NVIDIA 3D VISION SURROUND Experience @ [H]

thehybridfrog said:
Ya they do, which is why I don't understand why they wouldn't work with 260's.
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Last I had heard, the initial 3D Vision Surround driver would only support the 400 series, with later drivers adding support for the 200 series.

Are you saying these already work with the 200 series?
 
Unknown-One said:
@ Kyle

You mentioned having issues getting Doom 3 to run at all on your test system. It takes a little bit of tweaking, but it will indeed run in surround:

*snip*

The HUD stretches, and it involved a hex-edit (in order to get the FOV correct), but it does work. Thank the fine folks over at Widescreen Gaming Forum for figuring out how to do it.
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Yup... I've been meaning to get Doom 3 again so I haven't tested it myself, but the thread here should detail the necessary steps:

http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=3503&hilit=Doom+3
 
harmattan said:
Interested in results with tri-sli 480s. Stalker: CoP and Metro 2033 really hitch up at 3600x1920 at high settings with two OC'ed 480s.

I thought triple Crossfire was still broke in Eyefinity...? I tried it back in March with 5970+5870 and results were awful.
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Oh I sold the 5970 and replaced with a 5870, the frames are lower (though not much as I OC'd the 5870 as sig) but CF and EF less than 60 FPS has a real stuttery feeling, the frames don't drop but it just looks/feels crap. There is a thread on the stuttery-ness of CF and EF somewhere on [H]
 
mach1.9pants said:
Oh I sold the 5970 and replaced with a 5870, the frames are lower (though not much as I OC'd the 5870 as sig) but CF and EF less than 60 FPS has a real stuttery feeling, the frames don't drop but it just looks/feels crap. There is a thread on the stuttery-ness of CF and EF somewhere on [H]
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Why did you downgrade from 5970 to a single 5870? Surely you knew the 5970 would give you a better Eyefinity experience.
 
because of the stuttering with CF and EF... there are a lot of complaints about it.. a single 5870 does decently on it's own at EF resolutions.. I have been amazed at how well mine has done.. I can appreciate not wanting the headaches CF brings into the picture with EF when a single 5870 does pretty well.
 
revenant said:
because of the stuttering with CF and EF... there are a lot of complaints about it.. a single 5870 does decently on it's own at EF resolutions.. I have been amazed at how well mine has done.. I can appreciate not wanting the headaches CF brings into the picture with EF when a single 5870 does pretty well.
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There's only one game that stutters for me in xfire: Crysis Warhead. That said though, I wasn't blown away with my 2nd 5870. I wanted to get it just to see for myself what sort of improvements I could get and if the stuttering was really there.

Personally all games except for crysis warhead are fine with xfire (unless they just don't play nice with xfire to begin with like older games).

Ultimately though, a single 5870 really is a sweet sweet deal for triple monitor gaming. I think the second card just doesn't add as much value as the pricetag warrants.
 
agreed for sure... I had a second 5870 in my shopping basket more than once and just couldn't pull the trigger for such a minimal gain and loosing vsync in a lot of games.. it's a very mixed bag of results I have read from EF and CF users.. seems like different motherboards / hardware configs / system environments are really affecting the results.. for as much as I have talked about it I should have just tried it out.. but oh well. I am going with a pair of GTX470s now.. it will be nice to be able to turn AA back on finally ;)
 
Yeah the EF experience is much much better with a single 5870 than CF 5870 or a 5970 running CF tried all three, I borrowed a mate's 5870 for a CF trial) (I have. The stuttery-ness is not just one game, BFBC2, ArmA 2 and in fact every game I tried which knocked the frames to lower than about 60 FPS. So i enjoy my single 5870 a lot more, it is better to game at 40FPS on a 5870 than a 5970 at 55, EF and CF sucks.

Here is the 10 page or so thread which touches on it: http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1506951
 
Just wondering what the bandwidth bottleneck is for 1920x1080?

I can tell you that for 1920x1200 in COD4 I fluctuate from 110 to 130, well around there. GPU usage shows that they are getting less work as they bounce off of the bandwidth bottleneck, as it simply can't pass more frames across the sli bridge.
 
I regret purchasing a 1GB 5870 and not a 2GB one just for the boost for high EF resolutions.
 
