Widescreen Gaming Forum

Greetings - I wrote a previous post about running triple screens in native (in my case 1600x1200) DVI digital resolution for doing graphics/media work in Windows as well as running in 3072x1024 for gaming (like TH2G). A responder mentioned the SoftTH option. This looks promising.

I was just wondering if anyone has started testing/working with it and what they have found so far, especially in terms of running demanding games like FEAR, GRAW, Rainbow Six Vegas, etc. I was planning on trying it out tonight and wanted to get a better idea what I am getting into.

Any feedback about SoftTH so far, and have you used UltraMon with it?

My system configuration:
ASUS A8N32-SLI
AMD 64X2 Dual
ToughPower 750w PSU
2GB Corsair
2TB Hard Disk (4x500gb)
BFG 7950GX2 1GB Video card (Primary)
BFG 7950GT 512MB Video card (getting it today as a secondary)
XP Professional sp2
3 Dell 20" LCD Monitors (+ TH2G but I won't be using it for test obv.)

I am currently hitting the following benchmarks with this system + TH2G:
FEAR - 50/60fps (with 4xaa I think)
Half Life 2 - 100/120fps (all settings maxed)
GRAW - 40fps (with 4xaa I think)
3dmark - 9850

Thanks - Mark

Not tried it yet ... may be in about a month when I might have some free time to play ...
Please let us know how you get on if you try it out ... :D

BTW ...

GRAW - 40fps (with 4xaa I think)

AA doesn't work at all with GRAW (I found if you have it turned on in the nvidia controls it will slow down your game) ... it has it's own (bad) edge softening thing in the video options.

Paddy - Ok I have been working on this for the last 5 hours or so. I would not call this highly scientific but I did learn a alot. Here are the steps that I went through...

* Started with a BFG 7950GX2 1GB video card in my PC (specs above).
* Uninstalled the TripleHead2Go software and drivers (+ reboot)
* Installed the new BFG 7950 GT 512MB video card (in other PCI-E slot).
* Hooked up DVI cables (2 to 7950GX2, 1 to 7950GT)
* Started Windows
* When windows started it was only running a single monitor. I got a little frustrated over this one, but finally figured out that the Nvidia drivers ENABLE SLI-mode by default. You have to disable SLI-mode in the NVidia Control Panel to get multiple displays to work. About another 15 minutes of tweaking in the Windows display properties and I had all 3 20" LCD's running at 1600 x 1200 DVI natively.
* So far so good... everything was working great on all 3 monitors!
* Downloaded SoftTH and...

* Tested FEAR first: placed the dll's and cfg file into the FEAR base directory where fear.exe is located. Started FEAR. Loaded a game and it immediately showed the SoftTH slash screens - I was impressed that it worked first time. BTW - I did not tweak the cfg (so it was on 3072x768). When the FEAR menu came up it showed the menu on the left screen, but the mouse highlight was on the middle screen. Wierd, but you could still work it. Glitches on the menu. But once in game it ran fine...

With TH2G and 7950GX2 (SLI mode, 3072x768)
- Maximum Settings - 50-70fps, excellent performance, very smooth
- High Settings - 100-120fps, outstanding but some loss of detail obv.

With SoftTH and 7950GX2 and 7950GT (non SLI mode)
- Maximum settings - 15-25fps, pretty sluggish gameplay, not good
- High settings - 35-50fps, much better, very playable but less detail

So there is a big performance hit going to SoftTH (and non SLI mode) as expected, but the High settings are still very playable, so it does work.

* Tested GRAW next: same installation procedure as FEAR. Also had menu glitches, in fact it crashed in menu a couple times. Once you get past the menus the game loads. However, performance is bad...

With TH2G and 7950GX2 (SLI mode, 3072x768)
- High Settings - 40-60fps, very playable, very smooth overall

With SoftTH and 7950GX2 and 7950GT (non SLI mode)
- High Settings - 11-15fps, very poor, sluggish, unplayable
- High Settings (AA off, shadows mid) - 20-25fps, poor, unplayable
- Mid Settings - 30-40fps, but major loss of detail and sharpness

* Tested Half-Life 2 next: same procedure as before. Menu has some big problems, took about 10 tries to get past it without crashing. finally got to the game though...

