital content creation (DCC), and High-performance computing/GPGP ...

as well. AMD Eyefinity supports a maximum of 2 non-

DisplayPort DisplayPort (DP) is a digital interface used to connect a video source, such as a Personal computer, computer, to a display device like a Computer monitor, monitor. Developed by the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA), it can also car ...

displays (e.g.,

HDMI High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) is a proprietary digital interface used to transmit high-quality video and audio signals between devices. It is commonly used to connect devices such as televisions, computer monitors, projectors, gam ...

, DVI,

VGA Video Graphics Array (VGA) is a video display controller and accompanying de facto graphics standard, first introduced with the IBM PS/2 line of computers in 1987, which became ubiquitous in the IBM PC compatible industry within three years. T ...

DMS-59 DMS-59 (Dual Monitor Solution, 59 pins) is generally used for computer video cards. It provides two Digital Visual Interface (DVI) or Video Graphics Array (VGA) outputs in a single connector. A Y-style breakout cable is needed for the transiti ...

VHDCI A very-high-density cable interconnect (VHDCI) is a 68-pin connector that was introduced in the SPI-2 document of SCSI-3. The VHDCI connector is a very small connector that allows placement of four wide SCSI connectors on the back of a single PCI ...

) (which AMD calls "legacy output") and up to 6 DisplayPort displays simultaneously using a single graphics card or APU. To feed more than two displays, the additional panels must have native

support. Alternatively active DisplayPort-to-DVI/HDMI/VGA adapters can be employed. The setup of large

video wall A video wall is a special multi-monitor setup that consists of multiple computer monitors, video projectors, or television sets tiled together contiguously or overlapped in order to form one large screen. Typical display technologies include ...

s by connecting multiple computers over

Gigabit Ethernet In computer networking, Gigabit Ethernet (GbE or 1 GigE) is the term applied to transmitting Ethernet frames at a rate of a gigabit per second. The most popular variant, 1000BASE-T, is defined by the IEEE 802.3ab standard. It came into use in ...

Ethernet Ethernet ( ) is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...

is also supported. The version of AMD Eyefinity (aka DCE, display controller engine) introduced with

Excavator Excavators are heavy equipment (construction), heavy construction equipment primarily consisting of a backhoe, boom, dipper (or stick), Bucket (machine part), bucket, and cab on a rotating platform known as the "house". The modern excavator's ...

-based Carrizo APUs features a Video underlay pipe.

Overview

AMD Eyefinity is implemented by multiple on- die

s. The HD 5000-series designs host two internal clocks and one external clock. Displays connected over

, DVI, or

each require their own internal clock. But all displays connected over

can be driven from only one external clock. This external clock is what allows Eyefinity to fuel up to six monitors from a single card. The entire HD 5000 series of products have Eyefinity capabilities supporting three outputs. The ''Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity Edition'', however, supports six

mini DisplayPort The Mini DisplayPort (MiniDP or mDP) is a miniaturized version of the DisplayPort audio-visual digital interface. It was announced by Apple, Inc., Apple in October 2008, and by early 2013 all new Apple Macintosh computers had Mini DisplayPort, ...

outputs, all of which can be simultaneously active. The display controller has two

RAMDAC A Brooktree RAMDAC A RAMDAC (random-access memory digital-to-analog converter) is a combination of three fast digital-to-analog converters (DACs) with a small static random-access memory (SRAM) used in computer graphics display controllers or ...

s that drive the

or DVI ports in analog mode. For example, when a DVI-to-VGA converter is attached to a DVI port). It also has a maximum of six digital transmitters that can output either a

signal or a TMDS signal for either DVI or

, and two

clock signal In electronics and especially synchronous digital circuits, a clock signal (historically also known as ''logic beat'') is an electronic logic signal (voltage or current) which oscillates between a high and a low state at a constant frequency and ...

generators to drive the digital outputs in TMDS mode.