Unknown-One said:
@ Kyle

You mentioned having issues getting Doom 3 to run at all on your test system. It takes a little bit of tweaking, but it will indeed run in surround:



The HUD stretches, and it involved a hex-edit (in order to get the FOV correct), but it does work. Thank the fine folks over at Widescreen Gaming Forum for figuring out how to do it.
Click to expand...

Coolio. QIII was easy, but the same r_customheight XXX etc and vid_restart did not work for me, so I went on about my business.
 
revenant said:
because of the stuttering with CF and EF... there are a lot of complaints about it.. a single 5870 does decently on it's own at EF resolutions.. I have been amazed at how well mine has done.. I can appreciate not wanting the headaches CF brings into the picture with EF when a single 5870 does pretty well.
Click to expand...


I have used many CF EF setups and have yet to see it....actually my personal system is 5970 current and is greatness.
 
Question for the NVsurround guys, so I picked up a Bioshock 2 off steam because it was dirt cheap the other day off steam. Im running the monitors in my sig with nvsurround @ 5760x1080. When I launch the game, it spans across all 3 screens even @ 1920x1080. I cant get it to switch to just my center screen.

I dont know wtf to do lol. Im getting frustrated. I then set it to 5760x1080 and it plays but its all stretched out and such. Nothing like how TF2 / Bad company 2 / and etc run in eyefinity / nvsurround, this is just bad.

Is this an issue that is going to make me manually go into nv control panel, switch to 1 monitor just to play this game and then go back to 3 when done ?
 
bizzmeister said:
Question for the NVsurround guys, so I picked up a Bioshock 2 off steam because it was dirt cheap the other day off steam. Im running the monitors in my sig with nvsurround @ 5760x1080. When I launch the game, it spans across all 3 screens even @ 1920x1080. I cant get it to switch to just my center screen.

I dont know wtf to do lol. Im getting frustrated. I then set it to 5760x1080 and it plays but its all stretched out and such. Nothing like how TF2 / Bad company 2 / and etc run in eyefinity / nvsurround, this is just bad.

Is this an issue that is going to make me manually go into nv control panel, switch to 1 monitor just to play this game and then go back to 3 when done ?
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No, you should be able to use NVIDIA scaling with fixed aspect ratio. Try that and see what happens.

But by default you shouldn't have to do that.. odd.
 
@Kyle

I temporarily swapped my HD5850 for two GTX260's so I could test this out, and I ran straight into the same issue you had with Doom 3. I spent some time bug hunting, and came across something troubling.

There appears to be a hard resolution limit for games using the Doom 3 engine (and many other OpenGL applications) when they're running on Nvidia cards. I ran the game in a window so I could quickly switch the game's resolution, and discovered that setting the resolution any wider than 4096 pixels instantly resulted in the render window turning gray.

This happens with or without SLI enabled, and with or without Surround enabled. It doesn't appear to be limited to the GeForce 200 or 400 series either, because I was able to make the issue appear on a single 9800GT as well. This appears to be an issue effecting every Nvidia card, with every version of their video driver that I've tried.

Just to be sure, I swapped the HD5850 back in. Doom 3, Prey, and Quake 4 all started working at 5040x1050 again. I also did some searching on Widescreen Gaming Forum, and found that everyone who had tried to run these games using an Nvidia card with a TripleHead2Go had seen the same problem crop up. Wider than 4096 pixels = gray screen.

There's something wrong with Nvidia's drivers or hardware, and it's a long standing issue spanning multiple generations. Think you can give Nvidia a poke so they'll fix it?
 
Unknown-One said:
@Kyle

I temporarily swapped my HD5850 for two GTX260's so I could test this out, and I ran straight into the same issue you had with Doom 3. I spent some time bug hunting, and came across something troubling.

There appears to be a hard resolution limit for games using the Doom 3 engine (and many other OpenGL applications) when they're running on Nvidia cards. I ran the game in a window so I could quickly switch the game's resolution, and discovered that setting the resolution any wider than 4096 pixels instantly resulted in the render window turning gray.

This happens with or without SLI enabled, and with or without Surround enabled. It doesn't appear to be limited to the GeForce 200 or 400 series either, because I was able to make the issue appear on a single 9800GT as well. This appears to be an issue effecting every Nvidia card, with every version of their video driver that I've tried.

Just to be sure, I swapped the HD5850 back in. Doom 3, Prey, and Quake 4 all started working at 5040x1050 again. I also did some searching on Widescreen Gaming Forum, and found that everyone who had tried to run these games using an Nvidia card with a TripleHead2Go had seen the same problem crop up. Wider than 4096 pixels = gray screen.

