Multi Monitor Gaming - Spanned Desktops

[TantrumusMaximus]

Wondering about gaming with spanned resolutions across monitors. If you use my sig system .... what would I need without replacing anything but the monitor I have or adding to it?

My gut tells me 3 24" res would be too much for any video card combination (save 3 GTX 260's on a tri sli board etc, I'm just not willing to blow that much cash.)

But what about 3 19" displays and adding a 2nd board to feed a left & right monitor????

I'm new to the idea of spanned resolutuions so I'm looking for ANY advice.... "Do it.... " "Don't!" etc etc....

Do the drivers send the load to what monitor the information is displayed for is the processing going to be more complex than that. Just very curious.... "on the fence"

I have 6 LCDs around the house to play with this and a GTX 260.....

Could I add the 260 as a second board and spread the load to the right / left screens?


I tested this out on my way in to work this morning on my wife's box... a 24" Dell and a 22" Acer spanned at 3360x1050 resolution... it opened my eys when I fired up Warhammer Online on her box and it ran butter smooth. Thoughts????? I'm going to have some fun with this when I get home tonight.... going to toss my 24" into the mix and do some perf testing see what I would be in for before even considering tossing more $$$$ at gaming.

All thoughts welcome!

 

[aka1nas]

If you want to do this with Vista (or with 3 screens on any OS) you either need to buy a TripleHead2Go box or use Softth to do it in software. I use the latter solution with 3x24 inch screens (5760x1200) and it works pretty well in most games. With a software-based solution, you are actually mostly PCI-E and memory bandwidth-limited so having an ultra-high-end graphics setup isn't a huge deal. X58 would actually be an ideal platform to do this on.

 

[aka1nas]

Also, does your 295 show up as an SLI setup in the Nvidia CP (I'm not as familiar with the dual GPU cards)? If so, then you need to use another card for the 3rd display that is not in the same SLI set (so no buying a second GTX 295 and doing Quad SLI at the same time as running display 3 off of it). Other than that, you do not need a very high end card at all to run the extra display as it will not contribute to rendering.

I use my GTX 260 SLI pair to run displays 1+2 and render, and then my old 8800GT for display 3 + PhysX.

 

[TantrumusMaximus]

Cool, getting excited to try this!

I have the 2nd card "kinda". My plan is to go home after work and "steal" my wife's GTX 260 out of her clutching grasp and stick it in my P6T grab another 24" Dell (off her box too heheheheh), then nab one of the kid's 22" LCDs.

Both of these will get plugged into the GTX260... I'll span a 1680x1050 and test.

Will this work? I'm under the understanding you don't need the triplehead hardware with the new drivers & vista.

Thanks!

The best thing about this test is I called wife at lunch and told her my plans and what this could possibly lead to "spending more $$$." Her response: "Whatever floats your boat!"

The test:
GTX295 >>> Middle Monitor
GTX260 >>> Left & Right Monitors
All spanned at 22" LCD res 5040x1050

 

[TantrumusMaximus]

YAY after taking the time to set it up and having NO span option I was like WTF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

After reading x number of forums about this subject apparently MS removed the option in Vista.... HOW WONDERFUL... Thanks MS.

 

[Lonyo]

http://www.kegetys.net/SoftTH/
Try that. Never tried it on Vista, but worked for me on XP.

 

[aka1nas]

Originally posted by: aka1nas
If you want to do this with Vista (or with 3 screens on any OS) you either need to buy a TripleHead2Go box or use Softth to do it in software. I use the latter solution with 3x24 inch screens (5760x1200) and it works pretty well in most games. With a software-based solution, you are actually mostly PCI-E and memory bandwidth-limited so having an ultra-high-end graphics setup isn't a huge deal. X58 would actually be an ideal platform to do this on.

Sorry, should have emphasized that part more. Spans are gone in WDDM, and only ever worked with 2 displays AFAIK anyway. You'll have to use Softth or a TH2GO unit.

 

[Dadofamunky]

Originally posted by: TantrumusMaximus
Cool, getting excited to try this!

