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Triple Monitor Solutions From AMD, Nvidia Face Off
New submitter Dputiger writes "Nvidia's latest GTX Titan puts a renewed focus on multi-monitor gaming, but how does it compare against other cards at half the price? 'The games we tested fall into two general camps. Arkham City, DiRT 3, and Serious Sam: BFE are all absolutely playable on the GTX 680 or 7970 in a single-card configuration, even with detail settings turned all the way up. Shogun 2, Metro 2033, and Crysis 3 aren’t. In Shogun 2 and Metro 2033, however, the Titan maintains a playable frame rate at High Detail when the other two cards are stumbling and stuttering. Crysis 3 was the one exception — in that game, all three cards remained playable at High Detail, and dropped below that mark once we increased to Very High Detail and added 4x SMAA.' Field of view adjustments, the impact of bezels, and single-card performance at multiple detail levels are all covered, as is the price of multi-screen setups."
I've had a triple monitor setup for years, but I've never actually gamed on it. This article makes me want to give it a shot. Unfortunately, my machine is kind of low powered (Core 2 Duo E6???, Radeon 5770) for the more recent games that could actually use triple monitors, so maybe not. And, I hate most recent games. I wonder how Defense Grid would look on three.
I mean, obviously I would if I COULD, but really I'd see myself using one monitor for gaming, another monitor for a movie, and the other for live streaming porn!
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
"Peripheral vision."
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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They already make HD wrap-around screens for that.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
All this does is increase the viewing angle of a flat display. There is no actual true wraparound, where you can look to the side and see things off to your side*. The wider it is, the more stretched the image, and if you angle the side monitors toward you, the in-game angles are all misaligned.
Have we forgotten Doom and MS Flight Sim as to how to actually do multi-monitor properly? Each display should be rendered from a different angle, allowing real viewing in multiple directions, giving you selected projections of an actual sphere of vision.
* = Due to the nature of 3rd person cameras there's a bit of this in some of those scenarios, but even that partial effect is completely lost in things like driving games and any 1st person camera perspectives.
I bought three monitors a couple years ago for iRacing, as it is almost a requirement in that sim for a good view. (They even have a built-in FOV calculator to give you a 1:1 life-size view.) I wouldn't want to race without it. I had not given any thought at all to how it would be in anything else, but I've found it's quite nice to have in all kinds of games. I've got an older system, an AMD Phenom II running at 3.8 GHz and a pair of GTX 480 cards in SLI, and for most things it is fast enough, but not everything. I'd definitely like to upgrade to one of the recent Intel CPUs and perhaps 680 cards.
I think a big bottleneck with triple screens is how much RAM they put on the video cards. It doesn't seem to be as much of an issue with single screen setups, but once you triple the resolution you require that much more for the framebuffer data, and that obviously takes away from storage for all the other data. It definitely takes its toll. Not to mention the horsepower required to crunch all the extra pixels. It is definitely worth it, in my opinion.
PowerColor makes video cards based on Radeon chipsets that support 3+ monitors and have been making them for a long time. They weren't really mentioned in the article but worth looking into.
http://interserver.net/
I couldn't agree more. Years ago, I'd have killed for what is possible to buy today, just for flight sims, especially MS Flight sim, the only reason to buy Windows AFAIK. Now investing in hardware just to run MS Flight sim seems like a hopeless 'requirement' when spec'ing hardware.
For everything else, especially actual work stuff, 2x 27" monitors or less seems much more realistic. Not to mention K.I.S.S. principles being best, especially if the rig does double-duty as an actual workstation.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
It seems these GPUs can also support 4K single monitor gaming quite nicely even if gaming quality 4K displays aren't quite ready for prime time yet.
I was a pioneer/advocate/addict of multimonitor gaming. To the point where back in the day when I got a deal on 22" Nokia high-res CRTs I bought three. I had my second on the desk and was going back for the third when I looked back and realized my desk was buckling under the weight of just two! After reinforcing the desk, XP era, it became obvious that multimonitor gaming was broken, because the resolution wasn't there to support it. What's the point of running 3 monitors if it's not 3 TIMES your normal res, which at 1920x1200, took quite a while to arrive. So I shelved it for a while.
Eventually, tech caught up and it struck me about 6 months back that I had the parts lying around to 5760x1200 the 24's and call it good. So I bought the adapter for #3, hooked it all up and prepared to rejoice. And there wasn't much rejoicing. Games just don't work.
What triple screen gaming even means is up for debate, but fundamentally, I think we all expect the extra screens to be more views on reality. More FOV, more of what we really see from our eyes in real life - wrap around video. Well, except it's NOT just FOV. Games need to be designed for it, and they're not.
I spent days running EVERY title I could. Widescreengaming.net is a huge help for this. But in the end, the views in everything from Quake to Rage are unbearably broken. The best results by far were from Dungeons & Dragons Online, which looked almost good enough to keep, but Unreal Engine titles, ID engine titles, everything else - nothing worked without horrible distortion. At last I fired up Civ IV, thinking isometric viewing at least would work; not a chance, instead of seeing the world (wrapped!) in glorious high-res, I got a screen where the men in cities 75% were as tall as the screen, and a small fraction of the world was displayed!
