State of Multi-Monitor Gaming?

xtal asks: "What's the current state of multi-monitor gaming? LCD panels are really dropping in price - I've seen a 17" panels for under $400cdn, bringing it into the ballpark where purchasing three of them for a much wider field of view becomes possible. The hardware to drive these displays in a LAN configuration (3 machines, 3 monitors) is also inexpensive, or at least attainable - so when I look around for the state of multi monitor simulation, I don't see much. The best candidates are flight sims, but my interest lies in racing. Are there any suggestions or sites I'm missing?" What games have you played that could have really benefited from a second (or even a third) monitor? Do you think that the games you normally play will be significantly enhanced by the use of multiple monitors, or is one enough?

Comments

My thoughts...

[brokencomputer]

I think games need to be designed with large monitors in mind for this to improve the gaming experience drastically.

I don't think that driving the displays in a LAN configuration would be good for the refresh rate, but I may be wrong.

Something I really want is a G5 with dual 30 inch Cinema displays. That's probably the best configuration as each of those two monitors supports the resolution of about 3 of your cheap 17" LCDs. We may have to wait for Intel Duo powermacs to get your windows games to work, however.

By the way, Wolfenstein Enemy Territory is fun on Dual displays and it is free for Linux, Windows, AND Mac, so that'd be a good option.

--
tvWiki.tv - The Television Wiki

Re:My thoughts...

[inter alias]

Yes, multiple monitors may be appropriate to distinguish between different tasks or parts of tasks (multi-window apps), but gaming is one one-window task and therefore a huge monitor is the appropriate solution. Even better if it was flexible or produced 120 degrees concave or so.

But yes, until we get curved displays 3 monitor gaming is a workable solution for peripheral vision. But I'd still go with a 30" cinema display.

Re:My thoughts...

[TheSkyIsPurple]

I remember playing a flight sim/attack game many years ago on my Quadra 650 w/ 3 screens. It was great. The main screen showed the front view. The left screen showed the left view, and I think you can work out what the right screen showed =-) Now... apply that to FPS (and give me the motion sensors like in Marathon), and I might get interested in that genre again.

Re:My thoughts...

[Glonoinha]

There was actually a way to get the original Doom to do this. It took three machines, each with a single monitor, networked, to do it - but it could be done.
Or so I heard. I never actually saw it working.

Re:My thoughts...

[TXG1112]

I've always wanted an RTS that supported multiple monitors, and it would only require two. Game area on one screen, and map, unit descriptions, menu items, etc. on the other.

DS

[tepples]

Do you think that the games you normally play will be significantly enhanced by the use of multiple monitors, or is one enough?

Just ask any Nintendo DS fanboy ;-)

games list

[uzusan]

matrox has a list of games that support mutliple monitor modes:

http://www.matrox.com/mga/3d_gaming/surrgame.cfm

Re:games list

[FlamingLaird]

This is support for multiple monitors via the Matrox Parhelia card. The interesting thing about the Matrox is that it treats multiple monitors as one large monitor. Say you had three 1024x786 native panels plugged into it... the operating system (and games) thought it was one large monitor with 3072x768 resolution. This meant that all a game had to do to support multiple monitors was offer support for large weird resolutions, which is fairly easy to do in a totally 3d game. Unfortunatly the Parhelia is several years old, and an order of magnitude behind Nvidia and ATI in terms of fill rate.

When you plug multiple monitors into a new Nvidia or ATI card (or cards in SLI or Crossfire), they actually show up to the OS as additional monitors. This is actually the perfered behaviour because it lets you use monitors with different resolutions and sizes together and in non-traditional arangements. Unfortunatly, it means that actual multiple monitor support has to be specifically coded into games.

As far as actual support afaik the only game that offers REAL multiple monitor support is MS FlightSim '98 and above. I'm sure there are others out there either natively or through mods, and I'd be interested to hear about them.

Eyes behind my back

[biocute]

I wouldn't mind having a EBMB feature where a secondary monitor will who/what's behind me.

I think any game will benefit from such setup, like RPG/Simulation/RTS/FPS won't hurt with dedicated displays for "stats" and "field".

Multiple Monitors

[ryanmetcalf]

What if PC's were able to make the use of multiple monitors, like Nintendo DS does? I'd love for an extra screen to keep mini-map, server rank, ammo counts, etc on an always displayed screen. No more bringing it up on your main screen

Female gamers.

[Onan]

So have this vague memory of a study done a few years ago. (Far too vague to be able to cite, sorry.) It was examining the "spacial" navigation skills of people in a rendered 3D environment, ala FPS games.

One of the surprising results was that women tested had much more difficulty learning the layout of complex spaces, and avoiding getting lost--when using a 4:3 display. But when a wider aspect ratio display was used (giving more gestalt context, one assumes), not only did testees of both genders do better, but this disparity disappeared.

Previous studies have shown that men and women tend to handle navigation differently, so this is not totally implausible. (And no, I'm not referring to men-asking-for-directions jokes. It seems that men tend to rely more on distance and direction, and women tend to rely more on landmarks.)

