• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

PLP and Gaming

I don't have my PLP/LLL setup anymore - I gave it up after I tested 5x1 24" 1920x1200 PPPPP and realized I couldn't use 5x1 for productivity purposes and replaced *THAT* with 3x30" monitors and 4x20" monitors for a LLL/LLLL setup. SoftTH is an interesting idea which I tested but has a long way to go, which led me to game mostly on only the 30" which I found irritating. My new setup allows me to run productivity software when I'm not gaming (editing video/audio on 20 megapixels of desktop is a real productivity boon) without having a separate set of monitors for gaming versus working. My quad-fire HD6950 2GB isn't scaling all that well in games, which I suspect is a VRAM issue and possibly a CPU bottleneck. I can probably pull a video card out without any performance impact.

The biggest problems with 3x30" are performance and field of view. In most games I have to turn down the eyecandy in order to maintain a reasonable framerate (especially when dealing with microstutter). The field of view has funny distortion problems in games like Star Wars The Old Republic because they never postulated the existence of such a wide monitor and even more importantly that a monitor could have a curved surface (I bend the wing monitors inwards to help see).
 
Zorachus said:
So how does BF3 play on PLP ? Are you just getting a stretched out 2560x1600 view ? Or is it 4960x1600 in-game ? If it is just a stretched out 2560, do you need to adjust your FOV in-game ?

How hard is Soft TH to setup old games for ? I would imagine games like WoW take advantage of Soft TH ? And Half Life 2 mods like Black Mesa should work too ?
Click to expand...

It runs at 4960x1600. I simply start the game in windowed mode, use the windows key+arrow left to move it to the far left screen. Then I drag it to fill all 3 screens. It automatically adjusts to the correct resolution for me. It plays pretty good for me. Might be a little laggy, but nothing too drastic. Lack of bezel correction is more distracting imo.

SoftTH is a little harder to setup. I haven't tried it with many games yet, but so far, it seems to be pretty much the same procedure. Place the dll in the correct folder (usually with the other dll files such as bin folder). Then start the game normally which will create a config file in the same folder. Then you can change some settings in the config file to set up the bezel correction. Last thing is really going to the games own config file and setting the resolution to 5380x1600 (including the area left off for bezels). Some games might need a little more fiddling, but searching for what other have done should guide you in the right direction.
 
I'm your huckleberry said:
It runs at 4960x1600. I simply start the game in windowed mode, use the windows key+arrow left to move it to the far left screen. Then I drag it to fill all 3 screens. It automatically adjusts to the correct resolution for me. It plays pretty good for me. Might be a little laggy, but nothing too drastic. Lack of bezel correction is more distracting imo..
Click to expand...

Does SLI work in that situation ? I thought I read gaming in Windowed mode doesn't let SLI work, only uses one card, and that full screen true gaming activated the second card for real SLI to work ?
 
Zorachus said:
Does SLI work in that situation ? I thought I read gaming in Windowed mode doesn't let SLI work, only uses one card, and that full screen true gaming activated the second card for real SLI to work ?
Click to expand...

Answered several times. SLI doesn't work in window mode. There is no fullscreen PLP gaming without SofTH, which doesn't work with anything newer than dx9.
 
fenixv said:
ulnervrgtit - it wont. the second card would be sitting idle playing in windowed mode.
Click to expand...

It did...I tried it while I had a second on RMA (the stickers were peeling off the first card). It was quite stuttery but it utilized both cards in windowed mode.
 
Zorachus said:
I am debating going PLP, my system in Sig could handle it hopefully ? I have the Dell U3011, just need the two Dell 2007 FP's. But worried how game play will be ? I mainly play BF3...PS2...WoW...Torchlight 2.

Do I just run all games in window mode ? And in-game should show a resolution of 4960 x 1600 to choose from ?
Click to expand...

I haven't tried many games at 4960x1600. The only one that really works windowed for me is BF3 because the BF3 borderless app obviously removed the border and lets you set the resolution.
 
fenixv said:
you don't change any settings in game. i have yet to see a game that actually has a 4960x1600 resolution option. what you do is merely drag the window size bigger like you would what any normal program. stretch it out to fit all three screens.

i've done it a couple times on bf3 to test and its fun when flying around but will completely cripple you if you try to do any competitive or serious gaming.
Click to expand...

You need a pretty beefy GPU but it can be done...Ive been playing at 4960x1600 almost exclusively lately and it hasnt negatively effected my stats, and Im well over 1 KDR so my starting point wasnt really low or anything. It does take some getting use to though.
 
fenixv said:
Answered several times. SLI doesn't work in window mode. There is no fullscreen PLP gaming without SofTH, which doesn't work with anything newer than dx9.
Click to expand...

So basically PLP is dead for gaming today ? Full screen gaming with 20+30+20 only works partially with Soft TH which is outdated and for Direct9 games only ? And in games I play, like Battlefield 3 just will not play in full screen game mode with PLP it seems ?

Only option is to wait for AMD's Eyefinity driver team to get PLP in the Catalyst drivers, which is said to be in the works, but no timetable, and who knows if nVidia is even working on a driver for PLP ?

So for now, i guess just best stick with a single 30" for gaming only. And maybe add the two 20", but would only be used for Desktop Windows stuff, never new games ?
 
That being said - I don't know what the current state is with nvidia gpu's. I don't own one.
 
fenixv said:
Yes to everything but the "never". Never say never, friend!

There are multiple other PLP threads in the GPU subforums. Here are a few under AMD:

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1662586&highlight=PLP

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1664726&highlight=PLP
Click to expand...

Thanks for the links. So it sounds like a no go from AMD still, that it's not just drivers, but a hardware limitation ? Thought I read somewhere that AMD was actually working on a PLP driver, but just that it was not coming soon, just in the "future".

And nVidia has zero info on PLP + Gaming.

The only hope is the code release by K, the creator of Soft TH, maybe someone else will make use of that code to work under DirectX11 ? AMD should grab that code, and run with it :)
 
Would this help PLP work in games ? I read you just isntall this program, it finds your games on your computer, you enable it, and then press * in-game, and it forces your desktop resolution in games. Is that true ?

https://www.widescreenfixer.org/
 
Never seen that prog. Try it and let us know :cool:

There was speculation AMD would support PLP before the release of the 7 series gpu's and eyefinity 2.0. The speculation was based off of a slide that showed several monitors with different resolutions. However, they were all landscape. After the release of the drivers and 7 series it was determined it did not support PLP full screen gaming.
 
Go triple 30 if you can. I did and I set up all my dell's in portrait mode and debezeled each one. Black gaffers tape around the bezels so that they look flush. BF3 looks amazing but you kind have to get use to the bezels being in the way, but they don't bother me at all. When I'm flying in the chopper, the bezels looks like the cockpit cover anyways :) Only problem I've been having are the drivers. The latest drivers causes a bunch of problems like firefox crashing immediately, I can't open windows device drivers, and BF3 errors and crashes immediately. Other than that, for gaming, its superb. Of course you gotta have horse power to back it up. Desktop resolution is at 4800x2560, but for games I run it at 3600x1920. At the lower resolution compared to the larger, the only difference is the size of the menu. Characters and everything else in game are the same size, so why waste power?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top