Running Oblivion acriss 3 monitors

[grannywils]

My husband is really the one who should be posting this question, as he is the computer tech, and he is the one who wants to do this. But he is busy looking all over the internet, and I told him there are lots of people right here on Nexus who might be able to help, so here I am asking the question. Here go's.

 

He saw a video on the net of someone who has Oblivion running on three monitors, and thinks it looks really cool. He has been trying to rig it up himself, as he has 3 monitors, but has not gotten it to quite work the way he wants it.

 

Is there someone here who know what it takes? He says there is some sort of special program or something (I am not tech savvy), but he is a computer tech, and thinks there is a way to work it some other way. Does anyone know? If I can get some help, I will get him to come on so he can discuss it with you.

 

Thanks in advance for any input at all that you can give.

[ub3rman123]

I used this guide once to try to get it working. It sort of worked, but it was very glitchy, i.e. half of the left monitor was mirrored horizontally, and it lagged a lot, along with failing to display most text.

[grannywils]

I used this guide once to try to get it working. It sort of worked, but it was very glitchy, i.e. half of the left monitor was mirrored horizontally, and it lagged a lot, along with failing to display most text.

 

 

Thanks ub3rman123 for responding. Have passed it along to my husband, along with the link.

[obobski]

I had Oblivion running across three displays with SoftTH (devolper's site here: http://www.kegetys.net/SoftTH/), had to configure the secondary displays within SoftTH to 16-bit color and some other restrictions to get it playable, still lagged like crazy in high graphics areas (forget the Orrery entirely) - I was using two PCIe cards as SoftTH advised, and my performance still took a huge hit (running it across two 1152x864 4:3 monitors and a single 1440x900 16:10 monitor for a total of 3477x900 and I was probably averaging 30-40 FPS at best, into a 2560x1600 16:10 monitor I probably averaged twice that on the same system (the single monitor is actually more pixels)). SoftTH must be configured/tweaked per-game, so you will add files to the Oblivion directory like a mod, and play with a configuration file to get things working right (like FOV and whatnot), if you want it to work with another game you must repeat this process.

 

If your computer doesn't let you have a pair of PCIe x16 cards, forget it entirely - PCI simply won't handle the bandwidth requirements.

 

Another option, if you're up to buying new hardware, would be AMD Eyefinity (you need a Radeon HD 5000 or 6000 series board and supported monitors (all digital, at least one must support DisplayPort either through active adapter or natively), which will use a single graphics adapter to drive all three monitors - I don't know what the performance hit is like, but it's supposed to be much lighter than SoftTH. This solution, and the two below it, don't require the same level of tweaking that SoftTH does (mostly because we've moved into commercial products).

 

Also, again if you're buying hardware, look at Matrox's TripleHead2Go, either the Digital or DP edition, its GPU agnostic so you can have nVidia, ATI/AMD, S3, whatever you want, and it will give you triple monitor gaming - downside is that you have some resolution restrictions, PowerDesk (Matrox's software) is a bit dated, and some people have trouble getting the thing to even work. The upside is it supports three DVI or DP monitors, an analog edition also exists (its cheaper), but it doesn't support as high of resolution (I think it only supports 3x1280x1024 or 3x1440x900 if I remember correctly, the digital versions will do 3x1920x1200).

 

Finally, nVidia has released their 3D Vision Surround tech, which even supports 3D Vision (the 3D glasses for gaming), you need a supported card or set of cards (the list is sorta long: http://www.nvidia.com/object/3dv-system-requirements-surround-technology.html), this will give you similar connectivity to the Matrox, with none of the resolution impositions, and the ability to run 3D if you have monitors that can do 120hz (high end CRTs, some DLPs, and some LCDs) - downside is the massive price if you don't already have the hardware (a GTX 590 is not cheap, for example).

 

My advice: if your hardware supports two PCIe x16 cards, and you have a spare card to test out (it will work with different brands of cards, but you have to have Windows XP or Windows 7 to install that - afaik Vista's WDM still doesn't let you run ATI and nVidia or whatever side by side), try SoftTH - if you like the experience, then look at buying some fancy hardware solution if this is something you're going to do as a regular thing (just because the hardware solution will let it port to basically any game, and will probably give you better performance).

 

The reason I say test it out first, is because the triple monitor gaming experience is a lot different than you might expect - I personally didn't care for it, and went back to a single larger monitor and just played with the FOV a bit; some people absolutely love it though.