Amy mulit-monitor gaming in Nvidia or ATI future?

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wazooda

Weaksauce
Joined
Jul 8, 2002
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As monitor prices continue to plummet, one would hope that either Nvidia or ATI would offer a product with the Surround Gaming features (i.e. 3 monitor gameplay) of the horribly slow Matrox Parhelia.

Any word on this?

If not... any way to do it without a Parhelia?

Thanks!

Wazoo
 
There really isnt much of a demand for it, so I dont see it being implemented anytime soon. :(
 
While my Parhelia isn't as fast as some other cards, it's FAR from "horribly slow". It's run every game I've thrown at it with perfectly acceptable frame rates, and Surround Gaming well more than makes up for some visually undectable FPS.
 
Originally posted by Kruzin
While my Parhelia isn't as fast as some other cards, it's FAR from "horribly slow". It's run every game I've thrown at it with perfectly acceptable frame rates, and Surround Gaming well more than makes up for some visually undectable FPS.
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Well... this is good to hear. I have been considering it for some "legacy" games as I have seen triple headed gaming and it is an absolute blow away!

However, although I am far from a framerate whore, I look at the comparisons over at Tom's Hardware and see that the Parhelia was averaging 31 fps on Call of Duty versus 120 fps on the latest ATI 9800 Pro.

Now, again, if it never went below 31 fps.... GREAT! However... that is obviously an average and thus when things get a bit hairy.. you'll start to suffer.

Primarily.... I'm looking for simulation and First-person shooter gameplay....

BTW - Do you find that your framerates improve as you've upgraded your CPU etc. (assuming you have)?

Wazoo
 
Originally posted by Confused_User
There really isnt much of a demand for it, so I dont see it being implemented anytime soon. :(
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All things being equal.... it is obviously a smaller market than the game market as a whole. However.... one could make a similar argument for Dual heads on a video card and yet, both Nvid and ATI produce them.

One would think it would not be a big stretch to make three heads.....

Wazoo
 
Personally, I'd just be happy if they would make use of widescreen or something. I hate how the angle of vision is so low in games. IRL I can see far more than just a 90 degree angle in front of me. I think a game with periphrial (spelling?) vision would be pretty cool. Presumably if "surround monitor" gaming ever happens, this kind of thing might finally be implemented. Anyway, I suppose the biggest problem right now is that video cards still have a very long way to go.

Hrm, maybe three cards combined with a SLI like interface like the Voodoo2s? Heh, who knows.

Just imagine though. Playing UT2003 and they think they are sneaking up on you, but you can see them coming in your periphrial vision. d-:
 
Originally posted by Nazo
Personally, I'd just be happy if they would make use of widescreen or something. I hate how the angle of vision is so low in games. IRL I can see far more than just a 90 degree angle in front of me. I think a game with periphrial (spelling?) vision would be pretty cool. Presumably if "surround monitor" gaming ever happens, this kind of thing might finally be implemented. Anyway, I suppose the biggest problem right now is that video cards still have a very long way to go.

Hrm, maybe three cards combined with a SLI like interface like the Voodoo2s? Heh, who knows.

Just imagine though. Playing UT2003 and they think they are sneaking up on you, but you can see them coming in your periphrial vision. d-:
Click to expand...

You can currently play UT2003 on the Parahelia card and see from your peripheral vision. Problem is (or was) framerates.

I saw it demonstrated at E3 in 2002 on a Parhelia. They had it set up with three projectors. It was AMAZING.... HOWEVER... it slowed to a crawl when things got hairy.

Now that was 1.5 years ago.... so maybe the increase in CPU power has changed this problem.....

Wazoo
 
Can I have your card? d-:

Hehe, oh well, I'm glad to know that there is some progress in this area after all. And it's not CPU power, it's GPU power. It would have to be rendering a lot more and doing a lot more math and everything, whereas the part on the CPU is physics and stuff that goes on around you regardless of if you see it or not. Video cards are definitely more powerful, but I suspect it would still be pretty hard to get very good framerates with good quality settings.

Who knows, maybe some day video cards will be so powerful that one can play Doom3 surrounded by monitors and see those demons running up at them from all directions at once d-:
 
it would be awsome to have the option to run games at a 8:3 ratio for correct proportions over 2 moniters. As someone said, i too have seen multimod screens from ut2003 at least, but they were badly streched.
 
Originally posted by wazooda
Well... this is good to hear. I have been considering it for some "legacy" games as I have seen triple headed gaming and it is an absolute blow away!

However, although I am far from a framerate whore, I look at the comparisons over at Tom's Hardware and see that the Parhelia was averaging 31 fps on Call of Duty versus 120 fps on the latest ATI 9800 Pro.

Now, again, if it never went below 31 fps.... GREAT! However... that is obviously an average and thus when things get a bit hairy.. you'll start to suffer.

Primarily.... I'm looking for simulation and First-person shooter gameplay....

BTW - Do you find that your framerates improve as you've upgraded your CPU etc. (assuming you have)?

Wazoo
Click to expand...

When Tom's tested the Parhelia, their results where highly contested, and proved wrong at the MURC forums. The tester used a very early set of drivers, and refused to retest, or do any tweaking. Tom's is (or at least at that time was) sponsored by nVidia, so they had a vested interest in making their sponsor's product look good, and the competition look bad. AFAIK, they have never updated their results with current drivers, or any of the tweaking suggestions we gave them.

