I don’t need this. But by God I want it. ATI’s upcoming Eyefinity (ouch) tech allows rich, mad men to run six monitors from one graphics card, all of which combine to display one game. Six monitors! Where in Dolly Parton’s name do I get that many? Still, exciting stuff: ULTRO-SCREEN LIVES. It requires, inevitably, a brand new graphics card – the titular Eyefinity range, ATI’s next generation of 3D chips – but that the one card can share a real-time 3D image across up to six screens is incredimagic. It’s refreshing to have a card upgrade that isn’t simply about nebulous performance boosts, too.
Total resolutions go as high as an improbable 7680×3200 if you have six 30″ panels, but if you’re not a millionaire, you can use less or, word is, mix and match different resolution monitors, or even arrange strange T-shapes and suchlike. Many games will support it out of the box, as essentially all that’s needed is to allow insane resolutions (as a great many games do), but if it works as promised no doubt there’ll be tweaks and patches for stuff that doesn’t play so nice with it. Games such as Crysis and Left 4 Dead have already been demonstrated on it to a few lucky journos. Techradar has eyewitness thoughts, more tech details and – woo! – piccies.
The appeal is not so much the resolution but the immersion factor – being surround by a wall of image rather than the small window that is one monitor. In theory, just three screens (just. Ha!) would be super-splendid, as it gives a windscreen-like ultra-widescreen, but six is going to quite the thing. The problem, I guess, is to what degree the plastic sidings of each monitor foul up the sense of awe and wonder. I’m keen to try it out and see regardless, massive nerd that I am.
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Though bezels are a bit off putting to me, I think on a 3 monitor setup, with a large center monitor and two smaller side monitors for peripheral vision, they’d be unobtrusive enough. The important part would be to keep all the interface elements in the center screen.
Didn’t doom2 do triple monitor, via three computers linked over ipx?
Old. Old!
@Starky
For video then there’s a practical resolution limit as you say (although I suspect it’s still above 1080p), but I think Alec’s immersion idea might be more the point.
More complex games could also make use of peripheral screens to display additional content, although that’s been possible for a while now and very few games actually seem to enable it (SupCom being example that falls immediately to mind). The problem until now has been, as far as I can tell, that devs have been loath to “waste” dev time/rendering budget on supporting a second screen which comparatively people will have, and the use of which could cause a major fps drop. If these new cards have got sufficient headroom or capability that there’s no major cost to at least put map elements/status displays on an additional screen, then that might be a good start, particularly for palette-tastic interface games like WoW and sim-type games with dials and displays everywhere.
I have two monitors, home and work. I used to have three at work. Actually virtually everybody in our company has 2, even the receptionist.
One of the suits setup 2 screens in 2002 or so and was amazed at the productivity difference and thus made it company policy.
It’s very real, two screens makes life super productive for business stuff. Especially once you become ninja at shifting windows across screens etc.
For games, well I’ve used it a few times for laughs, but its’ kind of slow in some games and kind of useless in others. I can see the benefit for immersion in 3D games, as long as the PC/video card can keep up. Otherwise, Game on one screen, IM / email on the other for me.
DirectX can indeed treat monitors differently rather than as a single large panel, but only in DX10, i.e. Vista and higher.
My only attempt at actual multi-monitor gaming was when I installed a copy of Vista purely to try out World in Conflict. They had a feature whereby you could do the action on one monitor, and the 3D overhead map on the other monitor, and therefore have both immediate control and situational awareness.
Unfortunately, going from XP to (single-monitor) Vista pretty much cut my framerate in half, and going to the dual-monitor setup cut it in half again. So what was already a slightly dodgy framerate became a slideshow. Obviously I was glad I had done this on a spare HDD and could just rearrange some wires and be back to XP, where I’ve stayed ever since.
That said, multiple monitors are far from useless. My main uses for them:
1: Actual legitimate stuff, like development or web browsing. In particular, web programming — browser on one monitor, text editors and SSH sessions on the other.
2: Playing a game on the middle one while I monitor other stuff on the side ones. That may include IRC, MUSHes, my Steam friends list, etc.
3: Multi-clienting in MMOs. I actually used both my computers for that, and I’ve been known to set up foot-pedal control for the helper character. (One pedal = heal, other pedal = follow.)
4: Playing other games while I play MMOs. For the boring bits, like travelling. (Of course, this was part of what made me realise I should stop playing MMOs. The “game” is so “fun” that I need to play other games at the same time? Oy.)
So yeah, multiple monitors are a big win for me, even if I’ve abolished uses #3 and #4 by telling MMOs to go
fuplay themselves.3 screens are better for gaming than 6. ok, 9 are nice too, or 5 in one row in portrait mode.
in gives you an insane fov
and no bezels right on the middle screen
the immersion feeling is great, you dont really notice the side bezels after a short while, your peripheral vision picks up the sidescreens.
its nice that ATI brings it to the mainstream so that developer support will be better over time. With Matrox TH2Go it is lacking at best, which isn’t Matrox’s fault, just lazy devs who dont want to please a niche market.
I really hope Ati can get mixed resolutions to work right.
A 1920*1200 widescreen in the middle and 2 1600*1200 4:3 screens on the sides would be the optimum in deskplace saving immersion gaming for me ^_^