DDO actually was pretty hot, but frankly the only truly multimonitor title may be Flight Simulator. And that's almost cheating - they just have more than one screen to display. But Eyefinity et al is DOA if there aren't titles that support it. Otherwise it's about as effective as piling all your speakers on top of each other and playing Master & Commander in 5.1. Enjoy the mud.
"Why jerk my neck around like a goon when Tyranno-Vision decides what I should look at?"
Well, that's not an apples to apples comparison but peripheral vision covers it. In a racing game, I can see who's moving up on my side. In a shooter, it's like taking off blinders. Same reasons you like it for flight simulators.
Thirteen plus years ago you could do it with a couple of Matrox cards.
NVIDIA Surround and AMD Eyefinity are both fairly clumsy technologies; both approaches merge two or more physical screens into one logical screen. Whilst active the spanned mode results in oddities like a stretched task bar, the inability to properly borderless maximise windows to one monitor only, and things such as full-screen movies which would usually fit on one monitor with black bars above/below will instead stretch across the three and look terrible.
The best approach is to get 3D software to support three screens without crutches like Eyefinity. I've seen it with some mild success in Supreme Commander 2 and OpenSceneGraph, but it looks like it'll be down to graphics API and game developers to support multi-monitors properly. Given the only groups of people that seem to be really interested in multi-monitor solutions are the simulation crew (driving or otherwise), it doesn't seem like the available support is going to improve any time soon.
Actually multimontior support is generally broken across most applications not just games.
Run a full screen flash video on one and see what happens when you click your mouse on one of the other ones.
Most apps that run in full screen break under multi-montor setups. they just can't be used that way.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I'm running three monitors. I play EVE Online and BF3 mainly. The downside to my setup is that I have two flatscreens and an old CRT. I use the CRT for movies, a 24" for my browser, and a 27" as my gaming screen. I tried setting up EVE on two monitors and I hated it. I couldn't imagine playing an FPS with it. Too much area to cover with your eye. I simply like to view my screen without having to turn my head. Having my browser, PC Stats / Movie, and my game in each in their own dedicated screen is awesome.
I assume you don't watch movies either, for the same reason? They're only 24 fps.
Watch for Penguins, they eat Apples and throw rocks at Windows.
Run a full screen flash video on one and see what happens when you click your mouse on one of the other ones.
Step 1, install Office 97
Step 2, launch any app and drag it to the second display on an XP machine
Step 3, laugh as it is revealed that Microsoft can't develop working software for their own OS, when the pop-up menus pop-up on the primary display.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You must not actually work with any flight sims or real FPS games with independent cameras for each section of the FOV. These work just fine. And no, you don't have to sit right up against the screen. You just need a monitor wide enough.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
PC's are running behind mobile and tablets these days so all AMD and nVidia are doing is trying to be king of #3. Considering how little interest there is for multi-monitor gaming, this is even a feeble contest.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
A $1000 video card is a little bit better at playing games than a $400 video card? Blasphemy! Oh, my fragile little world is crumbling before my very eyes.
If we colonize Mars, it won't be the World Wide Web anymore. UWW?
Modern? None. Doom and Quake have modifications that allow for it, as I think Doom 3.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I have both Eyefinity and Surround setups, both running at 5760 x 1080 resolution, using triple monitor setup. A few games don't support mulit-monitor (Unreal 3 Engine based games) but others (Source // Valve games), Battlefield franchise, Crytek engines (Crysis), Civ 5, Dirt 3, Trackmania Canyons, EuroTruck Simulator 2, Take on Helicopters, Defense Grid, Assassin's Creed franchise, etc do. More and more of my games are supporting Eyefinity/Surround setups. When a game doesn't support the Eyefinity / Surround I simply right click / disable the multi-monitor before playing the game (or simply launch game and outside monitors go dark).
As long as I have the financial means I will be using 3 or more monitor setups.
um office 97 is 16 years out of date
at least use
run iTunes, play anything full screen, video, visualizer, etc watch all other monitors fade
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
It isn't just 97. At work I have 3 monitor setup. Office 2010. I have an excel spreadsheet with forms written in VBA code. It is any guess which monitor it will pop up, under, over around. It has no relation to which monitor is 1, which the spreadsheet is on, if the spreadsheet is on two, maximized (max goes to just one). So yeah, it is broken.
Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events. - Albert Einstein
Office 2010 opens on the monitor and size it was when last opened. I do it all the time with remote desktop, bouncing between one and two monitor setups.
However that said. it takes registry hacks to break Office 2010 out of the archaic every window must open inside of the master window mentality. It really sucks trying to run two spread sheets side by side on two different monitors and still be able to see background apps.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I'm talking about forms loading when excel is all ready open.
Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events. - Albert Einstein