AMD unveils Eyefinity, six 30" screens off a single 5800-series card

24.6 megapixels of eye-wateringly gorgeous screen.

With the 5xxx series cards just peering over the edge of the horizon AMD isn't resting on its laurels and instead has announced a number of exciting technologies, as well as a new branding scheme. Called VISION, these are a series of badges that will be applied to their products to give an idea of their performance; including standard VISION, Premium and Ultimate.

Courtesy TechPowerUp

The real exciting story here is Eyefinity, an amusing play on words that means a whole lot more - six giant 30" LCD screens being powered by a single 5xxx series card. It's a custom-designed PCB for now, that packs in six DisplayPort connectors on the expansion bracket, giving enough bandwidth to power six individual monitors at a resolution of 2560x1600.

This equates to an earth-shatteringly huge 7680x3200 resolution - in other words, a 24.6 megapixel image! AMD can do this by coding their driver to tell the operating system that a single huge screen is attached, then letting the driver itself take control of the indiviual panels to divvy up the work. It works so well that GRID, WoW and even DiRT 2 can be played at this massive res, ushering in a whole new gaming experience.

Of course this six-connector GPU monster isn't a production model, but there should be three-connector versions at launch that will allow an ultra-widescreen setup off a single card. The downside to using so many monitors is that their bezels might get in the way, but the upside is the huuuuuuuge resolution. Not convinced by the technical specs? Check out the following pics below:

GRID, six 30" Screens - courtesy Tom'sHardware

Possibly HAWX - courtesy Tom'sHardware

Left4Dead on triple-screen setup - courtesy Tom'sHardware

There's some exciting potential for this tech, so head to the article at Tom'sHardware for some more pics of the 5xxx series card, and details about Eyefinity itself.