Widescreen Gaming Forum

Afternoon Guys,
After spending over 2 hours fighting with nVidia surround last night I felt compelled to tell the world about my troubles so that hopefully my experience would help someone in the future.
So, I upgraded to a gpu that supported nVidia Surround on one card but had odd sized monitors (one 20", two 17") and found Surround only works with identical resolutions. So... I went and bought two monitors online that were the same as the 20" I already had, lovely, 3x 20" displays! Enabled surround and all was working lovely, until I decided to remove my graphics drivers and do a clean reinstall.. They installed fine but would only let me set surround at 3840x1024 (3 screens at 1280x1024). What it should have let me use (and did before clearing out the drivers) was 5040x1050 (3 screens at 1680x1050).
I spent 2 hours cleaning and reinstalling, trying different driver versions, moving plugs between outputs on my card but no way would it let me use that resolution in surround. Eventually I came across more information online about nVidia surround requiring all 3 monitors to support the same Sync Polarity at the same Res, turns out one of my monitors was running the opposite sync polarity at 1680x1050, WHY OH WHY OH WHY NVIDIA

PLEASE - IF YOU ARE GOING TO IMPOSE THIS RESTRICTION TELL US WHEN WE ENABLE SURROUND THAT THERE IS A PROBLEM AND WHY!!

So, anyway, I found the surround part of the nVidia drivers to be very buggy indeed, almost like beta code! Various combinations of display settings would cause the Control Panel to actually crash when trying to enable surround and I could not get consistent results, it seems like this is really not finished, hopefully nVidia devs will be putting some more time into polishing this side of things, I only paid £180 for my Gfx card, if i'd bought a GTX Titan i'd be livid!

ANSWER - THERE IS NO GUARANTEE THIS WILL WORK FOR YOU, I ACCEPT NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY HARM CAUSED, IN EXTREME CASES IT COULD CAUSE DAMAGE TO ONE OR MORE OF YOUR MONITORSAs others will probably encounter this problem too, download Monitor Asset Manager http://www.entechtaiwan.com/util/moninfo.shtm
This will allow you to see all the details of each monitor and identify what sync polarity it uses. Pick one of your monitors and use the file menu to create a custom INF file for that display. Now go into Device Manager and force install that INF on all three of your monitors (As I said before, I accept no responsibility for damage caused here), if like me your monitors are all similar you should have no problems, if the monitors are all different you may find the settings don't work, but then your on your own. Once all three monitors are using the same driver they will report/use the same sync polarity and nVidia drivers will allow you to enable surround correctly.

I'm hoping nVidia remove this restriction from future drivers, it should be possible because afaik eyefinity doesn't have this problem

After enjoying Eyefinity for several years, I recently upgraded to a Titan card and tried to setup Surround. I ran into the same problem of not being able to select full resolution, as my Dell U3011 has a sync polarity of +/- while the Dell 3008WFPs that I use for the sides have a polarity of +/+.

However, by creating a custom resolution for these monitors with the Nvidia Control Panel I could not only see the sync polarity but also change it. After applying the custom resolutions to the 3008WFPs with the polarity changed to +/-, Surround works fine at 7680x1600.

I don't know how long this option has been available in the Control Panel but I've never read about this solution before. I thought it is worth mentioning as it may mean that you do not have to deal with EDID files at all to solve this problem.

Oh.... and i always thought that when you have different Sync Polarity the monitors doesn't work at all!

So they do work but in smaller resolution! Good to know.

P.S, Don't you think you could change the Topic title to something more useful for other people who have the same problem as you ? Kinda sure nobody searches google for frustrating crap if their monitors don't work!

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We gonna send it to outa space!

I honestly would have loved to have gone Nvidia but had to stick with AMD for yet another generation because of the sync polarity requirement. Neither side is perfect, that's for sure. There are some methods out there for trying to force your sync polarities to match by editing the monitors' EDID, but I can't say I've tried anything like that. Knowing I already had an Eyefinity compatible rig kept me from getting too adventurous.

Is there any updates to NVIDIA cards/drivers for this problem? I had to sell my NVIDIA card cause no matter what I tried I couldn't get my 3 monitors to run in the correct resolution.

Nope, no fix as of yet! I had to uninstall all my nVidia drivers today to test a friends AMD card, when I put my 660 back in I installed the latest nVidia beta drivers 326.41 and still had the same ballache! Had to go through the whole shebang again to get my surround setup back up and running... sigh! Never mind, it still works, its just a bit of a faff and its not like I uninstall my graphics drivers every day