Widescreen Gaming Forum

I just discovered this in my travels:

http://www.kegetys.net/SoftTH/

Its basically a hacked direct3d.dll that lets you do triple head without the dedicated matrox hardware. There's some performance penalty of course, due to the need to copy two framebuffers across to system memory. However, this would let anyone w/ multiple monitors to try out the TH2G effect.

Discuss. 8)

Very interesting. He should of used some decent LCD monitors to make the PICs though, those three CRT's look "shizenhouzen!"

So you still need two PCIe cards though. Hmmmm. Althought, you could get a cheap-arsh one to pull the 3 monitors, as all the work is on the single one. Could be good for some lower RES games. This could be a great alternative. Althought, I think TH2G would be just as an effective solution seeings that I believe you only need one card for that from memory.

I hear Gabbo wants to do a review of this. :nudgenudge Good on you Gabbo! Hope you got 3 monitors mate.

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Does it need to physical graphics cards, are would one graphics card with dual output do the trick? Still, that could be rather useful, as SLI systems are quite common anymore.

Interesting ...
I wonder if this would be a way to get ... higher resolutions than the TH2G can do ...
Also higher widescreen resolutions than the TH2G can do ... for 3 widescreen monitors or even a ... 4:3 monitor ... Widescreen ... 4:3 monitor ... configuration.

Maybe not ... with the frame buffer limitations ... all the same I must give it a go when I get some time.

Well after a few weeks of reading these forums, this post has finally made me take the plunge and register. Hooray :)

This discovery has intrigued me greatly for exactly the reasons that Paddy The Wak mentioned above - a "4:3/16:10/4:3" configuration.

What's more, it got me thinking further, if it is possible to utilize 3 screens in this fashion with some sort of dual card config, why hasn't NVIDIA thought of it already? Would it be possible to suggest or forward such an idea to NVIDIA through this website? I can imagine there would be a huge interest in being able to run games in a "surround" fashion by adding a second card and applying a driver update. I for one would shell out for a second card as well as two 4:3's in order to experience this. An NVIDIA solution would ensure that the SLI config was making effective use of both cards too :)

Any thoughts? How many others would be interested in using SLI to create a "surround" gaming experience instead of extra hardware?

Hehe, i knew this post was gonna be interesting, welcome Brad :)

I'm not sure this will work in SLI mode like the TH2G will, because SLI mode disables the secondary monitors. As you said, its likely that nvidia could easily integrate this into their drivers, and probably make SLI work, but I doubt it works now.

Ideal config for this would be a strong primary card (8800 GTX) and a cheapo secondary card thats just there to feed the screen output. You could get an old PCIe card used from another gamer, or just buy the cheapest PCIe card you can find in the stores. Spend the extra money on nice monitors.

I noticed another way cool feature in the readme:

You can use the borderSize cfg setting to add a "dead
zone" between the monitors where the monitor bezel is.
While SoftTH attempts to make the game not render to the
dead zone area, it still increases the used render
target resolution. Many cards have a limit of max 4096x4096
textures, so maximum border size in, for example 3840x1024
triplehead resolution is 128 pixels (3840 + 2*128 = 4096)

Currently softTH doesn't support mismatching monitor resolutions, but it doesnt seem like a very far-fetched thing to request. Obviously the author has matching CRTs, so that feature was never important to him. However, you do have the ability to specify whatever resolution you want, so widescreen users should be able to get their native resolution, no matter what it is.

Interesting ...
I wonder if this would be a way to get ... higher resolutions than the TH2G can do ...
Also higher widescreen resolutions than the TH2G can do ... for 3 widescreen monitors or even a ... 4:3 monitor ... Widescreen ... 4:3 monitor ... configuration.

Maybe not ... with the frame buffer limitations ... all the same I must give it a go when I get some time.

Yes Paddy do test this out! I'll be ready to start buying my monitors by the middle of Feb. and if this is the better way to go I'll get a Widescreen for the center and 2 4:3's for the sides....That would be perfecto!

Very exciting news... I would actual consider doing this if I could get higher resolutions! Paddy, I hope you can get this working on your three 2405's! That'd be simply amazing to see ;)

As mentioned in the quote in the post by DarKcyde above ...

cards have a limit of max 4096x4096

So thinking again ... we are not going to get any higher triple widescreen resolutions ... :(

1440x900 x 3 = 4320x900

but we might get ...

1280X800 x 3 which is at least 3 x 16:10 unlike ... 1280x720 x 3 and 1280x768 x 3 ... that are currently available with the TH2G.

So thinking again ... we are not going to get any higher triple widescreen resolutions ... :(

1440x900 x 3 = 4320x900

but we might get ...

1280X800 x 3 which is at least 3 x 16:10 unlike ... 1280x720 x 3 and 1280x768 x 3 ... that are currently available with the TH2G.

Maybe Matrox would release the necessary tools for creating custom resolutions, if someone would tell them about this alternative option. They don't want to lose their markets, that's for sure...