I have the 2nd card "kinda". My plan is to go home after work and "steal" my wife's GTX 260 out of her clutching grasp and stick it in my P6T grab another 24" Dell (off her box too heheheheh), then nab one of the kid's 22" LCDs.

Dude, you are SO greedy.

 

[TantrumusMaximus]

Originally posted by: Dadofamunky

Originally posted by: TantrumusMaximus
Cool, getting excited to try this!

I have the 2nd card "kinda". My plan is to go home after work and "steal" my wife's GTX 260 out of her clutching grasp and stick it in my P6T grab another 24" Dell (off her box too heheheheh), then nab one of the kid's 22" LCDs.

Dude, you are SO greedy.

Hell yeah man! That GTX 260 was a "loan" to her! She knows all her H/W are belong to me.

@aka1nas I missed your SoftTH suggestion first pass... I read through your post again last night and got the software but never could make it work and the forums weren't too clear over there about OS functionality.

I think if I want to do this the Matrox Triplehead is the way to go. All in all I don't think I'm going to take the plunge because I wanted my test last night to see what kind of performance I could expect at 5040x1050..... not going to spend on the Triplehead & 3 22" displays and THEN find out it's gonna be a complete slugfest.

Thanks for the help.

 

[aka1nas]

The Th2Go solution will have less of a performance hit, but is also somewhat less flexible. I.E. all displays need to be the same size. Softth can mix and match monitor sizes and also lets you do things like set monitor borders (so things don't appear to jump across monitors due to border thickness) and use lens correction (alleviates the "fisheye" effect you may get on the side screens in some games).

The new version(1.09RC1) also supports CUDA on Nvidia cards and is supposed to be much faster than the previous methods the author was using. Haven't had a chance to test it yet, though.

 

[TantrumusMaximus]

How do you make it actually work though????

I sat for 3 hours trying to get Crysis to show a custom resolution. Had everything setup like the quickstart.txt stated. Make sure the second displays were set to "extend my desktop on to this screen" etc.

No matter what same old resolutions. I took a look at the SoftTH.cfg in the Crysis folder and the dlls were definately initializing.

Is there a hard set limit for spanning when NOT using the Matrox solution???? I was very curious and almost thinking I was going to be buying one of these when I realized their max triplehead resolution was 3x 1280x1024 which is a major downgrade from looking at 24" LCDs on my gaming box. 1280x1024 is 4:3 19" in the LCD world and I'm on 2 here at work and they sure are TINY by todays standards..... trying to imagine going to 3 of these for gaming and it's really a big MEH!!!!

I think I'll listen to my friend and just go to a 30" LCD and toss this idea out alltogether.

 

[aka1nas]

Check out this thread:
http://www.kegetys.net/forum/index.php?topic=529.0

In particular:

Vista requires -dx9 mode (SoftTH does not work with dx10).

Tricky's thread has a lot of tested configs for various games:
http://www.kegetys.net/forum/i...ic=245.msg1181#msg1181

 

[TantrumusMaximus]

Originally posted by: aka1nas
Check out this thread:
http://www.kegetys.net/forum/index.php?topic=529.0

In particular:

Vista requires -dx9 mode (SoftTH does not work with dx10).

Tricky's thread has a lot of tested configs for various games:
http://www.kegetys.net/forum/i...ic=245.msg1181#msg1181

Thanks for the info aka1nas, I got frustrated and put all the hardware back how it was so I'm just going to wait until I can afford the below:

I got some pretty good news... after not being happy what I was seeing regarding the highest res being 3x 19" 1280x1024 on the Matrox TripleHead2Go product... I kept looking because it seemed too much a downer. Found out they updated the firmware recently and I confirmed the functionality by calling them today. 22" LCD Native Res (1680x1050) triplehead support was added. Only catch... your LCD must support 57Hz.

 

[aka1nas]

Ouch, that might be problematic. I wouldn't buy the box until you have messed with a few games running Softth and made sure you will like surround gaming.

 

[Lonyo]

Originally posted by: TantrumusMaximus
How do you make it actually work though????

