Widescreen Gaming Forum

In my current system I went big screen over surround screen with initially a 24" Samsung 245BW. I got the itch again for surround screen gaming though, which I recently picked up another 24" Samsung 245BW.

I pondered a bit about upgrading to Vista + SP1, but I won't be able to span the 2 monitors in Vista because horizontal-span mode has been dropped. This caused me to look at the new(ish) DH2G Digital which states it can do 2 x 1920x1200.

Of course, that lit a spark of insanity and a "what if" in my mind...lol. What keeps someone from using 2 DH2G, 4 Samsung 24" 245BWs and horizontal spanning that in XP? I like the "big" monitor concept, but I'm also stuck on the "surround" concept too. This setup would allow for native LCD resolution on all 4 of those panels. Only real hangup I foresee is the video card is gonna have to be pretty beastly to push the pixels.

For now, I'm going to use XP + 2 Samsung 24" 245BW + Horizontal-Span mode. In a few months I'll probably pick up DH2G box #1 and begin getting a few of the other pieces to the puzzle. IMHO, big and surround concepts can be done at the same time. I suppose a few months down the road I'll have a bit more insight.

Anyone out there see anything I'm missing in the equation, or something I should change?

_________________
Brad Hawthorne
Product Manager
Nthusim Pty. Ltd. | www.nthusim.com

The problem I see with the DH2G is that you have a bezel in the center. Even with two of them and 4 monitors you'll still have that issue.

My solution was to go with 2 TH2G units in vertical span mode (3 wide x 2 high). Because of centered pop-up messages I notice the horizontal bezels more than I did with just the one TH2G but the screen ratio solves some of the issues with Vert- games.

The other solution would be to go to SoftTH but, from what I've read, that has other limitations.

Neither TH2G nor SoftTH are reasonable solutions because of native resolution limitations or because of the software based hack nature of it. IMHO there is no hardware accelerated triple head solution for native 24". Bezel issues only come into play for 3rd person games. I'd prefer hardware acceleration at native resolution over the minor bezel annoyance I guess.

_________________
Brad Hawthorne
Product Manager
Nthusim Pty. Ltd. | www.nthusim.com

You are correct on both counts. I wish the TH2G supported more but...

I guess I should have added that I ended up using 19" (1280x1024) screens.

Other than what I mentioned I can't see another way around the centered bezel issue (other than using expensive high-res projectors). For me that's a show stopper.

Actually, I think you can run a TripleHead2Go out of 1 of your card outputs and just plug your 4th monitor into the other one and span across those.

You can't :( screens in span mode have to have identical resolution and such.

Correct.


For RTS-type games it might not matter that a 4-screen solution gives you a bezel down the middle. But almost every other type of game (FPS, racing, flying, RPG) sets the focus of the action at the center of the display, and then you are left staring at plastic.

I know with world of warcraft, you could have the four displays up with six monitors, and use the CT mod to shrink the rendered field down by the width of one of the side monitors

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Decrease the width of the rendered area of monitor one say by 1680 pixels and it will move the screens and such to the other five screens...

not sure if any other games have the ability or not

Just a small warning:

The engine in WoW still 'renders' the entire screen area regardless of what you set your viewport to using ct_viewport. Even running the rendered area at 1280x1024 the game is still processing all 3360x1050 pixels.

We had 2 Th2Gos running 6 screens with a single nVid card in vertical span mode in the labs a little while ago.

Just for fun we were running Crysis across all 6 monitors seen as one. Frames-per-sec were okay, but indeed the bezels got in the way. :)