Hi everyone,
I wanted to put my 2 cents in here about how I'm enjoying my new low budget triple screen setup. I don't really have a slouchy computer but it's not that great either at least for triple screen gaming with 3 widescreen monitors, even the 1680x1050 monitors I had required low settings for framerates above 25fps in many recent games, I'm running a 2600k i7 with a 2gb 7870 and 8gb ram.
The last couple of years I've been working on fixing up old arcade cabinets and have ended up replacing a couple of screens with 4:3 flatscreen monitors for cost's (and frustration's) sake, when I can find them with a decent vertical viewing angle for portrait mode they are usually less than $50. I ended up finding three of them and it has opened up a whole new world for me.
First of all it's around 50% less pixels so I've gained enough frames per second at low to hit 60fps in any ame I play or I can turn up the eye candy and run a decent 30fps. There is also less distortion on the edges, in fact there is almost no stretching at the edges of my side screens now in games like Arma, Battlefield, Mechwarrior Online. The resolution works out to 3072x1280 which is almost exactly 21:9 but with 1280 pixels vertically. Movies look good (I don't see bezels any more
and I've had success running games out of the box in 16:9 with black bars on the left and right (ACIV:BF, haven't patched it or 12:9 yet, too keen to pilot a ship!).
I would recommend this configuration or the same thing in landscape mode to anyone thinking of trying out surround gaming but unsure about taking the plunge. Any recent ati or 6-700 series card these days supports triple screens on one card and these monitors can be had for less than $200 or less, the cost of a single ws monitor.
There are certainly some drawbacks though, such as many webpages being designed for ws monitors, resulting in the page needing to be spanned across multiple monitors, and I'm sure I'll find some more as I continue using this setup.
Hope this helps any lurkers or single screen users thinking of trying out triple, I also hope that eventually PLP or differing resolutions in eyefinity will be supported and I can get a ws monitor for the centre screen with a future graphics card upgrade. Love to hear your guys opinions (and maybe meet some mechwarrior players?)