Dual-link DVI Digital Visual Interface (DVI) is a video display interface developed by the Digital Display Working Group (DDWG). The digital interface is used to connect a video source, such as a video display controller, to a display device, such as a comp ...

displays use two of the TMDS/DisplayPort transmitters and one clock signal each. Single-link DVI displays and HDMI displays use one TMDS/DisplayPort transmitter and one clock signal each. DisplayPort displays use one TMDS/DisplayPort transmitter and no clock signal. An active DisplayPort adapter can convert a DisplayPort signal to another type of signal—like VGA, single-link DVI, or dual-link DVI; or HDMI if more than two non-DisplayPort displays must be connected to a Radeon HD 5000 series graphics card. DisplayPort 1.2 added the possibility to drive multiple displays on single DisplayPort connector, called Multi-Stream Transport (MST). AMD graphics solutions equipped with DisplayPort 1.2 outputs can run multiple monitors from a single port. At High-Performance Graphics 2010 Mark Fowler presented the Evergreen and stated that e.g. 5870 (Cypress), 5770 (Juniper) and 5670 (Redwood) support max resolution of the 6 times 2560×1600 pixels, while the 5470 (Cedar) supports 4 times 2560×1600 pixels.

Availability

Feature overview for AMD graphics cards

All AMD GPUs starting with the Evergreen series support a maximum of 2 ''non''-

displays and a maximum of 6 DisplayPort displays per graphics card.

Feature overview for AMD APUs

AMD Eyefinity is also available in AMD's APU branded product line. The A10-7850K is said to support up to four displays.

Software support

AMD Catalyst supports Eyefinity and enables the user to independently configure and run each attached displays. It facilitates the configuration of "cloned mode", i.e. to copy one desktop onto multiple screens or "extended mode", i.e. to span the workspace across multiple screens and combine the resolutions of all of those displays into one big resolution. AMD calls the extended modes Single Large Surface (SLS) and Catalyst support of certain range of display group configurations. For example, 5x1 landscape and 5x1 portrait are supported since AMD Catalyst version 11.10 from October 2011. Starting in Catalyst 14.6, AMD supports mixed resolution support, so a single Eyefinity display group can drive each monitor at a different resolution. This is provided through two new Eyefinity display modes, ''Fit'' and ''Expand'', in addition to the existing ''Fill'' mode. In Fit or Expand mode, AMD compensates for mismatched resolutions by creating a virtual desktop of a different resolution than the monitors, and then either padding it out or cropping it as is necessary. AMD Eyefinity works with games that support non-standard aspect ratios, which is required for panning across multiple displays. SLS ("Single Large Surface") mode requires an identical display resolution on all configured displays. AMD validated some video games to support Eyefinity. The short list includes titles such as Age of Conan, ARMA 2: Operation Arrowhead, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, Serious Sam 3: BFE, Singularity (video game), Sleeping Dogs,

Assassin's Creed II ''Assassin's Creed II'' is a 2009 action-adventure game developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. It is the second major installment in the Assassin's Creed, ''Assassin's Creed'' series, and the sequel to 2007's ''Assassin's Creed ...

, Sniper Elite V2, Soldier of Fortune Online, Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Conviction, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2, Marvel Super Hero Squad Online, R.U.S.E.,

Supreme Commander 2 ''Supreme Commander 2'' is a real-time strategy (RTS) Military science fiction video game developed by Gas Powered Games and published by Square Enix as the sequel to '' Supreme Commander''. A Windows-only demo was initially released via Steam o ...

among others. However, some games not on this short list seem to work as well, e.g.

Dirt 3 ''Dirt 3'' (stylised as ''DiRT 3'') is a simcade racing video game developed and published by Codemasters and distributed by THQ for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. It was released on 24 May 2011 and is the first game in the se ...

and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

KMS driver The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) is a subsystem of the Linux kernel responsible for interfacing with GPUs of modern video cards. DRM exposes an API that user-space programs can use to send commands and data to the GPU and perform operations s ...

supports AMD Eyefinity.

References

External links

* playing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim {{AMD graphics AMD IP cores Multi-monitor