Quote from Doso :

does it support different monitors?

As long as the monitors support the selectable modes, yes. Those are

640x480@60Hz
800x600@60Hz
1024x768@75Hz
1280x1024@60Hz

Obviously it's preferable to use LCDs due to the vertical refresh rate limitation...

Hi all,

I thought I would share my experience with the Matrox TripleHead2Go box, which I received last Friday finally. Focus is not about screenshots and stuff, because I think this is nothing new and has been done by those (few) Parphelia users already, but more about frame rate issues.

I tested the box with RT, GPL, RBR, GTR, LFS, GTL, rF and nKP. Ahead of all others LFS is really brilliant at support for those ultra wide screen modes. It was the only sim, that considers the aspect ratio also for menus and overlays. Different from that in GTR, GTL, rF and nKP those elements suffer from horizontal deformation as they simply scale to the wide screen resolution. The correct 3D rendering, however, was supported by all of them, too. For RBR one need a camera hack utility to get the aspect ratio adjusted, which finally worked as well. For RT and GPL I didn't get it working properly.

The annoying thing about all this triple stuff really is, that ATI cards do not support them in 3D. Unfortunately I've got still an AGP system (P4 3GHz) and to my experience here especially with LFS is, that comparable Nvidia cards are signficantly slower than ATI ones. This is most significant when a lot of opponent cars appear in front. To give you some numbers (benchmark is 3 mins of a multiplayer replay of a UF1 race SO classic, cockpit view with lots of traffic around):

ATI Radeon x800, 1600x1200, AA/AF max: 38/50 (min/average)
NVidia Gainward Golden Sample 7800 GS, AA/AF off (!): 25/33

That Gainward card is praised as the fastest (and most expensive) thing you can get for AGP. Well, it worked quite well for those Dx9 focused 3D benchmarks but I was very disappointed about the poor performance with my favourite sims, so that is why I sent it back before I even got the Matrox box and used an old NVidia Fx 5200 instead for benchmarking:

2400x600, AA/AF off: 29/42
3840x1280, AA/AF off: 11/20

So in SVGA resolution LFS was playable quite well. For all other sims, however, the fps completely sucked, not worth to take any measurements there.

Definitely it's a great experience to race in front of a triple monitor setup, it felt like in cinema in front of a big screen. However, for me the step back in quality and performance was too large so I put the box back into the box and my triple monitor project on hold until I'll upgrade to a more powerful PCIe system in future.

Meanwhile I would be curious about results on faster configs than mine...

Quote from Linsen :

Pool 5: [...] You really have to admire lowgoods' and filur's consistency and cold-bloodedness. They were always within half a second of each other, yet made not the tiniest mistakes. [...]

If you could have seen me in real, you wouldn't talk about cold-bloodedness for sure. Actually I was sweating through all my clothes and did not blink for at least 20 mins when being chased by filur . Definitly one of my most thrilling OLFSL races.

It was pretty tricky to overtake, even when being slightly faster. I tried to do so when Ant was in front of me at the beginning of the race but failed several times until he spinned finally and the two of us filur and me could pass. Then filur had the same problem with me in front. Actually, filur, you could have passed in lap 28 when I made a minor mistake in the chicane and cleared the ideal line in the following turn, but you didn't take the chance... thx for a very clean fight though

One last comment: someone mentioned in the chat that I was trying to overtake after start in the chicane. Sorry, but I cannot agree. I was clearly in front of giant when entering into the turn, also I was keeping my line... there was no reason to touch me. I'm honestly sorry though, that this ended up in a crash for some cars behind.

Most useful information I read in this this forum so far... excellent work!

I like the league as it is, the following would just be my personal preference:

• More of the longer track configs. Especially for the MRT events in South City I find those sprint tracks are too short with only one or two tricky turns.
  
• Distribute events more evenly on car classes. Obviously there are some favorites like FOX, others do not appear at all like FO8.
  
• No rally-cross events (which is the case already for the upcoming season :-). Actually I like rallying, but it's a completely different story (I cover this with RBR). It does not fit into a season focused on track racing.

Quote from BWX232 :

Cool... post some screenshots when you get it set up!

I will do so! Hopefully I'll get it working with RBR also, which is not in the list of supported games though. I remember, however, I once saw a video of RBR running on a triple monitor setup...

Pre-ordered...
Quite expensive though, germans have to pay 350 € at shopmatrox.com

Hmmm... when I was there, the warm-up time was a lot longer than 2-3 minutes and - äh - wasn't it a 6 lap race finally? Anyway, the period between two 4-racers sessions was 45 minutes, that's why I've actually quit before I got a cockpit place, subscription list was too long...

