OMG surround Gaming!

[mwmorph]

UT2k3
normal
http://www.nvnews.net/reviews/...ages/ut2003/normal.jpg
surround
http://www.nvnews.net/reviews/...es/ut2003/surround.jpg
Quake 3
normal
http://www.nvnews.net/reviews/...ages/quake3/normal.jpg
surround
http://www.nvnews.net/reviews/...es/quake3/surround.jpg
FS2002
Normal
http://www.nvnews.net/reviews/...ages/fs2002/normal.jpg
Surround
http://www.nvnews.net/reviews/...es/fs2002/surround.jpg

Framerates dont drop too much either!
about 30-40% when surround!
think about it... 3 monitors.

 

[MercenaryForHire]

And people wonder why I'm a Matrox Fanboy at times.

- M4H

 

[mwmorph]

it's beautiful. i've never seen ut2ks like that before. now if only matrox can release a faster version of this card, or at least ati give me the option in one of their driver/bios updates...

 

[2Xtreme21]

That's cool.. but it's rather ugly with the flat gun right in the middle of your screen, heh.

 

[BW86]

It would be pretty awesome.

 

[Avalon]

It would definitely be cool if Matrox would make faster gaming cards. I wish they would. Three companies competing against each other is much better than two.

 

[otispunkmeyer]

i believe the papyrus nascar games could be done this way too, but i can only see a real use for it in games like that and like FS, in nascar u had to press buttons to view out of each window, but on a tripple screen set up it was set up for u for instant nascar bliss. UT looks abit wierd, the angles like totally skewed

 

[mwmorph]

yeah there is a nascar 2k2 shot but the normal shot was broken so i didnt post it.

 

[Goi]

They should make SLI work so that 1 card takes care of 1 screen too. That's be great usage of all that power.

 

[CheesePoofs]

Originally posted by: Goi
They should make SLI work so that 1 card takes care of 1 screen too. That's be great usage of all that power.

I don't think that would be an effective usage of sli's power, because what if one screen had really detailed water effects with reflections and lighting, but the other screen was a wall. The card rendering the wall would spend most of its time waiting for the other card to finish rendering the water.

 

[kazeakuma]

Last year? or before I managed to get my hands on a Parhelia 256 (512MB version) for a weekend. Did the whole surround gaming thing, it's pretty good. Really need LCDs for it though, 1" thick borders kills the experience

Pity the Parhelia never performed that well cos all I got with UT2k3 max details, 768 vertical resolution was in the 30s. Means it would be useless as hell nowadays.

 

[mwmorph]

yeah, it'd be nice if nV put support for 3 screens in it's 6800 drivers as a option when SLi'ing.

 

[Gamingphreek]

Originally posted by: Goi
They should make SLI work so that 1 card takes care of 1 screen too. That's be great usage of all that power.

You can its called put to graphics cards in it but dont enable SLI. Voila 4 DVI-D connectors (1 video card for 2 screens)

-Kevin

 

[Ronin]

http://server.counter-strike.n...40x1024maxsettings.png

Those are small

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: MercenaryForHire
And people wonder why I'm a Matrox Fanboy at times.

- M4H

Matrox makes gaming cards????


j/k

Sorry, couldn't resist picking on their trailing position in the desktop performance 3D market.
I used to run a triple-monitor Matrox (2D-only) rig a few years back, it was pretty sweet for dev work.

Edit: There really isn't a big (technological) reason not to allow this same sort of thing, with multiple (or multi-headed) ATI or NV cards. Whatever software load-balancing that NV has to do for their multi-card SLI scheme to render a single display with two cards, could probably easily be modified to run as a virtual "surround" display device, and then assign the clipped rendering region for each portion of that display to each of the GPU "heads" attached to the monitor driving that portion of the display output.

You could also *probably* do the same thing, if you enabled horizontal span mode on a recent dual-head card, and then kicked UT2K3/4 into software-rendering mode. Viola, "surround gaming", but I'm sure that the performance and eye candy of the software rendering mode would kind of suck though.