Widescreen Gaming Forum

Very well done! :D

If you want to change the title, I'll sticky this as an example of PLP via SoftTH on a 5870. :D

Thanks Paradigm! I changed the title and I am sorry for the multiple threads.

Another Mod beat me to the sticky. 8)

I would like to add in some more info.

I have now completely reinstalled my Vista64 ultimate OS, with fresh ATI drivers and now nothing nvidia is left over and the game has added another 5-10 frames coupled with much better visual smoothness! So yea if you are switching over from NVIDIA reinstall everything.

Its pretty impressive how well the 5870 handles itself and I am curious if I could get crossfire to work with SoftTH, because the ati cards dont have the same limitations that the Nvidia cards have, now correct me if I am wrong but in order to do SLI you could only have one monitor going and the second card was merely a slave to the first. With the two dvi out cards you could not do three monitors and when using softth you had to use the second cards outputs for the third monitor which meant you had to disable sli.

Now with the 5870, since I am able to power all three displays off of one card, what will happen if I crossfire another one?!? Since no displays have to come out of the second card, will I be able to harness its power with SoftTH?

I am trying to find this out the hard way, but I looks like I might be gettin scammed on my second 5870 purchase on amazon, but I have to wait until the 19th before I either get the card or file a claim so time will tell.

I don't know whether the 5000 series have changed the 'only one output works when CrossFire/SLI enabled' thing that both nVidia and ATi have going on their multi-GPU setups...?

I know thats what I would like to find out, lol.

Currently, I think it only supports one out because they don't have crossfire enabled with eyefinity, however, they stated that they will eventually support crossfire and eyefinity working together.

If they do that then they should have all display outs being utilized, so there just might be a chance in having crossfire and all display outs being utilized with eyefinity and the normal desktop.

In theory if they allow that then it might be possible to go crossfire with all three display outs coming off of the primarly card (like I have now) while using Softth, which would help us irregular PLP monitor peeps out a whole lot!

Its a long shot, but then again, nobody thought one 5870 would push SoftTH and it does!

Then again, they could bunk all of that and come out with PLP support in Catalyst, which would be my ideal dream!

A couple of questions so this effectively works as a single spanned desktop when you play games and you are simply setting the ingame resolution too 4960x1600?

Also what 20" monitors are you using, none widescreen monitors are difficult to pickup nowadays and LCD tech has come a LONG way in the last few years.

In case its of any use I thought I'd post to confirm a successful SoftTH triplehead setup using both ATI and nVidia cards in the same system on Win7 64bit. I went with SoftTH because of the current difficulty getting an active displayport adapter for Eyefinity mode (yet to try the DVI-to-VGA alternative). Having never had a triplehead setup before I can say – it rocks!

- ATI HD 5870 (Catalyst 9.11)
----> HDMI to monitor 1
----> DVI>HDMI to monitor 2
- nVidia 9800GTX as the secondary one (MS WDDM v1.1 – built into Win 7)
----> DVI>HDMI to monitor 3
- Intel DP45SG motherboard
- 4gb
- 3 x AOC 2434 23.6" monitors (thin bezels but no VESA mount and no DVI input – just VGA and HDMI)

I've only tested in a couple of racing games so far – Driving Speed 2 and rFactor. DS2 works OK but rFactor works beautifully. The game resolution is set to 5760x1080 and initially I ran all 3 monitors at 1080. Incredibly with everything in-game maxed I got playable framerates ranging between 25fps to 45fps. Then using SoftTH's configs I was able to drop the final resolution of each side monitor down to 1280x720 and jumped the FPS up to 44-75. I'm intrigued to compare this performance with Eyefinity which doesn't allow different resolutions for the side monitors.

I don't know which to be more impressed with; Windows 7, SoftTH or the 5870! I was expecting to spend days tweaking and fiddling just to get the vid cards to live with each other, but the whole shebang just worked. I didn't even have to install drivers for the nVidia card – Win7 just installed its own driver without so much as a message balloon.

I'm curious as to whether SoftTH on a 5870 is faster than SoftTH on other setups... seems to me like it should be since you have three outputs on the card and don't have to go across the PCI-E bus, right?

I'm pretty sure it still goes to system ram and back.

In fact, while in source games I'd get 20-30 fps with softth and 50+ with eyefinity