Widescreen Gaming Forum

For what it's worth I'm now on the X38 (Maximus) on a 2.4ghz Quad clocked to 3.8ghz, using the 8800GTS 320mb plus 7300GTSilent.

Performance in Live for Speed is simply awesome.

Having set the side screens to 1280x1024 (1:1 res not needed) and the middle one to 1920x1200, I'm getting up to 100fps whilst racing; maybe dipping to 60fps when lots of cars are on screen e.g. race start.

The X38 features dual 16X PCIE bus so is probably optimal for SoftTH.

For what it's worth I'm now on the X38 (Maximus) on a 2.4ghz Quad clocked to 3.8ghz, using the 8800GTS 320mb plus 7300GTSilent.

Performance in Live for Speed is simply awesome.

Having set the side screens to 1280x1024 (1:1 res not needed) and the middle one to 1920x1200, I'm getting up to 100fps whilst racing; maybe dipping to 60fps when lots of cars are on screen e.g. race start.

The X38 features dual 16X PCIE bus so is probably optimal for SoftTH.

did you make benchmarks between 2x8 and 2 x16 lanes ?

Funkdancer, a PCIe x16 pathway supports 4GBps. Even your proposed setup using your monitors native resolution comes to 1.3GBps, if rendered at 70fps.

It's not your PCIe bandwidth that's holding you back. I don't have much experience with SoftTH so that's all the advice I can offer unfortunately.

Also take a pic of your setup.. id like to see how it looks with diff resolution.. Does everything match up still or are things skewed..

I have been wondering if i had a 1900x1200@ native resolution and a 1280x1024 @ native-- would the lines match up in a racing sim? I run Rfactor and i know my question here is lame but i have just been wondering this for a while.. My logic tells me -0- no the lines wont match up cause stuff will be smaller on the 1900... but part of me thinks it will line up cause the game will compensate and keep everything lined up- hell i don't know .. lol

did you make benchmarks between 2x8 and 2 x16 lanes ?

No I did not do benchmarks. The reason why is that it was moot; the Blitz Formula dropping to 8 lanes had severe impact on other games like STALKER i.e. sound stuttering and frame rate issues. Once I took the 7300 out I had great frame rates.

To make my post clear, this is without using SoftTH, just trying to play it normally on 1 screen - there mere presence of a 2nd card switched the mobo to 8x even though I wasn't using crossfire. I write this up as wildly misleading marketing from Asus. I was only expecting it to drop if it detected two identical ATI cards. :x

For LFS, the experience was a bit flakey. Stuttering, not smooth - sides flashing black from time to times.

Once on the X38 on the same Q6600 CPU speed of 3ghz things were much improved - felt just perfect. Of course later clocking the CPU from 3 to 3.8ghz made things even better so now I'm a very happy camper.

It's not your PCIe bandwidth that's holding you back. I don't have much experience with SoftTH so that's all the advice I can offer unfortunately.

Tucson - I'm not sure why you perceive that I have a problem with the current setup i.e. being held back. :) My 2407wfp hc in the middle only does 60hz anyway.

EDIT: I have a feeling you didn't read my latest post before posting here? :lol: As you can see I solved it with the Maximus and PCIE2.0

Also the amount of info the game must render is excessively larger ... standard 24" is 2.3mp, add another 2.6mp for the 2 sides at 1280x1024 and the overhead of doing the splitting to the monitors in software - not having to be held down by a 4x or 8x PCI transfer speed on top of all this but rather do it at 16x is sure to help. :wink:

I'm just posting this as a service to anyone else wanting to build a setup based on SoftTh. I'm only interested in LFS at the moment so my experience is directly based on that. Clear recommendation is to get the X38 over the P35 chipset.

Kegety's programming is very impressive. If you're reading this, thanks for putting your brain to such good use! :) :)

Thanks,
Funky
ps. performance in Vista was abysmal compared to WinXP. Also, if anyone wondered, the Blitz went into my new HD HTPC so I was able to make use of it. It was a bit overkill for the purpose but better off doing that than selling it.

Also take a pic of your setup.. id like to see how it looks with diff resolution.. Does everything match up still or are things skewed..

I'll do an in game one a bit later, i.e. this weekend.

It's not perfect but it doesn't have to be. The main thing with the side screens is to provide "environmental wrapping" i.e. peripheral vision. It really adds a whole new dimension to the racing.

That's also why there's no point to run them at 1600x1200, I wouldn't see the difference anyway.

Please note that I consider the TrackIR to be the perfect piece to round off this setup, it complements the 3 view perfectly as it also becomes easier to use with less effort / movement required. (On a single 4:3 screen there's a whole lot more work involved in making the TrackIR feel natural).

funkdancer, i read your posts. I'm just telling you that bandwidth is not your problem. Whatever fixed it wasn't the extra PCIe lanes.

So are you saying that SoftTH performance is completely unaffected by getting a 16x multi rather than a 8x on both cards? That sounds a bit odd to me.

Well in theory anyway. You can test it yourself by taping off half the pins on the card (start from the back).

:lol: