The Advantages of Eyefinity for CAD. AMD introduced AMD Eyefinity Technology (previously ATI Eyefinity) in their GPU family – the ability to connect three to six displays to one graphics card. It also supports grouping of multiple monitors into a single large surface (SLS), treated by the OS as a single monitor with very high resolutions. It is promoted as an inexpensive alternative for ultra-high resolution displays.
The entire ATI Radeon HD 5000 series products have Eyefinity capabilities supporting three outputs. The Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity Edition, however, supports six mini DisplayPort outputs, all of which can be simultaneously active. This technology is great for CAD users because it enables you to multi-task different workflow applications on each display or span a single CAD application across multiple displays as one desktop workspace.
DisplayPort has become the standard output port for both consumer and professional graphics cards. Yes, there are legacy DVI ports on some cards and there are even cards specifically designed to address the legacy market (e.g., FirePro V5800 DVI). But largely the debate about standards is over, and DisplayPort is here to stay. But while the graphics card manufacturers embraced DisplayPort early on, the display manufacturers (Apple aside) have only recently made the switch. Beginning in 2010, Asus, Dell, HP, Acer, Lenovo, and NEC released more than 80 displays supporting DisplayPort. But there are still a lot more displays released with only the less expensive DVI or VGA input connectors.
So what do you do if you have a display/monitor released before 2010 that only has single-link or dual-link DVI inputs? Or perhaps more interestingly, what if you want to set up a 3- or 4-display visual workspace for your CAD workflow using Eyefinity.
Get The Advantages of Eyefinity for CAD.
