Widescreen Gaming Forum

First, thank you Dave Baumann for being here and answering our questions/problem.

I would like to make a few comments:

1) I was a little annoyed at first that I can't use my cheap stolen passive DP -> DVI adapter from work. while I can't blame ATI for this since the description DID SAY "DP panel required". Even a computer tech like me was kinda assuming at first that a passive adapter would work and then pissed off that we have to get a DP panel or a $100 active adapter. It wasn't really clear that "A passive adapter WILL NOT WORK". I wished that line was listed as part of the product description.

I guess the anger came from so many people like me that just assumed a passive adapt will work.. (like the quote "Assumption is the mother of all F**kups)

2) We as a group here at WSG are picky and techheads and I guess we tend to complain more and more vocal. But we all gotta understand the tech is new and should be a little bit more patient. after all it's publicly released for less than 2 weeks. I'm sure when the Th2g came out there were some problems also.

3) once again, the fact that we have Dave here at least assures me that my purchase will be supported by the dev and they are willing to help.

4) It's good that Eyefinity is here now we have more options for triplehead and the fact that it's "free" should help triplehead go mainstream and get more game dev support.

[quote][quote]Thats what we did state - the Eyefinity pages state that the 3rd output requires a DisplayPort panel, not that a DisplayPort output should be used.

And , do you think this is accurate enough ?

A 100% clear sentence in this matter would be for me :
"the 3rd output requires a DisplayPort panel or, if the panel isn't display port, an active display port adapter"


That's my humble point of view though, as a computer tech who deals with unknowledgeable people.

It needs to be stated quite plainly "Passive DP-to-DVI/HDMI adapters will not work", because if you bring active adapters into the statement, people are going to instantly look for the cheapest adapters on the market, which are all passive. Heck, half the sites selling passive adapters are selling them as active adapters on their websites.

What we think ATI should do is try out every single adapter/monitor out there so they know what works and what doesn't. Then they can tell us about it. Right? That sounds all well and good, but there is the reason why standards for different interfacing technologies like DisplayPort and DVI are created in the first place. This is so each manufacture doesn't need to test every product on the market to make sure they work with there hardware. This is why standards are adopted. It isn't ATI's fault very few other manufactures are producing devices with DisplayPort yet. And there are so many half assed adapter producers making false claims about their products you just can't test them all. Even companies like ATI don't have the resources to manage other companies products for ATI customers. Some think large hardware companies have unlimited resources, but we would be surprised by how far they can actually go. Sure they can get a few together and approve them (like the bizlink active adapter) and pass the info along. But in situations like these the communities, the true niche markets like we here coordinate to get the desired result. If all the manufactures could do it all and read our minds in the process, then we wouldn' have as much purpose as we have here. This is one damn good reason why we are here on this very forum. The true enthusiasts make things happen on their own.

Not trying to be an a-hole ATI lover here. In fact I ain't had no love for ATI since the 9800 Pro. I just go for what suits me and tackle the issues with people like you guys when I get that itch. Right now I got the ATI itch. If nVidia knocks our socks off 30 minutes from now and that suits me I will have a decision to make.

Though i do agree with "Passive DP-to-DVI/HDMI adapters will not work". It isn't to late to include this Dave. And BHawthorne, this isn't directed at you personally. The quotes fit a generalization I picked up on. You do great work around here buddy! :-)
- Jay

I don't have any expectation for them to do much of anything with third party certification. Frankly it surprised me they signed off on the Dell/BizLink adapter as an immediate solution to the issue. What I am suggesting is that ATi is capable of producing and marketing their own single-link DP to DVI active adapters. That would solve the whole issue. :wink:

As far as me around here, I have a vested interest in this because the 6-port card is the only current generation reasonable way to do 5 projectors. Sure, with any old 200-series card and 2x TH2G boxes I could do 4 or 6 displays -- but not 5. nVidia XP span modes have to span symmetrical display resolutions. that makes spanning 3 and 2 displays impossible. Besides I don't want to be saddled with XP in order to do it. I want a fully modern and current OS with a current generation video card (or 2 or 3 once that works). I go with what works, and in the immediate future, what suits my specifications is the 6-port EyeFinity card. This will go quite well with the gaming room I'm building. It will be used for racing and flight simulation and whatever else I can configure the projector span to work with.

_________________
Brad Hawthorne
Product Manager
Nthusim Pty. Ltd. | www.nthusim.com

I appreciate the comments. I learn from them.

We may have dropped the ball unintentionally in that our communication wasn't clear or pervasive as we intended. The statement that folks should use a DP panel with 5870 or 5850 seemed to be unambiguous. Perhaps it was suitable for dealing with other engineers, but not end-users. Engineers as a group are quite literal. I hope you can understand there may be a bit of a learning experience here for us. I'd appreciate a little forbearance on your part.

