Quote from MustangSVT :

It's a nice setup but it would be super expensive and only be useful for a very small number of games and require insane power.

In my case, I have a 24" Dell LCD with 1920x1200 resolution. I wouldn't settle for anything less than 2 more of those, so that would be around another $1400 USD for 2 more

Well yeah, it's going to be super expensive if you insist on doing it with giant TFTs! I figure three decent budget 19"s will be around £600 maybe, and that gives you a 57" panorama - more than enough for a desktop I think.

Or three old 21"+ CRTs for £50 each on ebay. Bargain.

Quote from Bob Smith :

Or three old 21"+ CRTs for £50 each on ebay. Bargain.

I thought about doing something like that, but my desk would collapse under the weight of three 21" CRTs, and I can't make a stronger desk because I don't know one end of a drill from the other.

Quote from geeman1 :

Here is explanation about advantages of TH setup and about the bars: http://www.widescreengamingfor ... orum/viewtopic.php?t=8418

all of which is not true for sim racing where you will look to the sidemonitors a lot to see your opponents

Quote from Shotglass :

all of which is not true for sim racing where you will look to the sidemonitors a lot to see your opponents

Yeah, TH has some other advantages besides immersion too.

Quote from Shotglass :

all of which is not true for sim racing where you will look to the sidemonitors a lot to see your opponents

It depends, I look at the side monitors occasionally when something turns up at the side, but 99% of the time I only focus on the center screen. You dont turn your head and look out of the side window in your real car, unless there is something special going on like a car appearing next to you and you want to see the distance, but other than that, you always look straight ahead and enjoy the immersion and FOV. TrackIR is also recommended, than you can easily look into the corner before turning.

Quote from splunk4u :

Kegetys, I noticed that you mention that most cards are limited to 4k textures. Does this hold true for the 8800 series as well? I am really dying to try 1920x1080 (5760x1080 spanned) on each monitor. If not, is there any other card or configuration that would allow me to do this?

I dont have a 8800 to test it with so I dont know... I suspect the 4096 pixel limitation is a Direct3D maximum too, but the only hardware I have to test it with is my 7900GT + 6200LE setup.

Quote from splunk4u :

Also, would it be possible to make softTH work with 2 of the 8800's in SLI (to give more rendering power) and a third PCIe card as a slave? The 680i chipset based motherboard I'm using has 3 PCIe slots (2 16x and 1 8x).

I guess that should work, SoftTH doesnt care(or even know) what kind of setup you have, as long as the displays and devices work in windows and support Direct3D with the features needed by SoftTH then any kind of setup should work.

poor me, only 2 monitors :P 3360x1050

oh my god .that's so nice .more real.but need more money .

Kegetys - no luck here either, SoftTH logos appears on left and right screens (disappearing and reappearing almost at random), the middle screen stays blank with an hourglass on it.

I've tried various resolutions and refresh rates, and have tried changing the desktop resolutions in advance, with no effect. I thought maybe UltraMon was causing a problem, so I quit it, tried again, only to get LFS CTD. Will try some other games now (only LFS so far) but I don't hold out much luck.

Log attached. I'm getting a different error message to splunk4u.

Update: Oblivion launcher hangs upon launch, RBR CTDs almost instantly - both just with the presence of the dlls, haven't even got as far as changing resolution. In comparison LFS is fine until you pick one of the extra resolutions.

Update again: UT2004 doesn't see extra resolutions, but then didn't see all of them to begin with so I think that's a fault with the game.

Quote :

D3DERR_NOTAVAILABLE - This device does not support the queried technique.

Yet another fantastic descriptive Microsoft error

It seems the right monitor device creation fails, you could check if games work with that device alone (Disable SoftTH and try a game which lets you select the display device, and see if it runs on that card).

Hmm, perhaps I'm out of luck.

I get this when trying to run Oblivion using the X700:

Also the desktop on the third monitor is really slow, like when you have no graphics drivers installed. The ATI control panel seems to pick everything up correctly though.

Sounds like acceleration wouldn't be working on that card, I guess it's up to the drivers... Check the hardware acceleration slider from windows display properties on that card though, I think I once had that defaulted to none for some reason.

Quote from Bob Smith :

Getting a bit off topic here but...

I have 2x PCI Express slots on my board but only one of them is a 16x slot (I don't have an SLI board), the other is a slow slot (not sure what speed, probably 1x). There's a warning sticker on the slot to not use a second graphics in there unless it supports the slower speed... how to find a cheapy second card I can stick into that slot that I know will work?