There's something wrong with Nvidia's drivers or hardware, and it's a long standing issue spanning multiple generations. Think you can give Nvidia a poke so they'll fix it?
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See this is the compatibility issue I was worried about. We were all under the assumption that multimonitor should work the same across the board. I'm dying to see nvidias compatibility list when the drivers leave beta. Though of course it'll probably only list newer games like ATi. blah..
 
piscian18 said:
See this is the compatibility issue I was worried about. We were all under the assumption that multimonitor should work the same across the board. I'm dying to see nvidias compatibility list when the drivers leave beta. Though of course it'll probably only list newer games like ATi. blah..
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This isn't an issue with multimonitor itself, it's some weird OpenGL limitation on Nvidia cards. It's just that using multiple monitors give you the required resolution to make this long-standing bug show up. If you somehow had a single 16:10 monitor who's horizontal resolution was larger than 4096, you'd see this same gray screen bug pop up when using an Nvidia card.

The games themselves (Doom 3, Quake 4, Pray, etc) aren't the problem here, because they work fine at these high resolutions on ATi cards. This is a bug on Nvidia's end.
 
All I can say is that it's not an Open GL specific problem. I am running Freespace 2 using the Open Source Project launcher, which only works in Open GL since version 10.6, at a resolution of 6040x1200. It works. Now, I can't verify that it is actually running at that resolution; it doesn't look any better than I remember it looking from back in the day, but it certainly runs.

So maybe what we're seeing is an Nvidia compatibility problem specific to id's implementation of Open GL.

Not sure how much I care since id (or a team using its engine) hasn't put out a game worth playing in 10 years, but it'd be better to have it fixed in time for Rage.
 
Was playing around with this last night. I'm happy to finally see it working on nvidia, but even wow was pushing my cards at 90% so I know I won't have a great experience more demanding games with my limited hardware. The biggest issue I've run into is that the nvidia driver has blue screended my system twice. Once while alt tabbing and once when UAC was popping up. Not very happy there, first display driver related blue screens I've seen since Vista first launched. I know its still in beta, but those types of problems generally don't get fixed in a few weeks.
 
Matrices said:
All I can say is that it's not an Open GL specific problem. I am running Freespace 2 using the Open Source Project launcher, which only works in Open GL since version 10.6, at a resolution of 6040x1200. It works. Now, I can't verify that it is actually running at that resolution; it doesn't look any better than I remember it looking from back in the day, but it certainly runs.

So maybe what we're seeing is an Nvidia compatibility problem specific to id's implementation of Open GL.
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That seems to be the case. Not all OpenGL games have the problem, but those that do show the exact same symptoms as the Doom 3 engine.

In any case, lets hope Nvidia fixes the problem in their next driver.
 
Bummer on doom3 engine games... hopefully it will get sorted out with a driver though. I like to play Classic Doom for Doom3 every once in a while. :p I didn't have too many issues getting games to play at 5760x1080... some required some hacking, but most were fairly easy to coax into playing at that res.. I expected to have more issues than I did actually.
 
In general, the issue is not getting games to play across three monitors. It's not even that the aspect ratio is incorrect. The two main problems I see are (1) FOV too high on center monitor, which makes the fisheye effect on the side monitors too jarring, and (2) HUD elements appearing on side displays instead of center display.

Some games let you edit the FOV in-game or through a config file, but either the FOV range is limited (HL2 engine) or doesn't take in single-player (BC2). It'd be nice to have more control over FOV.

I've had the HUD issue has appeared in Serious Sam HD and X3: Reunion and its expansion. Probably happens in many games. There's is a fix available for HL2 engine games, and it's not really a huge deal in shooters, but it makes X3 games pretty hard to play since you rely so much on the HUD for a plethora of data. X3 is hard enough without trying to learn how to play by squinting and stretching from one monitor to the next; I'll probably learn how to play on one monitor and then when I'm comfortable enough with it I'll switch to three.
 
yes - the lack of being able to tweak the HUD elements was/is a bit annoying.. this is where real support for 3 screen (and beyond) would help a lot.. the fisheye didn't bother me too much if I stare straight ahead.. it did bug me when trying to use screenshots as a desktop..
 
revenant said:
yes - the lack of being able to tweak the HUD elements was/is a bit annoying.. this is where real support for 3 screen (and beyond) would help a lot.. the fisheye didn't bother me too much if I stare straight ahead.. it did bug me when trying to use screenshots as a desktop..
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In general, the fisheye is normal, but when the FOV is too high it is clearly too incongruous to ignore.