So this seems to suggest that not only is a three-across setup a great win for all gamers, but that it might be an interesting tool for narrowing the gender gap.

Re:Female gamers.

[Anonymous Coward]

The study that parent is referring to:

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn3628

Desktop for the other monitor

[Spazmania]

Hell, I'd settle for a game that lets me keep a desktop live on the other monitor so I can use IM and other apps at the same time without needing a second PC.

Re:Desktop for the other monitor

[jbarlow]

City of Heroes/Villians does this great. I've got two 19" LCDs, and when in CoH/V, as long as I'm not mouse-looking, zipping over to the other screen for anything is super-easy. The graphics blip for a moment, but if you're paying attention to multiple apps anyway, that should be fine.

Also, IIRC, every Blizzard game I've played pulls off screen-switching just fine. The caveat is that they basically pause, but continue to use every free cycle while task-switched out.

Anyway. That's all for now.

Re:Desktop for the other monitor

[Kesch]

Currently I use a two monitor setup with WoW on one screen and Slashdot on the other. It actually works great that you can set the game to be windowed and maximized so it looks the same as full screen, but you can move your mouse over to the second screen. Of course, I'm guessing you are using linux because I know that the second monitor on linux will black out when playing games like doom. I don't know how to fix that.

XBOX Forza

[jasko]

If I recall correctly, Forza Motorsport on the original XBOX can be set up in a three-system, three-monitor mode. And I think a trio of XBOXEN and decent TVs will set you back a lot less than high-powered gaming rigs and monitors.

Supposed to be a good racing game, too.

Re:XBOX Forza

[wolrahnaes]

It works with quite a few monitors actually. At a LAN party a while back I hooked up 6 Xboxes on 5 TVs. The front screen had a second machine running rear view in PIP and there were two off to each side. We were trying to get a 7th box in there to run a spectator-cam view, but we ran out of copies of the game (3 legit copies, only 3 modchipped xboxes, so only 6 could run it).

In the old days...

[Admiral Frosty]

I remeber reading many years ago about this man who did something similar with Descent. At the time, Descent was a game so 3D that it was nausiating to play for some. This man rigged up a headband with mercury switches and mounted a moniter behind him. So when he turned his head, the screens would switch to the rear view. Talk about sensery intergration!

Re:In the old days...

[meringuoid]

(which newbies might call downwards, relatively, since you're upside down, but any proper Descent3 pilot always knows the real up from down).

Easy. The enemy's gate is down.

Problems with games on a dual head system

[jafuser]

Over the past year or so, I've had a few minor problems playing games on my dual-head setup. My main objective was to have my main monitor be for games, while the second would be for IRC (or occasionally, the Web).

The problems I can clearly recall encountering are:

• Fullscreen task switching: For some reason, nearly every game I've tried always minimizes when it loses focus while in fullscreen mode. This is very annoying since I just want to hop over to my IRC window, type something quick, and hop right back to the game. Or maybe I want the game to keep running while I'm chatting, while I wait for something to happen (see next item). Also, usually the minimize/restore process can take a lot of time and doesn't always go smoothly (sometimes the audio volume level is bumped around)
• Automatic pause on defocus: Some games pause when the game loses focus (ie X3). I guess the idea is that if the game isn't the curretly focused application, then you probably want it auto-paused since you might miss something. With two monitors though, i've still got the game filling one whole screen so this is not always true.
• Windowed mode problems: Since fullscreen causes a lot of problems, it seems like the best idea is to try to run things in a maximized window if the game allows it. The problem is that some games won't maximize in windowed mode. For example, EVE Online gives me a list of standard resolutions which I can set the window to, but it can't be resized or maximized. And trying to move the window around is a game in itself since the program likes to grab the mouse pointer when i'm trying to move the window to the top to get it to cover most the screen without cutting off anywhere.
• Glitches on secondary screen: I've often seen games and programs which run fullscreen on my primary monitor will affect the secondary monitor's "bounding box" region for where application windows can be moved to. Usually it causes the left half of the screen to be unusable while the fullscreen game/program is up and running.
• Slowness: I had one game which gave me a really low framerate unless I first disabled my secondary monitor when I started the game; but once the game was running, i could re-enable the second monitor and my framerate was fine.
• The Seam: I haven't really had this problem yet, since I always play games on my primary monitor only; but any even-number of monitors is going to wind up with the problem that the center of your game's action is going to be on the seam between the monitors (unless the game explicitly notices this and compensates). It's too bad there aren't any ATI or nVidia cards which support triple-head monitors so people could do a nice setup with the game action centered on the center monitor.

Generally, I just try to only pick games which will run in windowed mode, and put up with the odd quirks that come up from task switching. I have yet to find a 3D game that runs in windowed mode, properly maximizes, and allows me to task-switch out and back into it without any annoying quirks; or a game which runs fullscreen and doesn't minimize when I task-switch out of it. I just hope as multi-monitor setups become more common, that they will be more thorougly QA-tested in this environment =)