With TH2G and 7950GX2 (SLI mode, 3072x768)
- Maximum everything - 90-120fps, totally rocks, what a great engine!

With SoftTH and 7950GX2 and 7950GT (non SLI mode)
- Maximum everything - 30-60fps, wild variations, seemed a little sluggish but was still playable.

Overall I was impressed at the SoftTH utility but there seem to be a lot of problems with the game menus. I prefer the TH2G, it is smoother and offers much faster framerates and you can play in SLI mode which is huge. I only play games in blocks (finish a game, take a break, etc...)
so what I think I am going to do is actually switch between TH2G and my 1600x1200 DVI mode. It only takes me a couple minutes to swap the cables and reconfigure Windows. And you don't have to remove the 2nd video card when you're using TH2G. Without a monitor attached to it, Windows XP just ignores it. It's the best overall solution for me I think.

Can't give up the TH2G - say what you want, but that hardware ROCKS! I just wish they would come out with a DVI digital version, that would be the best solution of all.

So that's it for tonight... I haven't tried bumping the resolution up to 3480x1024 on the SoftTH yet...

Wow ... thanks ... :shock: 8)
You did a fine job of testing this for us all !!!!

It looks like you saved me a lot of hassle ...

For me the point of SoftTH would be to get higher resolutions in windows and in games ... like your native res of 1600x1200x3 ... and it sounds like that would cause games to be a slide show ...

That said ... it would be nice to at least get 1440x900x3 for my widescreens ... I might still give it a go when I have more time.

Thank you for doing the testing ... :D

Wow, great info here. As I suspected the drawbacks of SoftTH seem to outweigh the benefits, when compared to a TripleHead2Go.

Overall I was impressed at the SoftTH utility but there seem to be a lot of problems with the game menus. I prefer the TH2G, it is smoother and offers much faster framerates and you can play in SLI mode which is huge. I only play games in blocks (finish a game, take a break, etc...)

SoftTH in theory should work with SLI. Only you need three PCIe slots (2 for the cards in SLI and 3rd one for the secondary card).
There are some hardware limitations on the resolution. Only Geforce 8-series are known to be able to render textures with vertical resolution over 4096. 5760x1200 is the biggest resolution which is proven to work on 8800GTX.
Anyway here is a thread from Live For Speed forums, which has talk about running the game in Triplehead system. There is some talk about TH2Go, but it has lots of info about SoftTH and the developer of the software (Kegetys) has made a few posts in there too.
http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?t=18847

Superb work mbeede.

DUE No SLI in SOFTH you should habe benched TH2Go with 7950GX2 @ No SLI !

Here my opinon

SofTH

+ DVI
+ many res.

- No SLI (?)
- SLI board
- config.
- DX8/9 only


+- costs depend on what secondy card you use

Another plus is that there are bezel adjustments with SofTH, are there not (i.e. you can "hide" some of the image behind the bezels)?

I just got 1360x768x3 to work using it. That's about as close to the 4096 limit as you can get. :)

I'm going to toy around with a few other resolutions to see if it can do better.

_________________
Brad Hawthorne
Product Manager
Nthusim Pty. Ltd. | www.nthusim.com

Yeah, I can confirm it works pretty well on a 8800GTX in rFactor. I have it currently running at 5760x1200 85Hz. (1920x1200 on each monitor)

My Setup:

ASUS P5N32-E SLI
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600
2GB RAM
eVGA 8800GTX (Render card)
eVGA 8800GTX (Unusable at the moment)
eVGA 8800GTS (Slave card used for output only)
XP Professional sp2
ForceWare 97.92
3 Dell 24" LCD Monitors

Performance rFactor w/ 4x AA and 16x AF (and all other at setting at max):

42 FPS with one car on track.
about 28 FPS with 10 cars on track

Obviously this isn't very usable at these resolutions with that sort of frame rate I think. What I really want to do is put those two GTX's in SLI. Problem is, as soon as I put a third card in, the SLI option disappears. Also, when I try SLI with just two cards, it only allows for one monitor. Now, I'm not really good at this whole SLI thing, but wasn't the idea of 3 PCIe slots on Nvidia's new 680i chipset to allow for three GFX cards? There has to be a way.