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Gaming on three or more monitors is no easy feat. Pushing that many pixels is hugely demanding on a GPU. So if you want to get the most from your multiscreen setup, you’ll need to pair it with adequate graphics power. Using our challenge scenarios as examples, we examine what kind of GPUs you will need to achieve adequate frame rates and quality settings.
To get the best gaming experience on a six-screen setup, you need two Radeon HD 6990 videocards—if you can find them.
AMD likes to tout the ability of its GPUs to handle up to six LCD panels simultaneously. You’ll need a special Eyefinity Edition card, complete with six Mini DisplayPort connectors, if you want to drive six panels with one card, based on the previous-generation Radeon HD 5870.
The problem is that the HD 5870 doesn’t really have enough gas to drive six 1080p panels with decent frame rates in many games. You’ll either have to significantly dial down the eye candy or reduce resolution—which defeats the purpose of having six panels. You’ll see better performance if you pair up two Radeon HD 6970s. Even then, you’ll need to sacrifice some high-end features.
If you want to go all out and drop in a pair of Radeon HD 6990 dual-GPU cards (assuming you can actually find them), then you can get pretty decent frame rates.
You can theoretically drive six panels with Nvidia-based cards, but you’d need either three cards in triple-SLI mode or two GTX 590 dual-GPU cards. It’s unclear, however, whether driver support is really there to deliver the same level of experience.
For more practical gaming, three 1080p LCD monitors is probably the sweet spot right now. You can drive three 1080p monitors with a single high-end, single-GPU card like the Radeon HD 6970 and get decent frame rates at the full 5760x1080 resolution. You will need to sacrifice some detail settings in some games. And there will be a few titles, like Metro 2033, that won’t be playable at these resolutions with a single card.
If you’re willing to go with two cards or a dual-GPU card, the field opens up. Either Nvidia or AMD can run a triple HD desktop display with either dual-GPU cards or two discrete cards. If you’re willing to go with the high midrange—Radeon HD 6950s for AMD or GeForce GTX 560 Tis for Nvidia—then you can probably get decent frame rates.
Assuming you have the monitors and the necessary stands, you can get an awesome experience from three 30-inch panels in portrait mode. That translates to 4800x2560 resolution, or 12.3 million pixels. You can go with a single AMD card, but don’t expect a good gaming experience. What you really want is a pair of high-end, dual-GPU cards. If you’ve got the cash, you might be able to hit good frame rates with two Radeon HD 6990s. That’s a lot of cash, but then you’re driving a lot of pixels. Remember, three of these 30-inch panels are really only about 150,000 pixels less than six 1080p panels. So in terms of GPU horsepower, you need about the same performance for a three-panel, 30-inch setup as you’d need for six 1080p panels—but it will probably look better.
What if you want to hook up three HDTVs? That’s the same resolution as three 1080p desktop panels, and the performance requirements are the same. However, unique problems exist. For one thing, you’ll want three HDMI connections. That’s not as hard as it sounds, though. If you’re going with Nvidia, you’ll need two cards (or a single GTX 590) and three DVI-to-HDMI cables. With AMD cards, you’ll want DisplayPort-to-HDMI adapters. Both of these solutions exist, thankfully.
The other issue you’ll run into is overscan—where the signal extends beyond the visible boundary of the display—although this problem crops up less with the newer HDTVs. If you’re hooking up older TVs, however, overscan can be enough to make you tear out your hair. In that case, you’ll definitely want a third-party solution, like PowerStrip ($29.95 for a single license). But that’s not a solution for the faint of heart.
So you’ve cleared off a huge swath of desk space, and you have your multiple large screens arranged just so. Now what? If you’re using an AMD graphics card, you need to pay a visit to the Catalyst Control Center. Getting your displays to work in concert isn’t a totally obvious process. You’ll see all your monitors represented by icons, but no standard menu option for extending the desktop. Rather, you need to select one monitor, then use a drop-down arrow in the upper-right corner of the icon to span a group of your choosing.
In the Nvidia Control Panel, you might think you can take care of the job in the “Set up multiple displays” tab, like you would with two screens. But if you’re using more than one GPU—in either a single- or double-card config— you actually need to go into the “Manage 3D settings” tab to get three or more screens working together.
With Widescreen Fixer, you can adjust the aspect ratio of select games for improved playability across multiple screens.
