3 Screen multi 3D graphics

[gizard]

Anyone got any ideas on how to do this.
Primarily I want to use Flight Sim with 3 Screens.
I was thinking of A PCI-E card for the centre screen and then a PCI for either side - Probably a 1600X1200 screen in the centre and then 1280x1024 either side.

My question is has anyone achieved this - if so with what hardware?

PS - I will be building an entire new PC for this.

[mr_yogi]

The only consumer video card capable of utilising three screens in 3D mode is the Matrox Pharelia which was never that fast when it first came out and is now decidedly long in the tooth.

However I think Matrox (again) do offer gagets called doublehead2Go and tripplehead2Go which takes a very widescreen output from a suitably beefy video card and splits it accross two or three monitors. I think it was developed for mobiles and presentations but does work with gaming. But depends on the game and amount of tweaking possible I would imagine.

Hope that helps.

BTW your Idea of sharing workloads between PCI and PCI-express cards is a no goer. For cards to share workloads they need some form of multi-GPU support. The only current cards which support this are PCI express only (nVidia's SLI and ATI's Crossfire). Previous to this PCI cards did have multi-GPU support in the shape of 3dfx's SLi, but this did not support multi screen rendering, and are now antiques

Edited by mr_yogi on Monday 24th July 15:44

[docevi1]

Matrox G450 / 550 do this, although I think they are graphics cards in their own right rather than utilising the feed from a better g'card.

You can do dual screens very easily with most cards nowadays mind.

[mr_yogi]

I don't think either of those can utilise the tripplehead display in 3D mode. Besides the Pharelia is much more powerful and could only just run each screen is 800x600 without producing a sideshow on old games.

The G550 would have no hope

[malman]

mr_yogi said:

BTW your Idea of sharing workloads between PCI and PCI-express cards is a no goer. For cards to share workloads they need some form of multi-GPU support. The only current cards which support this are PCI express only (nVidia's SLI and ATI's Crossfire). Previous to this PCI cards did have multi-GPU support in the shape of 3dfx's SLi, but this did not support multi screen rendering, and are now antiques

Edited by mr_yogi on Monday 24th July 15:44

SLI and crossfire are setup so that both cards can accelerate the same 3d scene sharing the load between the cards. The app has no involvement in the process its done at driver level. By the sounds of it Flight sim 2004 appears to allow you to use entirely separate cards to process the individual bits of the 3d scene as they are treated as windowed applications so in theory you could have a mix of PCI and PCIe or thats how I read it anyway. Sounds like its using the extended desktop features of windows

www.fsinsider.com/articles/multimonitorsupport.htm

[gizard]

Didn't realise it was available but it seems this maybe the answer:

www.giga-byte.co.uk/Products/Motherboard/Products_Overview.aspx?ProductID=1957&ModelName=GA-8N-SLI%20Quad%20Royal

Quad PCI-E support and CPU Dual Core support - althought the CPU support appears limited at the current time.

Thanks for everyone's input.

[Zad]

Just get a twin PCI-E motherboard and run 2 dual head cards? Alternatively if you want to keep the same motherboard, run 1 dual head and a separate PCI card.

Matrox Parhelia cards are really made for business rather than gaming. Parhelia named after a meteorological effect more commonly known as "sun dogs" where you get smaller images of the sun to the left and right of the sun itself (para helios = beside the sun).

[chris watton]

I have the NVidia 7950 GX2 - it's like duel cards for one slot - am sure there'll be drivers for Quad SLI support soon - that'll certainly do the job (at least - the huge armies and battles in Rome look like Hollywood movies!)

[gizard]

chris watton said:

I have the NVidia 7950 GX2 - it's like duel cards for one slot - am sure there'll be drivers for Quad SLI support soon - that'll certainly do the job (at least - the huge armies and battles in Rome look like Hollywood movies!)

I had a look at this card it looks v.good - what mother board are you using? - I was thinking of a pair of these (gigabyte version) with:
www.giga-byte.co.uk/Products/Motherboard/Products_Overview.aspx?ProductID=1898&ModelName=GA-8N-SLI%20Royal

However they don't seem to support any dual core CPU's yet.

Anyone know of a Dual PCI-E X16 slot m/b with SLI support?

[chris watton]

I ahve the Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe mobo - very good and stable it is too. I also have 2x1gb of DDR2 Corsair RAM and a 4800 AMD x2 CPU. I do a lot of CAD work both on this PC and my works 'older' PC - the difference in performance (in the real world, not benchmarks) can be seen clearly when working on very large 3-D files.

[mr_yogi]

Just a thought, but if you're going to build a (very) high end system it might be worth waiting for motherboards based on nVidia nForce 5 SLI chipsets with support for the Intel Core 2 Duo (Conroe) which are due to be released very soon and which look very fast an good value.

[chris watton]

mr_yogi said:

Just a thought, but if you're going to build a (very) high end system it might be worth waiting for motherboards based on nVidia nForce 5 SLI chipsets with support for the Intel Core 2 Duo (Conroe) which are due to be released very soon and which look very fast an good value.



Agreed, the new Intel chips are supposed to be VERY good, even the cheaper ones have the same, if not better benchmark scores than the current AMD flagship chip!

[mr_yogi]

malman said:

mr_yogi said:

BTW your Idea of sharing workloads between PCI and PCI-express cards is a no goer. For cards to share workloads they need some form of multi-GPU support. The only current cards which support this are PCI express only (nVidia's SLI and ATI's Crossfire). Previous to this PCI cards did have multi-GPU support in the shape of 3dfx's SLi, but this did not support multi screen rendering, and are now antiques

Edited by mr_yogi on Monday 24th July 15:44

SLI and crossfire are setup so that both cards can accelerate the same 3d scene sharing the load between the cards. The app has no involvement in the process its done at driver level. By the sounds of it Flight sim 2004 appears to allow you to use entirely separate cards to process the individual bits of the 3d scene as they are treated as windowed applications so in theory you could have a mix of PCI and PCIe or thats how I read it anyway. Sounds like its using the extended desktop features of windows

www.fsinsider.com/articles/multimonitorsupport.htm

Thats interesting, I haven't played a flight sim since TFX on my 486

I wonder how that works, surley most PCI cards would be an order of magnitude slower than a PCI-express card

Do you think the side windows would run at a slower frame rate/ much less graphical detail or would everything be slowed to sync with the slowest card? Has anyone tried it?

Edited by mr_yogi on Tuesday 25th July 13:45

[malman]

Sorry should have put an "in theory" in there. I'm not reccommending you mix PCI and PCIe. I doubt you can get a PCI card that has anywhere near the grunt of even lower spec PCIe cards these days. I was more trying to point out that its not relying on SLI/crossfire techniques to do the multi screen for it.

I would expect you can run mismatched cards as each window is rendered separate they are going to run a different fps. Chances of getting same fps on different 3d scenes is slim unless there is something in flight sim holding them in sync. If you stick to the SLi/Crossfire cards though you can at least use them for other things as well as flight sim.

[gizard]

www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=293099

Does anyone know anything more about this board - The foxconn website has nothing about it... It looks like it will do the job but I am a little unsure of the processsor support...