Frankly, part of the problem is that the three screens really shouldn't be of equal size. The center screen, which you're supposed to be looking at, should be larger than the side screens, which are only peripheral. With a larger center screen, the bezels would also fall more to the sides of your vision.

The solution is actually already available - PLP (Portrait Landscape Portrait) mode, which Matrox and Soft TH users have been able to do for years. I hope that in "version 2.0" of this technology, we will be able to use PLP.

And "correct" or not, I'd like to see a reduction of fisheye in general - a flattening option. I mean, there is simply no way that it makes sense for Alyx's face to stretch ridiculously across two-thirds of my right monitor while I'm driving the buggy. And it also makes RTS and isometric games useless in Surround/Eyefinity.
 
Is there an easy way to switch between Extended Desktop mode (where Windows is aware of three individual monitors) and Spanned mode?
 
PSA, Grid is broken in Surround. It won't even launch. I was amazed to find that when I exited Surround mode, the game booted up fine. I also exited SLI mode, so I suppose it could be that as well...I've just never had a situation where a game refused to launch at all due to video card drivers, let alone a particular mode within the drivers.
 
Try booting grid in windowed mode and some low standard resolution. Then when the game is loaded, then alt-enter for fullscreen. See if that works. Just a hunch, as this is how Dirt 2 is for me. Wont load if I try to boot directly into 6048x1200.
 
I'll try that. Although no game boots into Surround resolutions by default, just the center monitor's native resolution.

Here is something I picked up as a tip from a guy at Widescreengamingforum.com, which is a great resource:

http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/support/gxm/software/?os=2&product=71

Use the top link to download Matrox PowerDesk, and within that, Desktop Management. Use the desktop divider tool there to split your "single" huge display into the three physical displays that you actually have. Now you can maximize your windows and such without having them span across all monitors. No need to switch between Surround and regular mode anymore.
 
JC2 booted straight into my NV Surround resolution as soon as it was installed....
 
Matrices said:
Here is something I picked up as a tip from a guy at Widescreengamingforum.com, which is a great resource:

http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/support/gxm/software/?os=2&product=71

Use the top link to download Matrox PowerDesk, and within that, Desktop Management. Use the desktop divider tool there to split your "single" huge display into the three physical displays that you actually have. Now you can maximize your windows and such without having them span across all monitors. No need to switch between Surround and regular mode anymore.
Click to expand...

This is a sub-optimal hack, and it does not offer the same level of functionality that true extended desktop mode does. The OS still isn't aware of three individual displays, so many things still don't work correctly.

There needs to be a simple way to switch between Extended Desktop and Spanned display modes. Lacking this feature is a complete deal-breaker, because for those of us who prefer to run in Extended Desktop mode while not gaming, it means we have to recreate the display group every time we want to play a game. Forget that!

You can already do this on ATi cards with a couple of profiles assigned to hotkeys. Far better than Nvidia's current driver, but it still requires you press the hotkey to switch modes before starting your games. If Nvidia really wanted to win me over, they'd figure out some way to automatically enable spanned mode when a game starts, and automatically enable Extended Desktop mode when a game exits.
 
Uh, you can probably stop whining because these are things called "beta" drivers. Have you even tried the drivers? There is no "creating a display group"; you press one button to get in and out of Surround mode.

And there's nothing "sub optimal" about this software - it does exactly what I need, which is maximize a window for the current monitor it's on. What "many things" are there outside of windows? Good enough for me until support can be added.
 
Bo_Fox said:
Damn it, man.

You're getting me depressed about 3D being a fad once again. No, it is gonna get solid traction this time around. Remember how Nintendo's Power Glove in the 80's was a fad? Then Nintendo's Wii gained enough traction to slow down Earth's rotation by a few milliseconds, right?
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GL w/that hope. Some of us stopped holding our breath re 3D way back in the middle of the last century of the last millennium.

http://www.ray3dzone.com/ExHist.html
 
Matrices said:
Have you even tried the drivers? There is no "creating a display group"; you press one button to get in and out of Surround mode.
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Yes, I've tried the drivers. I said as much when I went over the issues said drivers have with the Doom 3 engine.

