What's the best way to go if I want to run 3 monitors and have great FPS?

Basically, I am looking into a 3 monitor setup, and want to know how to go about it.

I want to stay away from Matrox, because those cards just can't hang with some of the better games out there (talking mostly semi-recent First Person Shooters, like F.E.A.R. and other, more tech-oriented games).

So looking to run at least at a 1280x1024 resolution per monitor with a high FPS (over 60), and with most of the more advanced graphical features enabled (like AA, AF, shadows, etc).

Can it be done?

And if so, what do I need to do it the best?

There was another thread asking the same kind of question, not sure if it was lost in the database failure a few weeks ago though.

IIRC you need the highest end gpu you can get, and then use the 3rd party (Matrox?) splitter thing that would allow you to send the signal to 3 screens not just 2.

What game are you trying to split up to 3 screens? There is some guy who has an awesome setup for ARMA, links might still be in the Gaming Section (not in the sub forums but main one).

Well, you will laugh at me, but Star Wars Galaxies.

I just wanted to know if SLI or Crossfire could do this natively, and wanted the best because of future apps, like Crysis when it eventually comes out (and yeah, I am waiting for the newer batch of DX 10.1 cards to come out before I go a buying).

SLI won't let you use multiple monitors afaik, and doubt crossfire will either. I haven't tried it though so no idea on how people get it to work. Did you want the monitors to display different things or just give a super widescreen view?

Pretty much just a super widescreen view.

Let me clarify - by super widescreen, I don't mean one image stretched out over 3 monitors, but rather, the monitors on the right and left to expand the viewable area, much like how you see extra things on a widescreen dvd compared to the letterbox.

The only way to stretch games across three monitors is by using the Matrox triple head system. The game must also support custom resolutions, and all of the monitors should be identical. If you where running just two monitors, nView's span mode would be sufficient, but it only works on one card at a time, and I don't know of any nVidia cards with three outputs. SLI and CrossFire, while you would expect to support multiple monitors, do not, so that option is out of the question for you.

I believe that the Matrox "Triple Head 2GO" box splices together (up to) three monitors so it's seen by the computer as one single display, which you could then drive using SLI (depending on the single display resolution, you might NEED to in order to have livable framerates...). A quick glance at the specs makes it sound like it only supports up to 1280x1024 for each individual display, for a total 3840x1024 display seen by the computer / video card.

Regardless of the solution you use for this, keep in mind that it will only work on games that are nice about custom resolutions - many won't play ball.

You can also always just not use full-screen mode to play your game. Some (very few) games actually have meaningful multimonitor support built in, but no clue where SWG falls with regard to that.