While gaming can be glorious across three or more large screens, some games are more adaptable to that format than others. In our tests, for example, we found that Call of Duty: Black Ops assumed an unnatural aspect ratio and field of view when we ran it on three 1080p LCDs (with a combined resolution of 5760x1080). But there is a way to compensate for these issues. A free third-party app called Widescreen Fixer (www.widescreenfixer.org) will adjust the aspect ratio to suit your screen setup. It requires that you install a separate plugin for each game you want to adjust—plugins are available for many popular FPS titles, including the Battlefield and Call of Duty franchises, BioShock, and Ghost Recon.
Another issue we encountered involved the placement of various maps, menus, toolbars, etc. in a massively multiplayer game, such as World of Warcraft. By default, this information occupies the far edges of your display, out of the way of the action. But when using an array of large screens, you find yourself having to crane your neck from side to side to access that information. Fortunately, there are a ton of custom interfaces that move those elements to alternate parts of the display. A multitude of custom UIs for WoW can be found at Wowinterface.com.
Comments are closed on this article
Thamuza
May 27, 2011 at 11:54pm
I would really like to see you guys do things like this with real world mid level and budget setups..
easyeddy
May 16, 2011 at 5:05am
Amazing this kind of mainstream analysis has waited until 2011... credit to maximumpc I guess but the bar's not that high - the article mostly gives just the obvious points though:
- you don't want the crosshairs in a shooter to be on the bezel
- you want thin bezels
- if you put widescreen monitors in 3 x landscape mode you end up with a very wide thin display space which messes up the 3D projection in most games which is too wide-angle for their game engines to display properly.
Here's a few more advanced points:
- * experiment tucking the centre monitor behind the other two so the bezels overlap - then it's important monitors are thin front-to-back to minimise the depth difference. Overlapping the bezels halves the size of the join.
- * most monitors are now widescreen, in a 3x config they should be rotated portrait and it's the typically thicker bezel along the bottom edge of the landscape screen that turns out to be critical as that is now where the screens join. This was tried in the article with the 30" monitors but not 23" - no surprise portrait 3x widescreen is better...
- * 4:3 ratio screens deserve a bit of a comeback for 3x multi-screen gaming as they then give probably the best combined layout in portrait mode. And they are cheap e.g. 3 x 20" 1600x1200 for a good combined resolution that is drivable by a single ATI card.
- * the 3xHDTV (and 3x23") trial was a bust because they didn't try portrait mode although of course that would have needed a custom mount. Even in landscape mode the HDTV's would have been better overlapped but in portrait mode the thick bezel on the bottom of the HDTV would be a killer. Also in portrait mode you don't really want LED's on the 'bottom' bezel because these then glow in the middle of the display...
- * Nvidia and ATI are very different in the way they support multiple screens at the moment because ATI 'eyefinity' basically amounts to a multi-monitor frame buffer built into the card so Direct3D upwards can treat the multi-monitor hardware as a single display area (i.e. built-in TripleHead2go) while Nvidia provides multi-monitor support via Windows (ATI can do this too if you want by turning off the frame buffer). This means games with Nvidia have to have multi-monitor support and in my experience this is shite - much easier to tell the game there's a single monitor with higher resolution which they rarely have a problem with except for extreme widescreen ratios. The fact that a single Nvidia card can only support 2 monitors and the game has to manage them separately means Nvidia is effectively a non-starter for mainstream multi-monitor gaming.
- Cheap monitors won't have a DisplayPort which limited ATI realistically to two DVI/HDMI screens until the $25 DisplayPort-to-DVI adapter (e.g. Sapphire) came along (they used to be $100+) about a year ago, so now cheap 3-screen gaming is fairly easy. This *was* a big issue but now you can ignore all the web threads from a year ago.
I run 3x20" dell 4:3 1600x1200 monitors in portrait mode on an ATI 5870 with a combined resolution of 3600x1600 and haven't yet found a game that doesn't run well at that resolution on the card (BFBC2, FSX, silent hunter, L4D2). Counter-strike runs at 250 fps in some maps but hey, the game is 100 years old. BF3 is out this fall and I'm fairly confident that will run fine too because I can always ease off the AA/AF if I need to as the resolution is high enough that jaggies are *not* the same issue as if you run a large screen with only 1920x1080. Ultimately I may end up putting in a second 5870 - that's always an option but hasn't come close to being necessary yet. This is *not* a low-end config but it's not the 2 x dual-gpu cards suggested in the article...
edit - by the way, in case you have any misunderstanding, in a game like Battlefield Bad Company 2 when you have three screens, the center screen shows exactly the same as a player with a single screen would be seeing, while the left and right screens give you an *additional* field-of-view to the left and right. As a three-screen gamer it's hard to understand how a player with one screen thinks they can compete in a close-up firefight with that narrow view. But if you're going to camp 10 miles away with a sniper rifle there's no difference.
shjt4brains
May 11, 2011 at 2:34pm
It is interesting that there was no mention of panel matching. When configuring dual screen or multi-monitor; brightness, contrast, and even color settings need to match to complete the feeling of a seamless display and enhance the gaming experience. Mismatch of brightness or color can severely compromise the visual enhancement of games in a multi-monitor configuration. This is just one more step that has to be completed in the setup of multi-monitor displays that can take considerable time based on viewing angle (especially in portrait mode) or size of displays (30” or above).