I can't find any one-click solution for switching between Extended Desktop and Surround in these drivers. I have to run through the entire wizard every time I switch, which is annoying as hell. Even if there is a way to do it, having to drill all the way down into the driver control every time I want to start a game isn't a great end-user experience.

Matrices said:
there's nothing "sub optimal" about this software - it does exactly what I need, which is maximize a window for the current monitor it's on.
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Actually, it doesn't even do that correctly. The windows never go into a maximized state, they're just re-sized to fill one of the monitors. You can tell because you still have frames around the windows, which are supposed to be hidden on windows that are actually maximized.

Matrices said:
What "many things" are there outside of windows? Good enough for me until support can be added.
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Some applications ignore the boundaries set by that software. It also completely breaks Aero Snap. Dragging a window down to restore it doesn't work, using Winkey + arrow doesn't work correctly either since Windows isn't actually aware of extra screens. In short, it's half-assed, and nowhere near as good as Extended Desktop mode.
 
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darkpaw said:
Was playing around with this last night. I'm happy to finally see it working on nvidia, but even wow was pushing my cards at 90% so I know I won't have a great experience more demanding games with my limited hardware. The biggest issue I've run into is that the nvidia driver has blue screended my system twice. Once while alt tabbing and once when UAC was popping up. Not very happy there, first display driver related blue screens I've seen since Vista first launched. I know its still in beta, but those types of problems generally don't get fixed in a few weeks.
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Bad news for you. The NV Surround drivers were designed for Windows 7, not Vista. So that's most likely the source of your issues. It's time for you to step up operating systems if you want Nvidia surround support.
 
vjcsmoke said:
Bad news for you. The NV Surround drivers were designed for Windows 7, not Vista. So that's most likely the source of your issues. It's time for you to step up operating systems if you want Nvidia surround support.
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Yep... I am installing 7-64 right now on the gaming rig (as I type) finally 100% on 7 now..
 
vjcsmoke said:
Bad news for you. The NV Surround drivers were designed for Windows 7, not Vista. So that's most likely the source of your issues. It's time for you to step up operating systems if you want Nvidia surround support.
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I sad I hadn't seen a display driver caused blue screen since Vista. Been running 7 since the day beta hit technet.
 
Matrices said:
In general, the fisheye is normal, but when the FOV is too high it is clearly too incongruous to ignore.

Frankly, part of the problem is that the three screens really shouldn't be of equal size. The center screen, which you're supposed to be looking at, should be larger than the side screens, which are only peripheral. With a larger center screen, the bezels would also fall more to the sides of your vision.

The solution is actually already available - PLP (Portrait Landscape Portrait) mode, which Matrox and Soft TH users have been able to do for years. I hope that in "version 2.0" of this technology, we will be able to use PLP.

And "correct" or not, I'd like to see a reduction of fisheye in general - a flattening option. I mean, there is simply no way that it makes sense for Alyx's face to stretch ridiculously across two-thirds of my right monitor while I'm driving the buggy. And it also makes RTS and isometric games useless in Surround/Eyefinity.
Click to expand...

I agree with all of this... the center should be main and the sides fill on FPS games for sure.. when I play LotRO though I do look more directly at the side screens at times because I am just standing there crafting and watching people run around in the crafting hall, and such... and I WISH also we could do away with the fish-eye.. hopefully some tweaks and or native driver or in game options will come out for this..
 
revenant said:
I agree with all of this... the center should be main and the sides fill on FPS games for sure.. when I play LotRO though I do look more directly at the side screens at times because I am just standing there crafting and watching people run around in the crafting hall, and such... and I WISH also we could do away with the fish-eye.. hopefully some tweaks and or native driver or in game options will come out for this..
Click to expand...

The "fish eye" is optically correct for a game camera projecting onto a flat surface (your monitor). The problem is, game cameras are centered on the dead-center of your display. This means the projection will only look correct when you stare at the dead-center of your display (even on a single monitor).

The only way to completely fix this issue would be to implement eye-tracking (this would also have to be explicitly supported by the game). If the game can track exactly where you're looking on your display, it can adjust the center-point of the game camera to match.

This creates a new issue, however. Only one person (the one the game is tracking) will be able to view this at a time. Everyone else looking on will see the screen warp around oddly because it's matching your vision, not theirs.
 
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