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Matrox TripleHead Triples Your Viewing Pleasure
mikemuch writes "Matrox brings one of the coolest features of its Parhelia graphics card--the ability to drive three monitors--to any setup through a little VGA box. ExtremeTech has a review of the Matrox TripleHead2Go up. The review is pretty positive, the immersion in games and extra productivity area are a definite boon, but there are drawbacks: First of all, three hi-res monitors will set you back some serious dough, also there are some compatibility issues with ATI GPUs, and you may get a little vertigo while surrounded by your WoW world."
Once you've flown just about any Flight Sim on multiple monitors, it's hard to go back to just one. Two is good, but there is the problem of having to deal with the divider in the screen, or living with your view being offset from center. I usually opt to fly with one monitor just offset from the center, and the other looking out one window. Three is much better, because you can center the main monitor and use the two on the sides for side window views. I've used multiple video cards and a product called WidevieW to achieve this. WidevieW allows Microsoft Flight Sim to run on multiple machines in Slave mode so that one machine controls the plane and the others just handle the view.
The difference it makes in flying sims is too big to describe. I know guys who have opted for many more monitors (13 or 19 even) to get a full surround view. I think that 3 or 5 would be gracious plenty.
The cost is not that big a deal, either. Fifteen or seventeen inch flat panel monitors are available for less than $250 each, and can be used on other systems if the multi-monitor setup is not needed all the time.
If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much space.
Get yourself 3 projectors and a huge wrap-around screen (hell, white cardboard). VGA is fine on projectors, and you can blend the edges.
Talk about immersive... imagine a driving game on that.
You'll be reducing individual screen resolutions, color depth, or both to account for the memory shortfall on the video card. Just because you can connect a big screen to the card doesn't necessarily mean the card has enough memory to feed it all in 24-bit color.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
I just bought 3 AOC 19" lcd's from newegg for $200.00US each. they look as good as my expensive Viewsonics and have a better warranty. Couple that with a dirt cheap Nvidia 6600AGP and a 6600PCI and I have 4 head capability with greater resolution capabilities for much much less while able to play any game at full res. (Yes even doom3/quake4 is smooth at full res) Matrox should give up and stay in the industrial 4-12 head video cards and not try to touch the home or media markets.. they simply can not compete.
Problem is that no ID games have been able to do multi-head cince Quake III had a hack to support it.
And flight sim's have sucked for decades because support for multiple PC's in MS flight sim has been missing for a really long time. (I had 4 monitors + 1 for instruments in MS flight sim 4.0 back in college... it was fun abusing the Computer lab!)
I would love to see games or mods use just a second monitor for stats, top down map, etc... but nobody is doing it as less than 10% have more than 1 monitor on their computer... Some games (C&C generals) have major control probmens with multiple monitors because the mouse does not stop at the border and they are using a 1 pixel wide b order for scrolling.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.