Okay, okay, all of this peripheral vision talk is COMPLETELY off-topic everyone, so it's pretty sad this is the top result on Google for 'Fixing ATI Fisheye Lens'. A lot of people who are ignoring what the issue is in order to talk super smart about human vision and schtuff.
I have no choice but to raise such an important thread back from the dead, so long as it exists, so long as there are still people suffering from my exact issue.
POINT: When I use a monitor in a game, I'm looking directly at it. That goes for all 3 monitors. I specifically got 3 monitors so I wouldn't get repetitive stress injury from looking in one direction too often.
Besides which, if my periphereal vision were all smeared and blurry (like if I had a serious concussion or a bad drug reaction), then the blurriness on monitors I am not looking directly at would already be created in my own brain.
I don't need my 300$ graphics card and 600$ bank of monitors to simulate tunnel vision. Same as I don't need all that to simulate motion blur. These things are things my brain can already do, in fact, my brain can apparently handle these things way better than the developers think I can, because I'm able (like most humans I think) to understand much more from peripheral vision and fast motion in familiar circumstances than ophthalmologists give us credit for.
So here's the thing; If I use three desktop mode arranged side by side, just as I have them in real life (although I curve them inward at about 35 degrees based on where I sit), and I'm playing a game that allows me to stretch the window to any size I wish, like Banished or Prison Architect, then I can use all three of my monitors perfectly fine with no distortion.
If I'm playing a game that does not allow me to stretch the window to any size I wish, such as Kerbal Space Program or Metro Last Light or Sid MEier's Civilization 5 or Iron Brigade or Age of Wonders III or .. (the list goes on for about an hour or so, I have a pretty big Steam library thanks to sales and bundles mostly) .. then you get the Fish Eye Effect, and you cannot play those games in EyeFinity mode without serious issues either immediately or down the line.
Locking your neck and eyes to stare directly forward at all times while you sit very close to your monitors is really bad for you in every conceivable fashion and will possibly lead to serious medical problems. If you have trained yourself to use EyeFinity in this way, then you need to lay off the Kool-Aid before you get a cyst in your stiff, atrophied neck or completely lose the ability to rotate your eyes.
So, how come we can't turn it off? Was that long project I launched last summer to get an EyeFinity display set up, that cost me upwards of 1,200$ altogether, doomed from the start because all of the ATI Cards I've tried adamantly refuse to actually render 5960x1080 pixels and that's why they smear that crap across your side monitors? What's going on here?
As I'm writing this, just my background for my desktop stretched across all three monitors is making me kind of ill. It's stretched.. wrong. I need to go back to triple monitor mode, and say goodbye to my dreams of having all my necessary monitors and instrumentation in Kerbal Space Program all visible to me at once and out of the way from the beautiful center monitor I can use to take inspiring screenshots for myself.
At least until they reprogram their game renderer to allow me to stretch the window on triple desktop mode, and assuming ATI doesn't decide to render such an image inappropriately regardless. I mean seriously if someone wanted to ever take a 5960x1080 screenshot why would they want the sides to be so ugly? What if they were going to crop it down to a landscape 1080p image? It would look all wrong. So why our games? WHY ATI?
If I could do it all over again, I would get an Intel system paired with an Nvidia graphics solution and see how that works out. Until ATI fixes this issue they have burned their bridges with me and anyone else I know who wants a multiple-monitor gaming solution.