As far as improvements with upgraded CPUs, I have only upgraded once, and that was from a P3-700 to an XP2000+, and yes, everything was much faster ;). Other users report that the card scales well up to 2.5-3Ghz.

I can tell you that with my rig (2000+, 1gig pc2700), I am able to play most shooters at 3072x768 with 16xFAA. A couple I have had to turn off FAA or drop to 2400x600 (which still looks great with Matrox's FAA). While I don't get into flight sims myself, I do know that Parhelia has become very popular with those who do.
 
It did occur to me to wonder what would happen if you got one of those new widescreen monitors and set an appropriate 16:9 video resolution rather than 4:3. It might be a cheaper way to get a vague hint of what such things feel like since nearly no games support multiple monitors/displays. Would it just stretch it like you were talking about, or would it maybe be able to handle it?

Of course, a widescreen display still couldn't cover but a bit of the range of what someone can actually see. Two monitors would beat that for sure except that at least widescreen with a 16:9 resolution would be only one display instead of two. Besides, you really need some kind of setup where it curves around you and you actually end up seeing the periphrial stuff in your own periphrial vision.
 
Originally posted by cloaked
it would be awsome to have the option to run games at a 8:3 ratio for correct proportions over 2 moniters. As someone said, i too have seen multimod screens from ut2003 at least, but they were badly streched.
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This can be done with any dualhead video card that can do stretched mode (as oppsed to independant), provided the game supports adjustable FOV (which UT2003 does), and you know the correct console/.cfg commands to adjust the FOV.
The big problem with this, though, is that your crosshairs, and most of the action get centered between the screens, making it very hard to aim with a 2-3" gap from the monitor bezels.
 
So THAT is what FOV is... Hehe, I suspected it might be, so I just set it as high as it went and never bothered even to compare with the lower numbers.

Oh well, I guess that kind of thing works best with 3+ monitors then, huh.
 
I've got one. It's not all that great in UT2003, but it looks gorgeous in surround w/ the settings cranked up. Morrowind in surround is also pretty cool, but also too slow. There's a hack out there to enable it. It started out as a dynamic settings adjuster to keep your framerates up, but grew all sorts of features. It'll also let you play in widescreen if you've got a 16x9 monitor or have it hooked up to an HD TV.

I've got it hooked up to basically a dual 2800+ (modded 2500+s @ 15x140), and it's not much faster in UT2003 than the dual P3 1.0 I had it in when I got UT2K3. Staying above 30fps on my system w/ 16x FAA on (another feature I wish ATI & NV would buy, license, steal, or clone...) requires 800x600.

Personally I think we should all just start pestering ATI and NVidia for a surround capable high-end card. Whichever one makes one gets my money. All they really have to do is add driver support and allow an external ramdac to be used along w/ the built-in ones on the chip. It might even be possible to implement on an existing Radeon or GeForce core. From a technical point of view three screens isn't any different from 2 in streached mode.
 
Originally posted by zandor

Personally I think we should all just start pestering ATI and NVidia for a surround capable high-end card. Whichever one makes one gets my money. All they really have to do is add driver support and allow an external ramdac to be used along w/ the built-in ones on the chip. It might even be possible to implement on an existing Radeon or GeForce core. From a technical point of view three screens isn't any different from 2 in streached mode.
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I agree. In fact, I emailed them both.

Whether it will have any effect is another story.... but can't hurt!

Wazoo
 
Originally posted by Kruzin
When Tom's tested the Parhelia, their results where highly contested, and proved wrong at the MURC forums. The tester used a very early set of drivers, and refused to retest, or do any tweaking. Tom's is (or at least at that time was) sponsored by nVidia, so they had a vested interest in making their sponsor's product look good, and the competition look bad. AFAIK, they have never updated their results with current drivers, or any of the tweaking suggestions we gave them.

As far as improvements with upgraded CPUs, I have only upgraded once, and that was from a P3-700 to an XP2000+, and yes, everything was much faster ;). Other users report that the card scales well up to 2.5-3Ghz.

I can tell you that with my rig (2000+, 1gig pc2700), I am able to play most shooters at 3072x768 with 16xFAA. A couple I have had to turn off FAA or drop to 2400x600 (which still looks great with Matrox's FAA). While I don't get into flight sims myself, I do know that Parhelia has become very popular with those who do.
Click to expand...

Interesting stuff. My two "killer apps" are Falcon4 and LoMAC. I'm hoping the new F4 version due out soon will be hackable to do surround gaming with the Parhelia as it is supposed to be DX8 compatible. I think LOMAC devs themselves are making it compatible.

How about displays? I must admit, I'm seriously considering this one:

http://www.go-l.com/monitors/cinerama/features/index.htm

I appreciate your views on all this Kruzin, as I do not know anyone with a Parhelia and appreciate objective observations.

Regards,

Wazoo
 
from somone that has a Parhelia its great never slows down..
play all the games i have in 3 screens with battlefield, ut2003 , racing and all
IMAGE48.JPG
 
Originally posted by Firebomb
from somone that has a Parhelia its great never slows down..
play all the games i have in 3 screens with battlefield, ut2003 , racing and all
Click to expand...

You have any experience with flight simming? I'm trying to get a guage for how well the card works with them....

Wazoo
 
only flight sim i played is combat flight sim 2003 and it did a great job with it

and with the new drivers the parhelia has there alot better now
the bench'e that u see are with the old drivers, i though they same thing and said i will give it a try and i am glad i did
 
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