Eyefinity Demo/Challenge in Dallas 11/14

So I just got back from the eyefinity challenge!

First of all, I was a little disappointed that the monitor setups I would have liked to have seen were not on demo. They did show off the 2x3 and the 1x3 landscape setups. I was hoping to see the 1x3 portrait and the 1x3+1 setups, but we can't always get what we want

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First impressions... everything ran surprisingly well. They were showing off the 2x3 setup on Hawx and the 1x3 on iRace and CoD4. The 5v5 was ofcourse on CoD4 and we all got our fair turn to give it a try. While having a huge screen is pretty spiffy and has the ultra cool factor of +5 cool points, I have to say that it's not what you think. EyeFinity is clearly not just a large monitor consisting of several monitors of much lower cost, and if you treat it as such you're in for a disappointment. The side monitors should really be considered peripheral view and not be looked at directly (at least in my opinion, others were using it as a huge pan ability). When immersing yourself in a game most people were fixated on the center monitor and either ignored the side monitors all together or found themselves reacting to them on reflexes.

I should also point out that everything ran very smoothly, there was no tearing, no flickering. The systems recognized all 3 monitors as 1 display and everything was very smooth. So 10/10 for the hardware side...yay!

In depth... game play was interesting to say the least. I am not a CoD player and I think that's actually a good thing for my perspective on eyefinity. I played first on a single monitor to get a feel for the game and see what my normal play would be like. Then I headed over to the eyefinity (I watched people play on eyefinity for several rounds and watched their reactions). I knew from watching other people to not worry so much about the side monitors as part of your normal view and found that they can sometimes be distracting. It is worth mentioning that the 3 monitors gave us about 130-150 degree viewing angle, and that CoD4 apparently only supports up to 80 degrees. This created some interesting eye trickery. When passing someone or something just outside of your main monitor, you got the impression that they were moving differently than they really were. Consider yourself looking thru a giant sheet of ice and only standing a few feet from it, trying to grasp the whole world on the other side. Everything is very flat, but you can obviously tell that it's not meant to be. This is the feel I got from EyeFinity while stuck at an 80degree angle. I found that I often double looked at people next to me to see if they were teammates or enemies and stationary objects seemed to start moving when you walked past them. Obviously I can't really blame ATI for this (it's the game's fault for lack of support) but I did run some questions past the ATI team to get feedback on these annoyances.

Apparently ATI will eventually add support to the driver to help correct the eye trickery that we encountered today by adding user selectable filters like blur effects to your side monitors (actually I asked for that specifically). So while Eyefinity seemed to lower my game skill today, I have high hopes for improvement in the near future and can definitely see the benefits.

Before I forget, game immersion +10 points. Having such a large viewable area coupled with the fact that 2 monitors are angled around your peripheral vision definitely impacts game immersion and helps you feel like you are actually there.

The ATI/AMD guys definitely hosted a great event. There were free beverages and snacks, good ambiance, great hardware setups and lots of cool eye candy.. . eyefinity candy? Oh did I mention the swag?

Swag:
Each group of 10-15 people were gifted with the following...
-shirt for everyone
-5 activity packs (these are disc shaped zipper pouches with frisbees and such... physical activity so we don't get the arthritisisis)
-1 copy of Wheelman
-limited edition Agent Ruby collector display figure for everyone
-2 lucky SOBs were randomly selected to receive a motherboard and Phenom II combo

Summary for the lazy..
Do the bezels get in your way distract you? Nope... I was surprised
Rate the driver support? I didn't get to play with it, but watched them setup... 8/10 at least (surprised... ati drivers tend to suck)
Rate the immersion factor? Pretty good actually 8/10 (some games have small issues that effected this score)
Rate the hardware? 10/10 didn't notice any issues at all.

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