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Tom's Hardware Reviews Multi-Display Gaming
MikShapi writes "Most gamers out there today own a dual-head graphics card (most of us completely neglecting the second port), and games such as X2 are offering support for this already (at least on nVidia cards, due to the "span" driver feature). Tom's Hardware did a nice rundown on the technology, complete with screenshots and benchmarks."
You can't beat the "3-headed" Doom play if you had three networked machines. That was fun.
This would work great for a game if you had a touch screen on one of the monitors.
Think MMORPG
One screen is first person view
The other is your inventory and chat screen
It's too hard to actively use 2 screens with one mouse.
I've always hated how my second monitor becomes unusable during gameplay. I'd like nothing more than to be able to throw my TV app up on the second monitor so I could watch TV while waiting to respawn in Wolf: ET.
I like the idea he presents in the article, but I'd rather have FPS games have the action in a middle window and have auxilliary information on the sides. Of course, the problem there is that two screens would divide the picture and three screens get you head swiveling even more than the original layout.
Multi-display gaming will require a lot of these kinds of ergonomic decisions if they are to succeed.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
My biggest issues with this is that I need a monitor that allows me to place 2 more monitors on the left and right seemlessly. Such as, I want to extend the screen forward in the form of a lens and then slide the left and right monitors behind it hiding the plastic along the edge of the glass display. I can't have the 2 inches of break in my display when playing FPS games. Put it on both sides and it is twice as annoying. Remove the frame of the monitor and we have this working for games. Otherwise this is going to only slow me down. My desk has a 19 inch CRT, 14 Inch CRT, 17 inch CRT, and 2 laptops. Nothing new, but technology just isn't right.
Some games I think a dual monitor setup would be awesome. Think any RTS game where the play field is shrunk because of the "instrumentation" or the like, with dual monitors, a lot of this could go to the second monitor. I think it'd be even cooler if you could decide what components went over to the second screen, and only keep those items most important to you on the play field screen. Or, have both the current and a completely non-instrumented view in the second.
I don't think that just spanning the entire screen shot across 2 monitors would be helpful in any way though. Even with LCDs, the break caused by the frames would be somewhat irritating, to me at least. Then again, even the mesh lines on Trinitron monitors are annoying to me, so I may be just a bit more sensitive to those types of things.
As for dual monitors in general, initially I thought why have duals? Just get one bigger better monitor. Now having worked with duals for about 2 years, I love this setup, and would rather have 2 slightly less capable monitors instead of one slightly bigger monitor. Being able to see a full web page and do something else in another screen related to it is way more helpful than switching between two window frames. There are many other instances where dual monitors are useful as well, and I even span both sometimes, although the application I use when doing that is amenable to doing that (eclipse).
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
What I want is two camera views one for each monitor. I would like to have an overhead camera and a front view camera when playing NeverWinter Nights. This way I can see the excellent fights and creatures and still have a tactical overview of the situation.
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
Not to mention that extra monitors are quite pricey.
Actually, they're quite cheap, if you had the space.
I have a triple-display setup at home. Three 17" CRTs. CRT monitors aren't very expensive these days. As for the video cards, I have one AGP Geforce2 on the center monitor, and I have two PCI Matrox Millenium II cards on the side displays. The Millenium IIs are $20/each on Ebay.
Now of course, given the hardware on the side displays they aren't very useful for running games, however this setup is incredibly useful for many other things (programming, web stuff). Also, I can have a game running fullscreen/accelerated on the center GeForce2 and have IRC or AIM or a web page or something running on the side displays.
I was suprised to find that Multiple monitors actually distracted from gameplay. As a previous poster mentioned, The time spent turning your head & refocusing on another screen was often long enough for your oponent to get a shot off. More significant, by adjusting the view to match the realestate of the display, I lost considerable vertical field of view. Leaving me prone to attacks from above & below. I used the Multi-heads for a month, making adjustments. But eventually reverted back to a single monitor and saw my frags increase imeadiatly.
