The Current State Of PLP - Eyefinity/Surround Gaming

Nvidia and AMD the only two players in the enthusiasts desktop graphics game, one has finally opened up their new hardware to offer support for PLP (Picture/Landscape/Picture) monitor setups the other?...

When AMD launched the R9 285 on September 2nd 2014 it brought along an update to its GCN (Graphics core next) micro-architecture - 3rd generation GCN or GCN 1.2 as it's better known. 
It was touted as having "included mixed screen resolution & orientation support" by vendors

 "It features improved tessellation performance, loss less delta color compression in order to reduce memory bandwidth usage, an updated and more efficient instruction set, a new high quality scalier for video, and a new multimedia engine (video encoder/decoder)." source Wikipedia 

The Radeon R9 285

With this update & after a few driver hiccups, it was found that multi-monitor PLP support was indeed working.

Video of eyefinity working on mixed orientation PLP setup with R9 285 (courtesy of Daniel Robideaux )

AMD recently released its rehashed R9 390x into the open, the card is based on the Hawaii GPU the same chip that powered R9 290x which was released back in October 2013. 
It features GCN 1.1 much like the 290x that preceded it and even though it is a newer card than the R9 285, so far it seems that it does not support PLP configurations.

The question now obviously becomes does PLP support rely on GCN 1.2?

AMD has now unleashed its Fury X into the market to compete with Nvidia and their dominant Maxwell based cards, most notably its Geforce 980 and 980Ti. 
The Fury X like the R9 285 features GCN 1.2, a few days after release PLP mixed orientation was also confirmed as working.

Image of Fury X powered displays with mixed resolution and orientation

It would seem that for mixed resolution and orientation support, you do indeed need a card that features GCN 1.2. 
Now we may still be surprised by a driver update in regards to the R9 390x, so we'll keep are fingers crossed. 

So far the current crop of GCN 1.2 cards are Fury X, Fury, R9 Nano, R9 380 & the R9 285. If you want to game and span across three different monitors you'll be best sticking with these cards for the time being.

Nvidia's support for PLP is unfortunately non-existent with all of its current cards. A few people have reached out to Nvidia via email or on the Nvidia forum to ask if we will see support anytime soon, but so far none have had a response. 

Whilst gaming is possible via SoftTH ( http://www.softth.net/ ) as the name suggests a software based method, it currently only supports DX9 although they are working on DX10 & 11 at this present time.

Another option & one I personally use is Westech Solutions Windowed Borderless Gaming ( http://westechsolutions.net/sites/WindowedBorderlessGaming/ ) again as the name suggests allows you to run your game in a borderless window via a couple of clicks from the taskbar icon and a press of the F3 key, however you may need to set pixel offset for positioning of the image across your display's.

The downsides are not all games want to play ball & some require some additional tinkering, in Skyrim for instance, I'm having the same problem described on the steam community forum, but currently no answer has worked. 

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/WindowedBorderlessGaming/discussions/0/613936039590633510/

Although a bit of niche market in the community at the moment, support for PLP seems to be growing, I suppose we are all left wondering,.... "how long Nvidia will ignore us"?