We wanted to see what some affordable graphics cards could do when powering five screens, so it’s time to stop messing around and get down to it. On the following pages, we’ve run a handful of games in a 5x1 Eyefinity configuration and captured some video of them in action. First up we have Alien vs. Predator and FarCry 2.
5x1 Eyefinity: Alien vs. Predator
Alien vs. Predator is one heck of a taxing game. As we showed you on the previous page, the game barely hits 60 FPS at high-quality settings on a pair of Radeon HD 6870, when anti-aliasing and 16x aniso is enabled. Scale the game across five screens with those settings and performance becomes a major hurdle. We found, however, that the PowerColor Radeon HD 6870 2GB Eyefinity 6 Editions could hit a somewhat smooth and playable 30.8 frames per second with 5x1 Eyefinity with the game set to its medium quality options with anti-aliasing disabled and 4x anisotropic filtering. As you can see in the video, the game is perfectly smooth and fluid, but it’s definitely playable.
5x1 Eyefinity: FarCry 2
FarCry 2 was much more forgiving, although we still had to make some compromises. On a single screen, many mainstream cards and most higher-end cards have no trouble churning through this older game on a single screen when using its Ultra Quality settings. On a 5x1 Eyefinity arrangement though, we had to dial the game down a notch to its Very High Quality settings and disable anti-aliasing. At a resolution of 5400x1920, with very high settings, the game ran at 51.07 frames per second, which is perfectly playable.