One thing I wish we had done, which might have helped somewhat, is to have put together a how to build an Eyefinity system guide. Kyle's EF review over on HardOCP comes the closest. We should have done a how-to guide. We should still do that.

As for the suggestion that we build a DP-to-DVI adapter, we are technically capable of doing such a thing, but as a company it is outside of our business realm. We are working with external partners to get you what you need. The price someone suggested is our target. We will see if we can get that for you all, but no promises.

As for DaveB's comment that EF is quite new, he is correct. With many things we do there is a large body of accumulated knowledge that makes it possible to deliver a feature or capability. In the case of EF, our internal knowledge and experience base was slim-to-none. Clear communication isn't clear enough in retrospect. We will get better.

I personally appreciate your interest and comments, and will take them to heart as we continue to work on EF. DaveB has been and is your internal advocate. You can rely on his guidance in these fora.

SunSp*t

Do you really mean to insult us all with the inference of your email?

First of all, thanks for the reply. I wasn't talking about any evil engineers at all - evil engineers can only be in movies or in some secret underground labs, bet even there they are mostly exploited by some evil bosses. Being a software engineer and a radio mechanic myself I admire what you've done! I know how is it to make something and then to hear that something is not good. EF is not good - it is great, terrific, I was waiting for this. All my post was about how the situation looks from the point of view of the customer. I am glad you gave us so much info, but the lack of the rest of the info makes people confused, makes them mistake giving money not to you but to the active adapters manufacturers and resellers and this is not good, it's not your fault but the fault of all that PR people and bosses who want to sell first what you've done for big bucks without telling the great warnings and then make engineers dig into that big heap of customers poop and feel bad about their product!

You heard already the replies of the forum ppl and probably you already understand what I was trying to say. Probably I might looked rude and disrespectful, excuse me if I did, but it's your fragile soul of a creator makes it look like this for you. You'll be probably be proud hearing that ALL my discrete graphics were ATI except my laptop, but the laptop story was long and it was price not the performance I bought it for and I didn't care about the parts. Talking about ATI+nV=friends I mentioned it was a paranoia, so I do not treat it seriously and I don't insist someone believed me about big brothers making friends to capture the world unless that someone thinks so too :)

All my life is ATI and as you can understand all good is being accepted without any thinking and all bad is being noticed and complained at as always, so when I tell you "ATI does nice things" I mean it, I mean you guys are great, and "better did nothing" I mean the rest little stinky pig-tail part pissing off all the sweetness making it all worse than nothing which almost every thing on this planet has except maybe clean shaved pussy. As an example I can put here my current 4870x2 which is awesome, great engineers did this thing, but the stock cooler is something awful it sounds like a jet plane and I know it were the market cost or deadline causing the product management to cut the 'goodness' of the silence. Great engineers tried their best making even that cooler but there was something/someone preventing them from making it as silent as Accelero Xtreme which I had to pay additional $100bucks for. I can understand you want to give your child to the biggest number of customers to make them happy, and I am not the only one with bucks, but can't you understand that if a fat-purse daddy buys a modern computer with your $400 product inside for his 6yo sonny going to school not giving a shit about whats it for and finds something he doesn't like in it, hell throw it out of the window telling it's not good, and if I buy a $400 for my last money to play cause all my life is a computer and a dreamed of that $400 product and I don't like how it bloody tears my ears I wont throw it away, I will find a way to make it silent paying any money for that. So when you tell 'make more people happy giving lower price' you have good tensions but in real life it makes ppl unhappy cause the ones who buy for 'goodness' don't receive it because of the little cons you leave behind the pros, and those who buy for 'feeling rich giving away money' don't care at all about the quality, they just give you money. Probably there are more of 'rich' rather than 'poor' but being 'not-rich' I put money into my coffee can for the EyeFinity you made and despite the rumors making me cry I still put the money into the coffee can.

Please tell me how am I supposed to guess whether there will be a 5870x2"six" or not? I ask this because all my monitors are DVI, after getting 2 more I will have 4 - 3 24'' for eyefinity and 1 side 19''. And I don't really want to get an active adaptor. I thought (2DVI+1activeDP-DVI)x2 = 4DVI+2activeDP-DVI and I will have a chance to hook 4DVI to a six card, but I think a single 5870 will not give good fps at 4 monitors and some MSAA, so I was aiming 5870x2. Seeing in future the possible ability of CF EF I wonder will it be even a chance to get 2x5870x2 with an ability to hook 4DVI without active adapters? Or I will have to get 4x5870 and a $100 active adapter which I will have to ship to Russia overseas? Will it be possible to hook up 3 DVI's to the "six" card though 3 passive adapters or 3 active adapters? Considering the fact that the main DP+ issue is timing, not the signal itself, I thought "six" had doubled timers and DVI will work through passiveDP as long as there are enough space for them and only the 5th and 6th displays will need activeDP. If 5870 needs 1activeDP then 5870six will need 2activeDP and rest can be passive?

