That sounds great! I look forward to hearing from any LFS person who tries it out!

I guess the user needs to install a driver for the device, and that would be a driver for a "monitor" as this device would appear to the computer as basically a monitor? I'm just thinking of how LFS will come up with the wide screen resolutions, in the screen resolution page...

My hope is that this allows 3 screen racing, using an up-to-date card so giving better frame rates than you can get with a Parhelia - which was the only real three screen solution up to this time!

Awsome I know what I'll be playing LFS on with the next major patch

Checked my card it can support 3840x1024 just got to wait for April

Next question is what is the max wiodesceen resolution that LFS supprots? Cause thats like 3.75:1 aspect ratio

This will be so expensive. I need to buy a bigger desk, 2 19" lcd monitors and that matrox device. And the cables...

I guess it won't work prefectly in LFS because you can't atm select what you want to see in other monitors = you can't select the look left/right views to the left and right monitor using the monitor in the center as the driving view. Or...?

Ah, I'd better mention what most people probably don't know...

If you select any 16:3 ratio screen mode (same as 3 normal 4:3 monitors) then LFS goes into a special "parhelia" mode, and the text / laptimes / etc - all 2d display things, are confined to the central screen, plus a couple of other layout improvements.

Great thx for the feedback Scawen

So then once you have set the mode in display settings to 3840x1024 with the matrox device, LFS will have that mode? I just dont see similar modes in there at the moment even with non-square modes enabled, but I'm guessing it only shows supported modes of your current hardware.

Just wanted to be sure about it before taking the plunge

Quote from Hyperactive :

This will be so expensive. I need to buy a bigger desk, 2 19" lcd monitors and that matrox device. And the cables...

I guess it won't work prefectly in LFS because you can't atm select what you want to see in other monitors = you can't select the look left/right views to the left and right monitor using the monitor in the center as the driving view. Or...?

Most cards already support dual monitor gaming - no point though, car is impossible to drive with the two bevels in the middle of your view. The whole point is 3 with one in the middle the others on L & R.

Unless you mean you already ahve one and want 2 more...

Quote from Scawen :

I guess the user needs to install a driver for the device, and that would be a driver for a "monitor" as this device would appear to the computer as basically a monitor?

not even that is needed. the tripledevice informs windows a 3840 monitor is connected...

"TripleHead2Go does is add support for three displays to your existing card. Once everything’s hooked up to your PC, TripleHead2Go looks like one really big 3840x1024 monitor to your PC, no custom graphics driver is needed to get it to work. Matrox uses the EDID standard to report the resolution to Windows (both Windows XP and Windows 2000 are supported), from there the TripleHead2Go module outputs the data from the GPU to the displays. Up to four resolutions are supported: 3840x1024@60Hz (giving you three 1280x1024 displays), 3072x768@75Hz (three 1024x768 displays), 2400x600@60Hz (three 800x600 displays), and finally, 1920x480@ 60Hz (three 640x480 displays)."

more info http://www.lfsforum.net/showth ... p?goto=newpost&t=5504

Quote from Seahorse :

Most cards already support dual monitor gaming - no point though, car is impossible to drive with the two bevels in the middle of your view. The whole point is 3 with one in the middle the others on L & R.

Unless you mean you already ahve one and want 2 more...

Yes, I was talking about having 3 monitors

I am actually more suspicious about how much use would it be to have my current 1 monitor view streched on 3 monitors. I mean, the left and right side monitors would only widen the perspective or fov, but it would still take to press the look left/right buttons to see what's going on on your side. I'd like to have the left and right monitors showing the 90 degree views from left and right and the center monitor would be the racing view monitor. Of course this would leave dead spots in forward left/right directions...

Hmm, maybe a trackIR and 3 monitors

I would like to see LFS on this (12pack LCD):

http://www.plastk.net/

Matrox Parhelia is the only video card that natively support 3 heads and / or report 1 drawing area to DirectX, but unfortunately it is oldish card. Probably will work fine (as stated earlier in this post), but no high resolution and no AA.So the only real altertative if you really want to go immersive, is to get a massive screen (24"+) and then run a SLI system for better performance to taste / budget. Oh and sit really close to it...

Read post #77 or this thread

http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?t=5504

Been a while since anyone posted on this....But i was thinking about doing this myself and wondered if anyone has tried this matrox box out yet? Or is there any other ways around this now?

http://forum.rscnet.org/showthread.php?t=254514
http://forum.rscnet.org/showthread.php?t=258035

All I could find from RSC, the search is a bit slow, 3 mins per search

Thanks for that...seems the matrox box is the way to go.