I currently run 2 monitors not for gaming but for webdesign and programming. One is a 19inch monitor the other is a 15 inch. I run the 19 at 1600x1200 and the 15 at 1024x768. No good for gaming but I can check how well a website works at different resolutions and program on the big screen then check out render on the 15. I'll never go back to a single monitor.
Have you tried using HMD? I've tried the Sony iGlass displays and it made my eyes hurt after only a a minute or so. It's like trying to read with your nose pressed into a book (literally).
Besides HMDs pretty much suck as far as resolution goes. And don't believe the: Like a 50" screen 5 meters away, it's a lie. Maybe if you have a 50" screen running in 320x240 while you are jabbing glowing hot needles in your eyes.
Great posts. I had been thinking about the Parahelia just for flight sim, now that's pretty well nixed.
... if you have your weather setup for rainy on your primary machine, the other machines won't just automatically show rain. So your left/right view would be a clear, sunny day while your primary display is raining. Same problems with air traffic. The weather problem can be overcome with a third party software program that keeps the weather in sync between the machines. I'm not sure if it works with air traffic too or not. (I think it's dumb that Microsoft didn't think to make it so that you could setup some "listen" nodes on your network. Sort of a client/server config for multiple displays.)
I would definitely advise against it unless you know what to expect and are OK with that.
So if you swapped out to ATI, what are you doing to drive your third screen?
Right now I have the 3rd screen on my other computer. I originally planned on buying 2 inexpensive ATI or NVidia PCI cards with DVI out so I could have DVI on all 3 screens. But every configuration I've tried so far under Linux has failed in one way or another. (And perhaps even more frustrating, all the configurations work fine under Windows. sigh.)
Have you set-up the multiple-computer flight sim set-up? How painful is that?
Sort of. I set up a 1 node configuration just to see if I could do it. I wasn't happy with the results. There's enough of a delay in the network response time between the machines that it makes for a weird experience. For example, you bank right, and 1/2 second later the Networked machines bank right. I have a 10/100Mb Network so I don't think it should be an issue of latency or not enough network bandwidth. (Could have been the relatively crummy specs of the spare machine though. My primary machine is pretty decked out though.)
Plus there are issues with the weather and air traffic. Since each machine is running it's own copy of the Flight Simulator
Plus there is the custom configuration that has to be done on each machine. You have to edit the cockpit files for *each* plane on *each* networked machine and tell it what viewing angle you want. -15 degrees on the left, +15 degrees on the right (or whatever).
It's a big pain in the neck in my opinion. You'd have to be a lot more of an enthusiast than I am to want to deal with it.
I really want a three monitor setup - it's just so much more interesting to flightsim when you can see stuff to the left and right of the plane.
Yes definitely. It's just too bad computers don't have 3 AGP slots where you could drive each monitor with a dedicated graphics card. I'm thinking PCI Express will be ideal for a 3 monitor setup.
I'm not terribly excited by flight simming, but it's cheaper to practice instrument approaches in the sim than in the plane. In some respects, I think it's better too. The controls/feedback sucks (Even with a FF joystick) which makes overcontrolling almost unavoidable. But the overcontrolling just forces you to have a really good instrument scan - so it ends up being better for your practice.
I think you can learn a lot from the Flight Simulator. I prefer yoke and pedals myself. I think it's more realistic than a combat stick.
But my interest level falls off rapidly due to the tiny field-of-view. I've had a chance to try two views (excellent Dell 20001FP LCDs) and it was great. Now if only I could add that third display....
My interest waxes and wanes like the phases of the moon. I was really jazzed about it for a while and kind of went "all out" on buying these 3 monitors, the parhelia card, and a yoke and pedals. And it was great fun for a while. But then, it got a little old. I put away my pedals and yoke and haven't touched them in months. My true interest lies in computer technology in general. Networking, playing with Operating Systems, and so on. That never goes away.