(Stop) Playing Favorites

Two recent high-profile game releases have generated a bit of buzz within the multi-monitor community.

First was the release of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. This title was "sponsored" by NVIDIA with their "The Way It's Meant To Be Played" (TWIMTBP) initiative. By all accounts the game is a great title, and offered superb "Surround" support. However, it doesn't support TripleHead via the Matrox TripleHead2Go or AMD's Eyefinity.

There is absolutely no reason any developer to lock out features based on which video card you purchased. This type of behavior segments and already small market and will slow the adoption of multi-monitor among users. Why would a user invest in any multi-monitor technology, if they have to worry about developers not only supporting multi-monitor, but their choice of multi-monitor technology.

Second was the recent release of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Conversely, this title was "sponsored" by AMD's "Gaming Evolved" campaign. While the game offers native support for multi-monitor, Eidos chose to center the HUD by using the Eyefinity SDK. This means that the HUD is centered by reading certain hooks in the Eyefinity driver setup, so that it can determine where to place the HUD.

While this works great in theory, this overly complex solution means that not only are NVIDIA Surround users left with a spanned HUD, but so are Eyefinity users whose drivers have not installed themselves perfectly. HUD solutions don't need to be this complex. Center the HUD, and center it on a 16:9 aspect. That will fit on the center screen of a 3x1-Lanscape setup, span a 3x1-Portrait setup, and center the HUD on the middle three screens on a 5x1-Portrait configuration.

I appreciate that NVIDIA and AMD are working with developers to drive adoption of multi-monitor gaming, but developers need to serve the entire user base, not a partial segment of an early-adopter market.