Otherwise great article.
easyeddy
May 16, 2011 at 5:00am
yeah shjt I agree with the issue - one of my monitors was noticeably dimmer than the other two (even though all are 20" dell 4:3 1600x1200) - however it really wasn't a big deal to setup with an image across all 3 screens and manually up the brightness on the dimmest screen until they looked ok. Maybe my reds, greens or blues are slightly off but I've never noticed. It's not the biggest issue though - in a 3D game you really need to minimise the effect of the bezels and bezel management would mean you lose that portion of the image and you could get shot from there... (although diagonal lines now line up perfectly across the screens) - my preferred approach is to *not* use bezel management but minimize the bezel width by overlapping the screens slightly - now you have to futz with the vertical mounts to get the images mostly aligned where you most look (e.g. the horizon in FSX) but accept a slight offset elsewhere. From sitting centrally in front of the screens there's no focus issue with the slightly recessed center screen, but there is a slight parallax issue vertically. In a firefight you don't think about it at all though.
Logun
May 11, 2011 at 11:11am
I just wanted to verify this:
"...PA301Ws offer the unique ability among 30-inch monitors to pivot into portrait mode"
No other 30 inch monitors allow a pivot into portrait mode?? Not even your best of the best ZR30W?
trgz
May 10, 2011 at 11:29am
Three of the more hardcore gamers on staff were photoshopped poorly into the images. Why bother if it a) looks so poor, and b) looks so cheesy?
thetechchild
May 10, 2011 at 3:28am
This is great if we have loads of cash lying around, but correct me if I'm wrong in saying that most of us don't. A better article would be testing a number of sub-$300 monitors of various sizes and aspect ratios in pairs. While these dream setups are nice to fantasize about, I'd like to know about a dual-monitor setup that doesn't force me to sell my home.
spRICE
May 10, 2011 at 10:57am
I'm pretty sure that you can't use a dual monitor setup for gaming. This article was specifically about using triple monitor setups in gaming. And besides, this is MaximumPC, not MinimumPC. I like reading about things that I can only fantasize about and I can't afford because it's entertaining.
easyeddy
May 16, 2011 at 4:42am
if 2 x $300 monitors means you have a budget of $600 without selling your house, then you're still better off with 3 x $200 monitors. It needn't be expensive though. Cheapest solution is 3x19" monitors which also allows cheaper graphics card as each screen is 1440x900 for total 2700x1440 across a 55" display space. Move up a notch and you can have 3x1920x1080 with maybe 23" monitors at $160 a piece (newegg), but also assume a good graphics card, and add $25 for a displayport->DVI adapter (or buy a Saphire ATI card including the adapter).
al360ex
May 09, 2011 at 6:32pm
Nice reference to Buffy !
For those of you who didn't get it, read the subtitle of Configuration 3...
And get a life ! :)
BUFFY FOREVER !!!!!
Lol, I'm just joking.
But seriously, if you haven't watch this TV show, or heard of it, I have one question for you :
Where have you been in the last decade ?
crazitrain02
May 09, 2011 at 5:08pm
With almost any game that natively supports triple-head gaming, there is some type of a HUD fix for it. Once you get the HUD fix in place, you shouldn't have to look to the left or right monitors to get the vital information that you need in a game.
WashTub
May 09, 2011 at 3:12pm
Call of duty has horrible aspect ratio to start Widescreen fixer works great for COD:MW2 not sure if theres a version for black ops.
sepiid
May 09, 2011 at 2:01pm
What about a 23" setup all in portait mode?
or the tvs mounted and in portait mode?
we need way more maximum here
Big Hoss
May 09, 2011 at 12:54pm
I remember watching the video with a bunch of different multiple-monitor configs. There were lots of complaints, but I felt proud that MaximumPC posted an article that is MAXIMUM. This is the type of stuff I love.
Although, you become less maximum when you play racing games on a 360 controller instead of a wheel. Seriously.
Thanks for the article.