Did you manage to work out if the new card is ok in a x1 slot? Given the warning sticker sounds like maybe your new card doesn't?

Maxim

I'm thinking that may be the issue. The card does work in 2D modes so it's not a complete waste of money but the 3D bit was the main motivation for the purchase. Perhaps I'll follow it up with a new mobo, the next one up supports SLI, not that I'll ever use that but it should give me 2 decent PCIe slots, rather than this cheat of a slot I've got atm.

Atm I'm playing with drivers, I was running 6.11 Cats before and tried updating to 7.1s but all that did was swap the monitor numbers around so 2 became 4 and 3 became 2. Now I get an error message that SoftTH can't find monitor 4, and UltraMon is picking up monitor 4. Think another driver clean and reinstall is in order, if I still have no luck I'll go back to 6.11s.

Edit: Giving up with the 7.1s, all I can ever get is:

Edit 2: Gone back to the 6.11s and I'm still getting that smae error, now I don't know how to get it to get as far as it did in the first place. Must have been a fluke. Any ideas on my current error Kegetys?

Edit 3: Tried Vista, perhaps this new fangled technology would work without a hitch... only to find the OS bluescreens on bootup with 2 graphics card installed. Looks like I won't be loading that for a while then.

Aha, well I tried reducing both numbers by one... to get exactly the same error.

On an off chane I thought I'd try using 1 and 2 anyway, despite windows saying one monitor is 4... and it worked! Well, by that I mean, I'm back at the original error messages and the flickering SoftTH logo. :|

Seeing as I can't run Oblivion on the secondary card it's possible there's an incompatability with the 1x slot, either hardware, driver, or both. Of course I'm running on old 6.11 drivers again so tomorrow (it's late enough here, half three nearly) I'll try the 7.1s and whatever the latest Omega drivers are and see if I have any more luck.

I don't know what processor you have but 939 SLi motherboards can be got for <£40 which maybe a cheap way to retain your sanity?

Maxim

People,

Ati videocards have a maximum horizontal rendering limit of 2400 pixels.

So in practice this means 2400x600.. 3 times 800x600.

Maybe this can explain some of your problems. Although It should only effect you if the primary/rendering card is an ATI.


-SoftTH is an increadible peace of work and I cannot wait to play with it.
I first need to upgrade to PCI-Express and NVIDIA cards. However i'll wait a while for LCD's to get cheaper. I'm not in that much of a hurry with a 24" CRT at 1920x1200.

I would like to try eDimensional shutter glasses but unfortunately they are, also, not fully functional with ATI cards.-

anybody uses fresnels to get rid of rims of monitors (especially with CRTs)? how do they work if you dont look straight on them?

Quote from MillerM :

Ati videocards have a maximum horizontal rendering limit of 2400 pixels.

Do you have a souce for that? Here it says:

Quote :

High resolution texture support (up to 4k x 4k)

It would seem quite dumb to have support for such large render targets but not being able to render to them.

Quote from splunk4u :

Is the source available anywhere for softTH?

No

The maximum texture size can be checked with the DX caps viewer here:
http://junk.kegetys.net/DXCapsViewer.zip (From the DirectX SDK)

Go to DirectX graphics adpaters/your card/D3D device types/HAL and select the 'Caps' icon. On the right it will display the MaxTextureWidth and MaxTextureHeight values which are the ones that matter. Someone with a 8800 could run it and see what it says...

I've already run LFS and Oblivion in dualscreen mode at 3200x1200, so there is no 2400 pixel limitation on ATI cards.

Edit: Tried that prog Kegetys, 4096x4096 limits for both outputs of both cards here (X1800 and X700). Sadly I don't know anyone with so much money to burn that would own a DX10 card.

Quote from Kegetys :

Someone with a 8800 could run it and see what it says...

8800 GTS here:

Max Texture Width: 8,192
Max Texture Hight: 8,192

Nice. I'm sure I left a thousand pounds under the floorboards somewhere...

In the meantime I've manged to fluke getting LFS to load a couple of times, but the side screens don't initialise: http://lfs.thefloatingwidget.net/photos/DSCF0943_resize.JPG - this is with 7.1 drivers now. Downloading Omegas atm...

Quote from seggons :

8800 GTS here:
Max Texture Width: 8,192
Max Texture Hight: 8,192

Cool.
*goes to shop and buys 8800GTS and 2 more 20" widescreen monitors*

You could even run 3 30" wide monitors with that. It's over 12 megapixels. That would be truly a mad rig