One of the underlying themes of CES this year was the transition to 4K displays. AMD had a 4K (4096 x 2160) demo at its booth driven by a Radeon HD 7970. Most 4K displays require multiple inputs, which was the case in AMD's demo. Two DisplayPort outputs from the 7970 drive the panel in the shot above. AMD ran both video playback and a 3D rendered test as a proof of functionality. If the high-end of the PC space moves to 4K eventually that will continue to drive high-end GPU demand thanks to the 2.1x increase in pixel count over a standard 30-inch display. 

AMD also had a 5x1 Eyefinity setup (not using 4K displays) running off of two 7970s showing a video conferencing app (ooVoo) running alongside Battlefield 3. This was of course one of the original intents of Eyefinity: to deliver a more immersive experience. The addition of video conferencing is a nod to a usage model where you are not only playing a game that makes you feel immersed but you're also able to look to your left and right and see your teammates. 

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  • AMD-Robert - Friday, January 13, 2012 - link

    Hi, all. My name's Robert, and I'm in the GPU division at AMD.

    Two DisplayPort cables were used for this demo because the connected displays do not use the 3GHz HDMI or DisplayPort 1.2 HBR2 standards.

    Any product with Graphics Core Next (including the Radeon HD 7970) support 4096x2160 over a single HDMI or DP cable. Of course the TV/monitor needs to support that as well, and these displays simply didn't. :)
  • B3an - Friday, January 13, 2012 - link

    As i suspected. Nice to see someone from AMD on here.
  • french toast - Friday, January 13, 2012 - link

    Hi there. Robert, if you sum up Nvidia in one word, any word you can think of, what would it be??

    Come on dont be shy now ;)
  • mmatis - Friday, January 13, 2012 - link

    Thank you!
  • tipoo - Saturday, January 14, 2012 - link

    Nice to see someone from AMD, hope you stick around to fill in the blanks from time to time
  • bego - Sunday, January 15, 2012 - link

    that was stupid idea...
  • chizow - Friday, January 13, 2012 - link

    Did they have any actual games running in 4K/2K? If 2 outputs were required I would guess they would have to do some manipulation on the driver side to basically halve the the resolution for each output and allow the display to recombine them. This would probably cause some issues on the game client side in terms of selecting resolution as you'd basically need either side-by-side 2K/2K images or top bottom 4K/1K images.

    I'm definitely interested in where this goes though with 3GHz HDMI, as it should open the doors for a lot of currently unsupported 2D and 3D modes.

    4K/2K would be amazing though, its basically 2x2 supersample AA when compared to a 1080p panel over the same screen size without any of the blurring issues you might see with downsampled methods.
  • Omoronovo - Friday, January 13, 2012 - link

    Assuming you are right and it was simply presented as two separate displays and later stitched together into one panel, AMD will have simply enabled Eyefinity to have it appear as one single large display making it agnostic to the applications running on it.

    Yet another way for AMD to sell Eyefinity as a great piece of tech (which it is), is that display manufacturers can sell panels like this that don't support the new DP standard to allow one display input to drive the entire panel.
  • Concillian - Friday, January 13, 2012 - link

    I REALLY want a ~24" 4k display. I've been wanting higher dpi displays since like 17" CRT days but for years it's been essentially the same pixels per inch and just larger displays.

    Bring on the high resolution.
  • sheh - Friday, January 13, 2012 - link

    Actually usually lower DPI on LCDs vs. CRTs.

    I hope 4096x2160 isn't going to be the new standard. It's annoying enough to have 1.77:1 monitors instead of 1.6, and now 1.9? They should go for 3840x2400. Both integer scaling, and 1.6.

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