My quest for cheap triplehead continues. A few weeks ago I got myself a PCI express system, and today I got a secondary PCI-e videocard (a GF6200LE). I coded up a test DLL and so far it looks good; I get ~50fps in 3072x768 resolution with 4xAA, three monitors: http://junk.kegetys.net/softTH.jpg

The FPS hit is pretty big, since in single screen mode, 1456x1092 resolution I get well over 100fps most of the time, but it still runs very well and is very playable. There propably still are some tricks to optimize it a bit more... But its not bad for a 29e setup(price of the 6200LE) compared to the Matrox Triplehead 2go

The setup I made it with is:
Intel Core 2 Duo "Conroe" E6600 at 3,45GHz
Asus P5W DH Deluxe (Forces PCI-e 8x mode for both cards )
GeForce 7900GT (Does all the rendering, and displays right monitor picture)
GeForce 6200LE (Displays left monitor picture)

Wow.. The entire video card industry can't come up with a decent triple screen solution and you just hack up some DLLs? Seriously, you need to get with Nvidia and have them create this as an official solution. I got a th2g for some testing and while it's works great for games, it's still pretty hacky of a solution and doesn't even do DVI.

Here's a little video of it. Running in 3840x960 resolution now, i put the side monitors to 1024x768 16bpp color to minimize the bandwidth required (they are downscaled from 1280x960 32bpp, so it looks good still)

Quote from Kegetys :

Here's a little video of it. Running in 3840x960 resolution now, i put the side monitors to 1024x768 16bpp color to minimize the bandwidth required (they are downscaled from 1280x960 32bpp, so it looks good still)

what fov is that ? it looks larger than the 120° lfs usually has as maximum

Quote from Shotglass :

what fov is that ? it looks larger than the 120° lfs usually has as maximum

Should be 120. I do have some code to force it wider, but as LFS isn't aware of the change cars/objects that are outside the 120 degree FOV disappear when using it, so it's not very useful

That modification is pretty impressive.
How does it work? Via a modified D3D8.dll like some of your other modifications?
If so, would it work on other programs aswell?
Can't wait to try that out.

As I understand the secondary videocard is just a "drawing-slave". Would any (D3D 8) videocard work, like f.e. a 5 year old PCI-card?
(Not planning to use it, just asking out of curiosity.)

Vain

Quote from Vain :

That modification is pretty impressive.
How does it work? Via a modified D3D8.dll like some of your other modifications?
If so, would it work on other programs aswell?

Yes, it's a d3d DLL. It should be possible to make it work with any D3D game, though currently I have only tried LFS (And it propably wouldn't work with anything else right now either as it does some LFS-specific assumptions)

Quote :

As I understand the secondary videocard is just a "drawing-slave". Would any (D3D 8) videocard work, like f.e. a 5 year old PCI-card?

Yes all the D3D rendering is done on the primary card and the others just display the parts of the rendered frame, but you need PCI Express for an useable framerate. (Even a non direct3D card would work as it uses Windows GDI to draw the side monitors) I tried it earlier with AGP+PCI combo but the best I got was around 10fps, PCI has very limited bandwidth and everything in AGP seem to be optimized for sending data from system RAM to the AGP card, not the other way so it ends up being very sluggish.

so it wont work with a sli setup then ... bad news i guess a single card just doesnt seem to be up for the job of driving those massive resolutions

Quote from Shotglass :

so it wont work with a sli setup then ... bad news i guess a single card just doesnt seem to be up for the job of driving those massive resolutions

I dont know, if SLI doesn't let you use three monitors then propably no... The resolutions aren't that big though for newer video cards, for example 3x1024x768 resolution is only ~22% more pixels than 1600x1200.

I also did some quick test with other games, and with minor tweaks I got Operation Flashpoint and LOMAC working quite well with it.

Quote from Kegetys :

I dont know, if SLI doesn't let you use three monitors then propably no...

afaik of the 4 dvi-outs a sli system has only 2 are operational so the only option would be a pci card which apparently doesnt work too well

Quote :

The resolutions aren't that big though for newer video cards, for example 3x1024x768 resolution is only ~22% more pixels than 1600x1200.

i was thinking more along the lines of triple 1280*1024 for 2 tfts which is roughly twice the amount of pixles i currently use (1920*1200) and on my sys the highest i can go with my single 78gtx for constant 60+ fps

Quote from Kegetys :

I do have some code to force it wider

Damn, you have code for everything!