Radeon/AMDGPU X.Org Drivers Add TILE Property Support For Tiled Monitors

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Radeon/AMDGPU X.Org Drivers Add TILE Property Support For Tiled Monitors

It's coming a bit late considering the X.Org Server bits were added back in 2015 along with the xf86-video-modesetting support, but within xf86-video-amdgpu Git and pending for xf86-video-ati is support for the TILE property in dealing with tiled displays...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Radeon-AMDGPU-TILE-Support

[Jumbotron]

As stated by Michael, this might not be a big deal for home users, but for someone looking to make a cheaper, more open tiled display server this will help. There are a lot of solutions out there that have custom controller software to do this, but now it looks like it will be possible to do this just as a setting (or settings) from the OS.

Thanks to Michel Danzer for this !! Good job !!

[Brane215]

What's a tiled monitor ?

[Jumbotron]

It's a collection of displays where the display output is mapped to different monitors to form a larger composite whole. Here is a quick example of what one looks like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lne0A5tONM

Here is a video showing proprietary hardware to do the same thing. This is why I'm kind of excited about this new feature in the driver. As I said earlier it could open the way to a cheaper solution than what is shown on this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6o9pISLdBgI

Or this one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo4LjMd4G6Q

[IM back!]

why dose that need explicit support? Xorg uses one big surface anyways (unless zaphodhead is used) and all you need to do is just disable the xinerama hints and every program thinks its one big display.

I dont get it i have been doing this for years.

[kurros]

It is not for video wall applications but monitors that use Multi-Stream Transport to get around bandwidth limitations. Many 4K or 5K monitors were this way--they presented themselves as two separate DisplayPort devices, one for each half of the monitor.

[M@GOid]

It is not for video wall applications but monitors that use Multi-Stream Transport to get around bandwidth limitations. Many 4K or 5K monitors were this way--they presented themselves as two separate DisplayPort devices, one for each half of the monitor.

I remember that. When 4K was brand new, the first models did not have a single connector for 4k @60Hz.

God, the time is flying so fast I already had forgotten about that...

[Jumbotron]

It is not for video wall applications but monitors that use Multi-Stream Transport to get around bandwidth limitations. Many 4K or 5K monitors were this way--they presented themselves as two separate DisplayPort devices, one for each half of the monitor.

Ahhhh....thank you for the clarification. NOWwwww I too remember the whole issue from...what...4 years ago or so. Well....I think Michel Danzer is owed a beer anyway, even more so!

[Brane215]

It's a collection of displays where the display output is mapped to different monitors to form a larger composite whole. Here is a quick example of what one looks like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lne0A5tONM

Here is a video showing proprietary hardware to do the same thing. This is why I'm kind of excited about this new feature in the driver. As I said earlier it could open the way to a cheaper solution than what is shown on this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6o9pISLdBgI

Or this one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo4LjMd4G6Q

So how is this different to what you could do before with xrandr ?

I think also AMD driver used to have option ZaphodHeads to join two monitors together.

So now they opened the possibility to do it in two dimensios (X * Y).

As said, nice, but you can do this in xrandr.

OK, probalbly with this monitors will be running in lockstep and some delays etc could be eliminated, but all in all, not that earthsattering IMHO...

[polarathene]

What exactly is a tiled display? Is it multiple inputs like a TV and you can just switch across inputs? Or something physical like layering display panels(like AMD sort of does with CCX/dies for it's Zen line), although that'd probably have some visual seams no?

Came across this display: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbrea...esync-43ud79-b

Which can display 4 different inputs tiled into quadrants, is that the type of display tech being discussed here? I think that feature is more related to the hardware product as it can display any one of those inputs fullscreen too. Is tiled display requiring more than one input/output from the systems graphics output to a single display device(as if you had two separate monitors but it's instead a single physical one), not sure what the point of that would be though if it was to power a single "display" not two displays/screens as if they were physical monitors and you switch between the inputs.

EDIT: Oops, thought I had read the comments so far, but that was from the linked 2014 article, it was already explained earlier in the thread, sorry!