Widescreen Gaming Forum

Hi everyone!

I'm new to these forums and I have come to ask a question which I've been Googling for over 3 days now. Although I have found out lots about it I am still unclear as I've heard many contradicting views.

Can I run Softth using an ATI x1950xt for the center and left screen plus a PCI card such as a ATI Radeon 9250 to power the right screen?

I understand that Softth uses the primary card for all the rendering so the second card does not have to be powerful as it is just passing on the information to the third screen. I want to play games on this setup as I love the idea of surround gaming. I've already got the left and center screen working and it looks amazing on Oblivion! Just need to know whether a PCI card is what I need? I don't have a motherboard with two PCI-E slots and I cannot afford the price of a triplehead2go. :(

If anyone has any experience with a similar setup or has the know how it would be much appreciated.

Many thanks,

Alex

Softth is supposed to handle pci based cards too, but with reduced performance, not sure if it would be playable.

Thanks for the reply Mesh

I'm guessing the reduced performance is due to the bandwidth?

I'm not worried about high resolutions on the side monitors as my attention is focused on the center screen.

So if I set a resolution of say 640 by 480 for the side monitors would this eliminate the bandwidth problem as the PCI card is only passing on the images rendered by my main card?

If anyones tried a setup like this before would love to hear of what sort of performance they got?

Thanks again. :)

bandwidth issues yeah, couldn't say how bad/well it'd run, I haven't even gotten softth to work with 2-3 pci-e displays. Seems the software part of it just won't work.

Guess I'll just have to get one and find out. :?

What games did you try with it?

It took me a hell of a long time to work out the configurations for Softth but when I did it worked brilliantly.

If anyones tried a PCI-E and a PCI setup would love to hear from you.

I wish triplehead2go was cheaper...

need for speed mw, nwn 2, ut2004, silverfall demo, tomb raider ani. demo, and probably others I'm forgetting.

the best I got it to run is under nwn2 but that's only some of the times and the mouse was locked to the middle screen which made it useless.

Grrr yeahh.

Softth is still in beta so I guess a lot of games wont work as I'm finding out. But still I can play oblivion and thats mostly what I play anyway. I'm gonna try get hold of a super cheap PCI and see what it can do. If it doesn't work I'm gonna Ebay for a new motherboard with Crossfire or SLI.

Cheers.

Still if anyones had any experience using this setup would love to hear from you.

hey, im using softTH with a pci-e x900xtx and a regular pci x1550 you do get the slow response from the screen connected to the regular pci but to lower this you should enable 16bd for the secondary screens, that will work way better.

the only game ive found that has issues with running 16bd on secondary screens is HL2 episode 2, the screen on the pci card goes very dark when in 16bd mode. other than that its great.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cwKcatXME0

That freetrack setup is sweet especially considering the price of a track IR.