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Author Topic: Triple-Monitor Gaming  (Read 13079 times)

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Offline Spanky

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Triple-Monitor Gaming
« on: Tuesday, May 25, 2010, 00:17:41 AM »
New Stuff:
Well since I found out that with the 3328x1024 setup, my two side monitors had to be set to 1280x1024 in the control panel which isn't their native resolution so it looks like shit, I dismantled the setup. A few weeks later, I found a 20" monitor that matches the size of my Acer's perfectly for $10. Only hitch was that there wasn't a power board inside. I searched online, eBay had one that sold for $80 or so and that seemed to be the last one on Earth. Then I posted on eBay's Want It Now page and more weeks went by until this guy over in China said there was one locally for sale. He wanted to mark up the price and make me pay more than what it's worth. I e-mailed Ryan (guy who owns Maverick Audio in China) and he purchased the item for me and boxed it up with the TubeMagic A1 he was going to send me anyway. Big thanks to him. Got it, popped it in and it works (with some kinda issue that goes away within 10 seconds of startup) so I have a 20" monitor that I paid $40 for. Not bad. I got it going and now have a very nice 5040x1050 resolution for games. Here's a little bit of what it looks like:

Video:

- NEW

Pictures:
None yet.

5040x1050 Screenshots: (click for a larger image)
DiRT2:









BF2: (First one is with corrected FOV. Too much for the game to draw) (Surprisingly I get worse FPS on BF2 than I do on DiRT2, I saw it dipped down to 11 once)





AA 2.5:







OLD SECTION:

Earlier today I scored a 8600GT locally and thought I would try something out that I've been wanting to so I popped it in my rig, got some 1337 software going and after several minutes of configuring, it looked a little something like this:

Old Pictures:



Old Videos:


I'm a little ashamed to say that the middle monitor is a 15" that runs a whopping 1024x768 but today, I found out that the screen rotates! So the 1024 vertical matches closer with my main monitors. All together it runs 3328x1024. I must say it's a unique experience that you can't really describe. I just might keep this setup :)
« Last Edit: Sunday, August 22, 2010, 01:47:39 AM by Spanky »
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Offline BlueBlaster

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Re: Triple-Monitor Gaming
« Reply #1 on: Tuesday, May 25, 2010, 01:59:29 AM »
Thats really really cool!!!!!

What 1337 software you use?



Offline Spanky

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Re: Triple-Monitor Gaming
« Reply #2 on: Tuesday, May 25, 2010, 03:03:41 AM »
http://www.kegetys.net/SoftTH/

It's a little outdated and a bit quirky but it sure beats buying one of those hardware solutions. http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/gxm/th2go/

In some ways it's better like it works with any size monitors you can think up. Down side is that to make DiRT 2 run, I have to change the left & right monitors from their native resolution of 1680x1050 to 1280x1024 to match the middle one. If I fail to do this, only the center monitor is used and the game defaults to the center monitor's resolution which you have to go change in the xml settings. I wouldn't have to do this if I had 3 monitors with the same resolution. Also, I've noticed Fraps can be quirky but it still works for me (displays on the left and right monitors, but not the center). Lastly, EVGA Precision has a nifty overlay that can display info such as GPU load, memory usage and temps but the hook it uses doesn't play well with the hook SoftTH uses and thus crashes the game if EVGA Precision's OSD is running.

Anyway, that's just 1 game, I have yet to try others. My desk is a mess since this is pretty much temporary but I'm liking it a lot. Tomorrow I may clean up and make a video to YouTube :)

*EDIT*
Hmmm, it appears ALT+TAB behaves different too. With SoftTH, you can minimize but maximizing will crash as I just found out.
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Offline Spanky

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Re: Triple-Monitor Gaming
« Reply #3 on: Tuesday, May 25, 2010, 20:01:05 PM »
Here's a video of what it looks like:
It's like shaving your pubes to make your junk look bigger.
Might look bigger, but it aint.....

Offline Alex

Re: Triple-Monitor Gaming
« Reply #4 on: Tuesday, May 25, 2010, 20:04:21 PM »
That looks really cool. I did notice that the brightness varied from screen to screen which would drive me crazy to be honest. But it still looks sweet as hell.

