Triple Monitor w/ SLI and overscan questions.

[Zoson]

Last night I hooked up my TV to my second GPU.

Apparently you can't run SLI with three monitors? Is there any way around this, or am I doomed? Kinda hoping to avoid having to put a third gpu into my system just to handle the tv... Seems kind of backwards too... How does triple monitor gaming work? Is it impossible with SLI enabled?

Also, my TV doesn't support 1:1 pixel mapping, so I've got to use resizing to account for the overscan... However this leaves me with an interesting problem. When I scale the picture down, it's not centered on the screen, so the bottom of the image lines up with the bottom of the screen, but there's a row of maybe 20 pixels at the top of the screen not being used.

Does anyone know how to shift the picture up? I thought there used to be controls for this on the NVCP, but couldn't find anything other than the scaling?

Thanks!

 

[Zoson]

I have a 9800GT sitting here...
Wondering what you guys think about me using this as a dedicated physx card and also to drive the TV?
Would the 9800GT hamstring my 560ti 448's if I used it for physx?
Would adding it in drop my SLI from 16x/16x to 16x8x? Or would it run the 9800GT at 4x and maintain 16x16x for the SLI gpus?
I'm only going to be gaming on a single screen, and would like to keep SLI.

 

[257Tony]

I have a 9800GT sitting here...
Wondering what you guys think about me using this as a dedicated physx card and also to drive the TV?
Would the 9800GT hamstring my 560ti 448's if I used it for physx?
Would adding it in drop my SLI from 16x/16x to 16x8x? Or would it run the 9800GT at 4x and maintain 16x16x for the SLI gpus?
I'm only going to be gaming on a single screen, and would like to keep SLI.

You'll have to run your own test to confirm, but when I tried an 8800GT (same basic thing as your 9800) as a PhysX card, it gave zero improvements, and that was with a GTX 470.

For your triple monitors, are your trying to do a true Surround/Eyefinity type setup, or do you just want 3 separate monitors?

 

[sirmonkey1985]

I have a 9800GT sitting here...
Wondering what you guys think about me using this as a dedicated physx card and also to drive the TV?
Would the 9800GT hamstring my 560ti 448's if I used it for physx?
Would adding it in drop my SLI from 16x/16x to 16x8x? Or would it run the 9800GT at 4x and maintain 16x16x for the SLI gpus?
I'm only going to be gaming on a single screen, and would like to keep SLI.

you can't run the card as physX and a display card, the drivers will go ape shit and cause an endless crash/recover till windows crashes. the only way to fix that is removing the card fixing the auto physX setting in the drivers and putting it back in.

trust me i tried this about a month back to see if i could get the 2D clocks working on both my cards when i wasn't gaming to save power. what a pain in the ass that was.

and yes you can run 3 displays with SLI.. thats called surround, but instead of running it as surround you run it as 3 extended displays.. i believe with nvidia you run 2 on the main card DVI and a third on the DVI port or HDMI port on the second card in SLI. other option is to run 1 DVI 1 HDMI main card and 1 DVI secondary card.

as far as the over and underscan goes there should be options in the control panel to fix it..

 

[Zoson]

So, right now i'm using a 560ti 448 as a dedicated physx card and as a display card... And it doesn't give me any crashing issues...

I don't want surround. I just want three extended displays, and one display with SLI.

 

[Zoson]

oh, and the issue i'm facing isn't exactly overscan, it's scan shift. overscan i can compensate for, but the picture isn't perfectly centered in the overscan, so when i compensate i end up with unused pixels on the tv, since to get the whole bottom i have to drop the res so much. yeah crappy tv software.

 

[sirmonkey1985]

So, right now i'm using a 560ti 448 as a dedicated physx card and as a display card... And it doesn't give me any crashing issues...

I don't want surround. I just want three extended displays, and one display with SLI.

really? then what the hell was my problem then.. grrrr!!! i guess it has something to do with them being old arse 8 series cards or something.

oh, and the issue i'm facing isn't exactly overscan, it's scan shift. overscan i can compensate for, but the picture isn't perfectly centered in the overscan, so when i compensate i end up with unused pixels on the tv, since to get the whole bottom i have to drop the res so much. yeah crappy tv software.

if you go into your nvidia display panel, and go under the adjust desktop size and position. then select your tv and click the size panel tab. does it allow you to resize/move the image you are seeing on the tv? i've honestly never used this feature but if i remember correctly it should be just like AMD's resizer that i've used with my old tv a couple years ago when the image didn't fit correctly.

 

[Zoson]

really? then what the hell was my problem then.. grrrr!!! i guess it has something to do with them being old arse 8 series cards or something.

if you go into your nvidia display panel, and go under the adjust desktop size and position. then select your tv and click the size panel tab. does it allow you to resize/move the image you are seeing on the tv? i've honestly never used this feature but if i remember correctly it should be just like AMD's resizer that i've used with my old tv a couple years ago when the image didn't fit correctly.

Not sure what your issue was, but if it was related to the 8xxx series cards, my 9800gt would suffer the same problem.

The resize control does help. However, my TV does not center the overscan. It is about 2/3 up the picture. So when I resize and bring the veritcal slider lower... The top part of the picture becomes fully visible about 20 pixels before the bottom part of the picture becomes fully visible... So I can get the whole picture... But there's a black band at the top of my screen that isn't on the bottom.

So I need a scan shift or something, rather than just overscan compensation.