I sat for 3 hours trying to get Crysis to show a custom resolution. Had everything setup like the quickstart.txt stated. Make sure the second displays were set to "extend my desktop on to this screen" etc.

No matter what same old resolutions. I took a look at the SoftTH.cfg in the Crysis folder and the dlls were definately initializing.

Is there a hard set limit for spanning when NOT using the Matrox solution???? I was very curious and almost thinking I was going to be buying one of these when I realized their max triplehead resolution was 3x 1280x1024 which is a major downgrade from looking at 24" LCDs on my gaming box. 1280x1024 is 4:3 19" in the LCD world and I'm on 2 here at work and they sure are TINY by todays standards..... trying to imagine going to 3 of these for gaming and it's really a big MEH!!!!

I think I'll listen to my friend and just go to a 30" LCD and toss this idea out alltogether.

I used SoftTH with a 17" <> 20" <> 17". You can mix resolutions, so you can run the main monitor at its specced res and not worry about the side ones too much because they are the periphery anyway.
As far as making it work, did you check the forums for any Crysis help? I had trouble getting Crysis to even support my native res until I installed the monitor driver. It def. seems a little picky sometimes (as well as SoftTH not being flawless)

 

[TheInternal]

From what I've read/seen, it looks like the least you'd want per 24" (1920x1200) screen would be an HD 4870 1 GB... I've run dual monitor for a long time, but not for gaming.
57 Hz? That's an unusual frequency... well... for LCDs.

 

[Dadofamunky]

I used a Matrox DualHead2Go for a few days; was not impressed with it. It did not support DVI connectors and its supported resolution wasn't acceptable. Not sure if Matrox now offers DVI on their units.

But yeah, a 30" is a better though more costly solution. It would better make use of the two-card scenario too.

 

[TantrumusMaximus]

Triplehead2go Digital Edition is 3 DVI inputs and one DVI output.

Go to youtube and watch some videos.

30" screen can "bite me" after watching a lot of these. My bud was trying to convince me to go the 30" route and I do see the logic in it....

-30" is 1,300,000 less pixels to render vs. 5040x1050
-30" will just WORK in every game without any messing around.


HOWEVER:

After watching some of those videos HOW CAN I control myself!?!?!?!?!?! I think my 295 will power this resolution if I don't try for 8x AA and 16x AF etc.... back off some settings.... all worth it for the experience IMHO. Add another 295 later if I want them features back.

I'm prob ordering the unit today and will be a community guinea pig...

I have quite a few games to test it against. Worst case scenario is I send the unit back to Newegg or wherever I buy it from I've already got 3 1680 capable displays to test with so I don't need to dive too deep... "yet."

 

[aka1nas]

Cool, let us know how well it works. If you ever want to get even crazier, you can do 5 displays if you stack the Th2Go with Softth.

 

[TantrumusMaximus]

Will do.

Have you seen this before?

http://www.seamlessdisplay.com/markets_general.htm

There are some youtubes on this as well. I heard the price of admission is astronomical just to get rid of the bezels. Would be cool though if they were around 30incher prices

 

[TantrumusMaximus]

Le'hawtness has been demoted to "old lady" as she has put the kibosh on this plan stating my spenditures in the name of PC gaming is officially on hold.

Mother F@$LKJ$%#$@$!!!!!

Hand was slapped.... guess I'm not as in the house as I thought.... meh this is nothing more than a slight set back. Tune in next month.

 

[aka1nas]

Originally posted by: TantrumusMaximus
Will do.

Have you seen this before?

http://www.seamlessdisplay.com/markets_general.htm

There are some youtubes on this as well. I heard the price of admission is astronomical just to get rid of the bezels. Would be cool though if they were around 30incher prices

They look like the same wrapping displays that we're being showed off at CeBit by Alienware and Gateway. They suck as they have very low vertical resolution and have noticeable lines between the component panels in addition to being very expensive.

At least with separate panels you can use them as independent displays when not gaming and try to get some more work done to justify the cost.