Offline Spanky

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Re: Triple-Monitor Gaming
« Reply #5 on: Tuesday, May 25, 2010, 20:44:20 PM »
Heh, yea. The left and right monitors are the same brand and model yet even set to the same settings, their color and brightness are off. The middle one is really red and I have yet to tweak it.
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Offline Spanky

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Re: Triple-Monitor Gaming
« Reply #6 on: Wednesday, May 26, 2010, 23:02:00 PM »
For anyone following, I have decided to undo my setup. It's really great but to make it easy and enjoyable, you need 3 monitors the same size all running at their native resolution. My 2 side ones had to be ran at a different ratio which stretched things out. I will definitely hook this back up when I get another monitor.
It's like shaving your pubes to make your junk look bigger.
Might look bigger, but it aint.....

bluechill

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Re: Triple-Monitor Gaming
« Reply #7 on: Thursday, May 27, 2010, 19:38:01 PM »
Well, why not try hooking up 8 monitors together :)

Over at U of M last summer I got the chance to hijack an entire computer lab so I had some fun playing CSS with 15 monitors, it was really actually quite fun after some hacks here and there.  I managed to get a 360 degree view working, it was sweet.  Too bad I didn't take a picture :P.  The other 30 computers were rendering a movie of mine :)

Offline Spanky

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Re: Triple-Monitor Gaming
« Reply #8 on: Thursday, May 27, 2010, 19:57:13 PM »
Uh huh. 15 seems pointless, 8 does as well. With that many monitors (unless they're like 640x480 10" or something) you would have a hell of a lot of FOV and stretching to account for not to mention how to power that many (not mains, but graphics). I think 3 is a good magic number since the center of your view won't have a bezel running through it and 2 are good for peripherals. Counter-Strike is an incredibly easy game to run in terms of graphics but what about games compiled after 2004? I personally prefer quality settings on high with full anti-aliasing before worrying about FPS and to do that with 1 monitor on a new game can be pretty tolling but to do that on 3 with say, 1680x1050 a piece would be 5040x1050, that's a hell of a lot of pixels to power.

Anyway, I don't believe you, much like 99% of the other crap you say. You would have to be running 3 of these: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121371&cm_re=5870-_-14-121-371-_-Product Which, under load, would consume over 1kw of power so it's pretty easy to say that you would need a couple of 15amp breakers just to run the setup. As far as I know, Eyefinity would be the ONLY way to run that many monitors while in a game unless you were using XP with spanning and 8 or so traditional graphics cards and that's quite a stretch.
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Offline BlueBlaster

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Re: Triple-Monitor Gaming
« Reply #9 on: Thursday, May 27, 2010, 22:22:02 PM »
He probably got a way to network the power together into the 15 monitors. Plus considering its a university computer lab, I wouldnt be surprised if there was extra hardware peripherals to make multi-monitor setups a hell of a lot easier. I know we've got a couple of those over here.



bluechill

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Re: Triple-Monitor Gaming
« Reply #10 on: Thursday, May 27, 2010, 22:43:09 PM »
the monitor resolution was 1920x1080 each :) it was so slow at first that I eventually had to hook up 4 computers together to get it to run at 30fps.  That was fun.  Anyways blueblaster your sorta right, I did something similar.

Offline Spanky

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Re: Triple-Monitor Gaming
« Reply #11 on: Thursday, May 27, 2010, 23:50:26 PM »
bluechill, what's it like to be a chronic bullshitter?
It's like shaving your pubes to make your junk look bigger.
Might look bigger, but it aint.....

Offline Knight

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Re: Triple-Monitor Gaming
« Reply #12 on: Friday, May 28, 2010, 10:47:11 AM »
imagine the porn

Gaming was a side effect...
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http://kodyhungenberg.500px.com[/url]

Offline Spanky

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Re: Triple-Monitor Gaming
« Reply #13 on: Friday, May 28, 2010, 13:26:42 PM »
It's like shaving your pubes to make your junk look bigger.
Might look bigger, but it aint.....

bluechill

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Re: Triple-Monitor Gaming
« Reply #14 on: Friday, May 28, 2010, 16:36:56 PM »
I'm not bull shitting Spanky.   But there is no easy way to give evidence either, just accept what you want, I'm just saying that what I said, 15 monitors hooked up to 4 computers is something I did last summer.

 

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