You cut my post in parts showing everybody my worst words but really I never meant to hurt you, and if you add words you cut out to the rest of them you'll see something about I was just ripping my hair off without any hope for any help! Really was a pleasure to see some words from the first source, like a miracle and just that is a relief already, you can probably make my fears go away. And since I have a chance to talk to the man who did EF personally, a million times thank you, thanks to all of your team, I waited it, I take off my hat, maybe it's not you who was making me happy during a huge part of my life but I'm sure you did a lot working in ATI for me and who knows maybe somewhere else.

EDITED: Just thought about the clean shaved pussy - it has period, so nothing is really perfect in this world :)

It needs to be stated quite plainly "Passive DP-to-DVI/HDMI adapters will not work", because if you bring active adapters into the statement, people are going to instantly look for the cheapest adapters on the market, which are all passive. Heck, half the sites selling passive adapters are selling them as active adapters on their websites.

The Eyefinity Technical Brief does into more details with regards to the possible configurations. If you don't want to download the whole thing, then at least read the following two pages:

http://www.hardocp.com/image.html?image=MTI1NDE2Nzk2NjBpOFVuVWt6c0RfMV82X2wuanBn
http://www.hardocp.com/image.html?image=MTI1NDE2Nzk2NjBpOFVuVWt6c0RfMV82X2wuanBn

Sales-talk about flexibility, upgradeability etc aside I think it´s safe to say if AMD/ATI from the start had set out to make Eyefinity available to the masses (IE people with DVI/HDMI connections) the cost per card for doing this would have been almost negligable compared to the current $100 we have to fork up now for an active 3rd party adapter.

The reason these active adapters cost so much isn´t because it´s some overly complicated technology involved, it´s because so far it´s been a niche product very seldomly needed. Now if you´d produce a few hundred thousand of these the cost would drop significantly.

Don´t get me wrong, I think we have a great product here with the 5800 series. Both performance-wise and the Eyefinity aspect of it. But I think if AMD/ATI had decided on Eyefinity and to make it as widely available as possible at the start of the design-process for the 5800 series they would have incorporated that extra internal clock needed for a third non-DP output. Without raising the cost of the card noticable, and more importantly without putting a $100 port tax on the end user who wants to use Eyefinity.

To me Dave´s comments about ATI talking to 3rd party developers about active adapters now just confirms my thoughts about Eyefinity and the DP-solution being somewhat of an afterthought in the 5800 design process. If this was the plan from the start, shouldn´t they have started these "talks" waaay back and made sure there were active adapters available en masse at launch?

ATI reps, as you probably know your Linux reputation is well ... not so good. You were officially launching this as a Linux / Win 7 product I still see no Linux drivers or support. I also have NO word as to when it will be supported. Given the current state of ATI drivers it might be years before this runs without bugs, and by that time I am betting that this card will no longer be supported as your Linux support for legacy products is TERRIBLE.

I was really excited about this card as setting up a triple head with mixed rotation is very difficult. I'm about to pull the trigger on a couple Nvidia cards because you guys can't seem to figure out what you are doing in this arena. I think that most of us in professions with unknown variables have learned that it is better to under promise and overdeliver, yet this isn't what your marketing guys have done at all.

Frankly I would happily shoulder the cost of the active adapter if you could support Linux in SLS on a 20" (portrait) 30" (landscape) 20" (portrait) setup. All I want is compiz @ 4960x1600. As of now I have no idea if that is even possible.

While I certainly understand that you needed to keep things under wraps prior to launch, what is the deal now? Where are you guys on this? I suppose Nvidia will remain the undisputed king in this arena?

PS: To anyone whining about the active adapter, gimme a break! I'm not saying it isn't a disappointment but it's not bleeding edge if it doesn't cut. You want an adapter for $30 and not $100, is $70 really gonna be the deal breaker? How much do you pay for 1 game title? Maybe you can't afford triplehead to begin with. :roll:

lol standing on the corner of freeway exits with a sign that says:

"just lost my job, need money.
will work for active adapters,
need to support a family of 3 lcds for eyefinity"

its better to use a finely cut cardboard box, because if they are torn around the edges.. they wont even look at u as they exit the freeway off ramp =)

lol standing on the corner of freeway exits with a sign that says:

"just lost my job, need money.
will work for active adapters,
need to support a family of 3 lcds for eyefinity"

its better to use a finely cut cardboard box, because if they are torn around the edges.. they wont even look at u as they exit the freeway off ramp =)

ROFL :D