ATI, graphics business unit of Advanced Micro Devices, is planning to release commercially release its graphics cards that supports output to six monitors in the coming weeks. The novelty will carry rather unprecedented amount of memory and will represent a secret weapon of ATI against Nvidia Corp.’s GeForce GTX 400-series that is to be released late this month.

ATI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 graphics card – code-named Trillian – will carry one ATI Cypress graphics chip with 1600 stream processors clocked at 850MHz along with 2GB of GDDR5 memory operating at 4.80GHz. The graphics card will feature six mini-DisplayPort connectors that will be able to support monitors with DisplayPort, DVI-I and D-sub input with special dongles. According to ATI, the price of the product will be “under $500”.

The Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 graphics board will finally be able to show the potential of the Eyefinity technology in all its glory – it will be able to render three-dimensional video games onto six displays at once in a bid to provide eye-definition visual experience. In order to ensure maximum possible performance, the developer installed 2GB of high-speed GDDR5 memory onto the card.

At present there are not a lot of monitors with thin bezels that would ensure splendid quality of multi-monitor setups, but ATI promises that such displays will be available from Samsung Electronics sometimes in April.

While the Trillian – or the Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 – will not feature much higher performance compared to the original model 5870 that was released in late September ’09, it is supposed to provide experience that is not possible on Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 400-series, the output of 3D video games onto 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 monitors at once. There are not a lot of people, who actually own six displays, but there are some, who can build setup consisting of two or three monitors to enjoy their favorite video games.

Nvidia’s new offerings based on Fermi architecture will also have their own trumps: stereoscopic 3D Vision, exclusive CUDA-based software as well as several games that use PhysX API to process effects physics. Time will tell, which advantages will persuade potential buyers.

Tags: ATI, Radeon, AMD, Trillian, Cypress, 40nm, eyefinity, Nvidia, Fermi, GF100