[bri3d]

I think this card is aimed at the compute crowd.

However, there is an extension of "multi monitor" that's probably going to become a big thing: VR gaming. VR gaming demands both more pixels and a consistent, high framerate, and could percolate more quickly down from "most hardcore of the hardcore" to "many people who enjoy gaming own one" than 4K displays or huge monitor stacks have.

This particular GPU is a multi-GPU single-card solution which is probably worse for VR, because alternate-frame rendering adds latency and can result in uneven frame timings especially when two sequential frames have dramatically different complexity.

[maaku]

Wouldn't you render the two frames at the same time on separate cards?

[bri3d]

Yes, and thus the cards are always racing one another.

If the cards display frames as they're available, they end up with uneven display times, which is a quite jarring visual effect. If they VSync they end up with the standard VSync issues where occasional slow frames are difficult to handle. Both are undesirable traits for VR. An output buffer naturally adds latency, which is also undesirable.

The card-race issue is called "micro stuttering" and you can read some outdated information about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_stuttering .

AMD cards in Crossfire used to be notorious for this effect, but they've since added an adaptive frame-rate limiter (forcing fast frames to delay, like VSync but not bound to the display's refresh) which helps.