NVIDIA’s GeForce GF100 Under the Microscope

Touching on NVIDIA Surround / 3D Vision Surround

During CES, NVIDIA unveiled their answer to ATI’s Eyefinity multi-display capability: 3D Vision Surround and NVIDIA Surround. These two “surround” technologies from NVIDIA share common ground but in some ways their prerequisites and capabilities are at two totally different ends of the spectrum. We should also mention straight away that both of these technologies will become available once the GF100 cards launch and will support bezel correction management from the outset.


NVIDIA Surround


Not to be confused with NVIDIA’s 3D Vision Surround, their standard Surround moniker allows for three displays to be fed concurrently via an SLI setup. Yes, you need an SLI system in order to run three displays at the same time but the good news is that NVIDIA Surround is backwards compatible with GTX 200-series cards in addition to forwards compatible with GF100 series parts. This display method can display information across three 2560 x 1600 screens and allows for a mixture of monitors to be used as long as they all support the same resolutions.

The reason why SLI is needed is because both the GT200 series and the GF100 cards are only capable of having a pair of display adapters active at the same time. In addition, if you want to drive three monitors at reasonably high detail levels, you’ll need some serious horsepower and that’s exactly what a dual or triple card system gives you.

This does tend to leave out the people who may want to use three displays for professional applications but that’s where NVIDIA’s Quadro series comes into play.


3D Vision Surround


We all know by now that immersive gaming has been taken to new levels by both ATI, with their HD 5000-series’ ability to game on up to three monitors at once, and NVIDIA’s own 3D Vision which offers stereoscopic viewing within games. What has now happened is a combining of these two techniques under the 3D Vision Surround banner, which brings stereo 3D to surround gaming.

This is the mac-daddy of display technologies and it is compatible with SLI setups of upcoming GF100 cards and older GT200-series. The reasoning behind this is pretty straightforward: you need a massively powerful system for rendering and outputting what amounts to six high resolution 1920 x 1080 images (two to each of the three 120Hz monitors). Another thing you should be aware of is the fact that all three monitors MUST be of the same make and model in order to ensure uniformity.


All in all, we saw NVIDIA’s 3D Vision Surround in action and while it was extremely impressive to say the least, we can't give any more thoughts about it, more testing on our part must be done.