Triple monitors?

[spacecowboy9891]

I have 1 acer 24" monitor now and was wanting some feedback when it came to everyday use, gaming, and programming with three monitors. Also I don't know about the triple head to go or if my 4850x2 will run all three with standard outputs. And if anyone has any gaming performance information.


Thanks,
arthur

 

[aka1nas]

I run 3 24-inchers. For desktop usage, you set it up just like dual displays, just with another card for display 3.

Gaming is a slightly different beast, as you cannot natively span games across 3 displays on any version of Windows (2-way spans are no longer available with Vista or Windows 7).

The Triple-Head-2-Go device will make your screens display as a single monitor to Windows, but is unfortunately limited in max resolution and will not scale up to the full resolution of our 24 inch panels.

Softh is an alternative solution that is a lot more flexible with resolutions and can even handle different-sized displays. As it is software-based, it will be significantly slower (usually PCI-E or memory bandwidth limited). This is actually not a huge limitation, as you would not be able to render most brand new games at anything like 5760x1200 with any significant level of detail enabled unless you have something like a Tri-SLI rig.

Speaking of multi-GPU, SLI now supports 2 displays on the primary card. You can add a 3rd card and enable SLI still by using a 3rd display adapter(not in the SLI set) which you would attach displays 3+ to. CrossfireX might be a little more flexible with this, but I don't have any direct experience with it.

Here is a Screenshot of my setup on X3: Terran Conflict @ 5760x1200.

 

[spacecowboy9891]

Ok, that is good to know about softh. I absolutely love your monitor set-up. I am not sure how flexible crossfire is with multiple monitors, but I do have 4 dvi ports so I should be able to do something with it. But as far as gaming, do most games handle that resolution, or is there something special you have to do to force games to run 5760x1200?

 

[aka1nas]

On the more demanding newer games, you will need to sacrifice a lot of detail settings. As I mentioned earlier, with Softth you will usually be bus bandwidth limited before anything else, so as long as all display adapters are on full x16 PCI-E 2.0 slots you should be fine (finally found a use for all that pci-e bandwidth ).

I am unfortunately on a PCI-E 1.x platform, so my performance is usually mediocre (but playable) in a lot of games at that resolution. I get about 20 fps in Fallout 3 and X3:TC. Folks with newer Intel chipsets usually get at least double my performance. Slightly older games such as Oblivion should run even better.

Game compatibility varies, with the problem usually being whether or not the game UI will scale or become disorted. Some games scale themselves very well out of the box, some have to be tweaked (fallout 3 looks amazing with a few ini tweaks), and some are not easily fixable.

Tricky has a nice threadwith a lot of working configs for many popular games. Most of the games that are totally unplayable have the same issues with widescreens in general, so it's not a huge loss.

The author of softth is also working on experimental CUDA support for Nvidia cards to further increase performance. From the current RC, it sounds like it gives a nice boost. He is also working on releasing OpenGL support eventually, too.

Edit: Here is a Fallout 3 shot. It actually looks a little better on screen as you tweak the lens correction values to offset the fish-eye effect:

Fallout 3 @ 5760x1200