cybereality wrote:Yes, but Surround/Eyefinity are not powering all those displays with a single port/wire. Each monitor has its own plug, and is already basically maxing out what can be done with current formats. Even DisplayPort probably will have trouble doing this. For example, look at this demo (
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5420/amds ... mos-at-ces" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; ), AMD needed to use 2 DP ports just to power a single 4K 2D monitor. So to do 3D you would need maybe 4 ports. I guess thats possible, but its very proprietary in nature and not really where the industry should be heading.
Actually I don't believe this is true.
First, looking at HDMI (check the wikipedia artice), the 1.3 version of the spec provides sufficient bandwidth (with a clock double to 340 MHz) for 4k resolution and in version 1.4 they list 4K as a supported resolution.
Specifically:
4096x2160/24bitColor/24p requires 5.35Gb/s of bandwidth
4096x2160/36bitColor(DeepColor)/24p requires 8.03Gb/s of bandwidth
both fit within the spec for a single cable (10.2 Gb/s including 8b/10b overhead)
The problem up to this point (from the HDMI perspective) is that silicon was not available that was able to process signals at the full 340MHz rate, but new parts are starting to trickle into the market now. This is actually covered in some of the MTBS interviews on YouTube and further validated by the new Sony BDP-S790 which can upscale content to 4K and requires only (1) HDMI out. That said, even if you kept color to 24bit, a single HDMIv1.4 would not have sufficient bandwidth to tackle 4K@48p which would certainly be the minimum requirement for 3D cinema viewing.
The Display Port standard offers even greater headroom with v1.2 offering a total effective bandwidth of 17.28Gb/s (again check Wikipedia). From a table listed on that page, 3840x2160/30bitColor/60p would require 16.00Gb/s, so I'm going to assume that 4096x2160/24bitColor/60p would be a possibility within the bandwidth offered by this spec.
To be clear, neither standard offers enough bandwidth to offer 4K/24bitColor/120p. Which would be the requirement for 3D gaming at 4K.
Regarding the display in the AMD booth, it was probably using older silicon and therefore required multiple DisplayPort cables at the DsiplayPort 1.0/1.1 data rate to achieve sufficent bandwidth for a 4K@24p signal.