AMD's making quite a hullaballo with its next generation ATI graphics parts. The company held a press conference to unveil the new graphics processors but didn't spill all the beans just yet. Outside of some really big numbers that we can mention, the new GPUs support a brand new feature called Eyefinity, a method by which to connect up to six monitors to a single video card.


Yes, you read that right - six monitors. No limitations either. Feel free to hookup six gigantic 30" displays if you want. Not all the new video cards will support six outputs, but three seems to be the new minimum. ATI's reasoning behind enabling support for so many monitors actually makes a lot of sense. While most of us can't afford a single 30" LCD (let alone six of them), grabbing three 20" LCDs can cost as low as $400. Six quality displays can easily be had for less than $1000 if you want to go all out.


Outside of giving you an absurdly large desktop space, ATI states that the new GPU will actually be able to drive insane resolutions in-game. You don't have to imagine what World of Warcraft would look like at 7680x3200, because you can actually do it. Game compatibility might be an issue, but ATI assured us that more than a few games work well out of the box, and that simple patches can enable many others.


ATI let loose two figures to allay concerns that their GPU can't possibly run games at such absurd resolutions. The new GPU will have 2.15 billion transistors, and will be capable of over 2.5 TFLOPs. To put those numbers in perspective, ATI's current generation Radeon HD 4890 has less than half as many transistors, and is capable of around 1 TFLOPs. We got to toy around on Left 4 Dead for a bit, and at the risk of sounding effusive, it rocked. Silky smooth and ridiculously large.


We'll see how the new GPU performs soon enough, and whether it's capable of driving more graphically demanding games with high quality settings at such insane resolutions. Until then, have sweet dreams of large multi-monitor displays and stupidly high resolution gaming.