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...
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...
(not that i will be buying this thing, i don't even have a single nice screen, let alone 2).