So long, Eyefinity...

Hey everyone. Just felt like sharing my recent escapade with having an Eyefinity setup. I bought three 23" ASUS monitors around Christmas and have been running Eyefinity for the last six months.

Oh, it was very cool when it worked.

But ... I no longer have the patience to deal with the problems I've been having.

Some games, although Eyefinity works when you're actually in the game itself, will not work properly when you're navigating the menus; it'll be all out of whack. That can be annoying.

Of course, the best experience is when a game works natively with Eyefinity and you don't have to do a thing for it to support it -- this mainly applies to more recent games. But then there are games where you have to do research and run little hacks to get them to work.

In order to watch a Blu-ray movie on my system, I had to turn off Eyefinity, unplug all three monitors, then plug in the central monitor with an HDMI cable. Then plug everything back in when I was done. Recently I forgot to turn off Eyefinity first in Catalyst, and as a result, it corrupted the video drivers (I had to do a system restore).

The other day I bought Corel WinDVD. Now, since installing that, every game that I try to play with Eyefinity will cause my system to lock up.

Some games I had would just repeatedly crash with Eyefinity no matter what, Need for Speed: Shift and Dead Island in particular.

So, I said to myself, well, it was a fun experiment while it lasted. So I took one of my three ASUS monitors and hooked it up to my Mac mini, and then took my 27" Hanns.G that I had connected to my Mac mini and put it back on my main rig. Hopefully I will be able to sell the other two.

It's actually kind of a relief. No more headaches. There's nothing wrong with having a single, big screen. And my graphics card is 10 to 15 degrees cooler since it no longer has to drive three monitors.

I don't want to say that it was all bad. If you choose to put together an Eyefinity setup, and every game that matters to you works fine (and you don't encounter the same problems I did), then there's nothing wrong with giving it try.

But for me, it's back to "normal" now.

Sounds like a massive headache, don't AMD support multiple monitor configurations out of the box? Does it have to be eyefinity?

As far as my desktop experience was concerned, there were no problems there. I could spread out my work on all three of my monitors, and it worked fine -- had lots of screen real estate. But the main goal for me the whole time was for the Eyefinity gaming experience, and as far as I know it doesn't go by any other name when it comes to AMD/ATI cards. I mean, if all you wanted was a couple of monitors to have more room to work on when you're in Windows, you could probably do that, and I'm not even sure if it would even be called "Eyefinity" (but don't quote me on that). Probably all you would need to do is just extend your desktop or something in your graphics settings.

Nvidia is now becoming a bigger player in this scene with the introduction of the GTX 6xx series, making Surround easier to do for people that want it. But I wonder if they are running into the same kinds of problems that I had.

mediarays said:

Your eyes will have more stress on that bigger screens so stick with single monitor.

Good point. :)

Yeah, I'm glad that I'm gaming again on my big Hanns.G monitor. I've missed it.