...votes for horns! Simply because I feel a lot better when someone not looking left nor right shoots me off the track and I can see him off with an angry push on my horn while sliding with a destroyed car over the green.

Quote from Frankmd :

... but the reason why you dont see the tyregraphics behave as on tv is because the framerate on a tv is fixed at a low framerate. In lfs the framerate fluctuates, and is also at a very high value ...

No, don't think this has something to do with the frame rate. The difference is, that a rendered frame represents an instant in time while a TV frame represents a period in time due to the exposure time of the camera. So if you snapshot a single frame on TV of a fast spinning tire it does look blured, not so for a computer game. This is also why TV always looks smooth even with 25fps only, while computer games need a lot more for fast movements...

Last edited by lowgoods, Sat, 22 Apr 2006 06:33.

Even when driving 300 km/h one can still catch the letters of the manufacturer on the tires. This feels pretty strange. Maybe some blurry texture could be used instead...

Think I will join that event in Munich coming Saturday. Hopefully the patch will be released on Friday so I can do some practise laps before at home...

Not to forget the Matrox TripleHead2Go launch, which is also scheduled for April... so we can enjoy both the LFS surprise and nKPro on a triple monitor setup along with powerful 3D performance

What about open roof setups? Don't think it has an effect on aero, but at least it could be precalculated (if there is any significant difference at all)...

Quote from PwrSlave :

Pool 3 was something for me lol ...

VIP visit in pool 3, nice to saw you joining the amateurs for a race, PowerSlave . Sorry though, that it didn't went too well for you. I had quite some thrilling distance fight against cyber|owl, who's been around a second behind me all the 35 laps...

Quote from danowat :

How pissed off would you be if you spun on the 1st lap and couldnt reset?

Well, shit happens...

Anyway, when most people want a reset I can perfectly live with it. It's just that I personally would have been happier without... no big deal.

Quote from varjsa-9 :

But isn't it nice to get more than 2 cars over the finish line too?

If one of those two cars is mine... no

But no kidding, I think a lot more people in the league are able to keep 35 laps without spinning. The tune up race is not a good reference, it's meant for test purposes and many people drove beyond there limit... don't think they will do so in the race next sunday.

This is really a pity!
Exactly that would have been the special excitement of this event to drive clean and faultless in order not to get stuck at the wall. Now it will get a hot-lapping character as it was the case in the NASSA tune up race...

Quote from B2B@300 :

... This would be a totally different disgin and electironic package (and most likely more expensive) Historicaly digital signal processing lags behind analog signal processing in its development cycle, so its just probably a matter of time, which probably would be proportional to the demand for the TripleHead2Go

Indeed designing an input interface for DVI, that can handle all those high resolution modes, is quite some tricky and costly as the frequencies involved go beyond 1 GHz. I'm not sure, but I think Matrox don't have one yet in any of their products and I doubt it would be profitable to design one just for this little non-mass market, low-cost box... so I don't expect a DVI version, at least not from Matrox, but let's see, maybe I'm wrong.

Was really a pleasure to watch this! Well done Vykos, convincing and bright comments, you got precisely to the points that make this game so thrilling and special...

Quote from danowat :

It seems to affect a particular combination, that being an Intel HT P4, or a dual core AMD, and an ATI card.

Thanks for the info. This matches my setup exactly. So I'll stay with the 5.11 drivers for the time being...

As the problem has been found in the driver code, can it be specified in more detail what sort of hardware is affected? Is it all ATI cards in general? Thx...

Quote from tristancliffe :

Indeedy - apparent the PMB is Progressive Modulated Braking. The pedal gets much harder the further you press it. It's not clear from their websites or reviews I've found if the pressure or the distance is measured. At the end of the day, it's not necessarily how you measure it, it's the final outcome. (this is me justifying the expense of ECCI when a better option might have presented itself).

I'm happy to own a set of those ECCI pedals. Indeed, they do not have a force sensor but a second spring, that is compressed in a non-linear way in correlation to the pedal range. Anyway, it feels very very good! Of course I haven't tried out a system yet that is using a force sensor as proposed in this thread, so might be that this feels even better...

It's not exactly what you want and a bit laborios, but what I do to achieve this is to keep 'c' pressed (clutch) while switching back to N using the paddles. By this I can skip the lower gears for example when running out of fuel at high speed in order to reach the finish line by coasting...

I know, it's not the point. Would be nice if it worked with the position list as well for reasons as stated above...