This Week at TPG - Feb 5th
Have you visited True PC Gaming? If not, you should. They are a great indie PC gaming site, and are friends of the WSGF. Here are some highlights from last week.
Recent Detailed Reports
Recent Articles & News
Last Week at TFT Central - Feb 5th
Last week was a good week for monitor fans. TFT Central completed their review of the 21:9 Dell U2913WM, and updated their review of the new Dell U2713H.
Reviews:Dell U2913WM and updated Dell U2713H.
AMD "Never Settle Reloaded" Bundle Confirms Upcoming Eyefinity Titles
Is AMD's latest bundle any good? It's their second stab at a major bundle in just the last few months. In the latter part of 2012, AMD launched a marketing tie-in that bundled several games with its top end video cards. The one thing that stood out with this promotion is that the games were both (1) good, and (2) not old. To much surprise AMD's "Never Settle" bundle included then-current high profile titles such as Far Cry 3, Hitman Absolution, Sleeping Dogs and Medal of Honor: Warfighter with its AMD Radeon HD 7800 and 7900 series cards.
The whole reason to buy a new graphics card is to play newer games. The catch-22 is that after the purchase you often have little money left over to purchase said games. In the past, gaming bundles usually included lower end titles, or favorites of yesteryear. While it was great for a marketing campaign, these bundles often proven to have limited value for gamers. A good bundle to be the tipping point to splurging on a new card. And AMD is hoping you see things that way.
New Options in the WSGF Monitor Stand Store
I'm pleased to announce that we are offering two new options. The first is a set of cable clips to help with cable management. This $10 kit provides four more bar clips, and three more pole clips. The second is a production quality mod to wall-mount a WSGF Edition Stand. The kit includes the pre-drilled pole and three sets of mounting hardware. The kit runs $50. Additionally, we are now offering stand-alone sales of our stand option kits. Previously these kits were only available as part of a stand or upgrade kit purchase. By adding the Option Shipping product to your cart, we can now cover shipping on stand-alone options.
WSGF Integrates 21:9 Support in our Games Database
Over the past few days we have been working to add the proper data elements to our games database, so that we can log support for 21:9 2560x1080 monitors. We have also added elements for testing the 2560x1080 resolution, as well as fields for the 21:9 support method (native, .ini edit. etc), HUD placement and whether the 21:9 aspect ratio introduces any unique anomalies into the game play.
DmC Devil May Cry (Triple Monitors / Eyefinity / Surround) [~4K]
Well that was impossible quick, 3 days after the games release and I published my first video on DmC Devil May Cry the developers released a patch. What did that patch do? Well among other things it fixed the FoV issues for multi-monitor users. That's right it took them all of 3 days to fix multi-monitor support, if only other developers were that fast, or even bother trying to fix it (Sony I'm looking at you specifically, get it sorted). This pretty much means the game has almost perfect multi-monitor support, as the GUI was already centred, there are a few trival issues here and there but nothing that effects the flow of the game. The game itself is what you would expect, its a spectacle fighter featuring a younger looking Dante but all the silly over the top fighting you would expect from a Devil May Cry game.
The video itself is part analysis, part walkthough and part waffle, feel free to like or dislike my video and comment are always welcome too.
Direct Video Link: DmC Devil May Cry (Triple Monitors / Eyefinity / Surround) [~4K]
Channel Link: http://www.youtube.com/user/n11skid
While this video can be watched on any screen it has been encoded to look best on a multi-monitor system, so if your running such a system, then select original quality from the drop down box and watch in fullscreen.
The Cave (Triple Monitors / Eyefinity / Surround) [~4K]
The Cave is a 2.5D puzzle platform that has you controlling three of a colourful array of characters with questionable motives trying to solve puzzles in the world using each of their unique skills. The game has very good multi-monitor support, it's horizontal plus and has a centred HUD, however there are a few of bugs that come from using a multi-monitor. The most crippling of which is an issue where your character can get completely stuck due to the camera trying to focus on something that would ordinary be off-screen at that point.
The video itself is part analysis, part walkthough and part waffle, feel free to like or dislike my video and comment are always welcome too.
Direct Video Link: The Cave (Triple Monitors / Eyefinity / Surround) [~4K]
Channel Link: http://www.youtube.com/user/n11skid
While this video can be watched on any screen it has been encoded to look best on a multi-monitor system, so if your running such a system, then select original quality from the drop down box and watch in fullscreen.
Benchmarking Bezel Compensation
A couple of months ago we ran a survey to better understand the type of content our users wanted to see on the WSGF. One of the questions dealt with which resolutions you wanted to see on our benchmarking. There was a fair amount of interest in bezel compensated benchmarking, but it was far eclipsed by interest in standard non-bezel compensated resolutions. From my personal experience, I haven't found that using a bezel compensated resolutions made any noticeable difference in performance.
Technically, I figured that the slight increase in pixels or FOV would make any noticeable increase in performance. My current bezel compensated resolution is 6040x1080, versus my native resolution of 5760x1080. This increase of 302,400 pixels represents a 4.86% increase in pixel count, and a 1.25 degree increase in the horizontal FOV. All in all, not a huge difference.
Devil May Cry (5) Quick Look (Triple Monitors / Eyefinity / Surround) [~4K]
Today I'm giving you quick look at the most recent Devil May Cry, the game is unfortunately vertical minus, but being an Unreal Engine game there is a configuration option in BaseEngine.ini called AspectRatioAxisConstraint which can be changed to make the game horizontal plus. However because the game wasn't designed for this it creates another issue that is almost as bad, as you fight you'll find the game appearing to zoom out more and more, till it gets to the point that it becomes hard to see attackers coming at you.
At time of writing we don't have a fix for this, the video below will show the issues in more detail and this year I'll be trying to make a habit of making these shorter videos if a game doesn't have proper support. Feel free to like or dislike my video and comment are always welcome too.
Direct Video Link: Devil May Cry (5) Quick Look (Triple Monitors / Eyefinity / Surround) [~4K]
Channel Link: http://www.youtube.com/user/n11skid
While this video can be watched on any screen it has been encoded to look best on a multi-monitor system, so if your running such a system, then select original quality from the drop down box and watch in fullscreen.
Strike Suit Zero (Triple Monitors / Eyefinity / Surround) [~4K]
I've been following this game since I saw it at Rezzed and was even lucky enough to go see the game while it was in development thanks to the good people at Born Ready. While there they showed us a development build which had their first pass at multi-monitor support, we took the opportunity to give them some advise on what would be nice for multi-monitor support. And I'm pleased to say they implemented pretty much everything we suggested and the game has great multi-monitor support thanks to their effort, better then just about every AAA game from last year.
If I could recommend the game on that alone I would, but the game is a lot of fun for those looking to recapture the space combat simulators of old. The video/s below are my analysis of the games multi-monitor support and my thoughts on the game itself, said commentary gets progressively worse the more I play as I get more immersed in it.
The video itself is part analysis, part walkthough and part waffle, feel free to like or dislike my video and comment are always welcome too.
Direct Video Link: Strike Suit Zero Part 1 (Triple Monitors / Eyefinity / Surround) [~4K]
Direct Video Link: Strike Suit Zero Part 2 (Triple Monitors / Eyefinity / Surround) [~4K]
Channel Link: http://www.youtube.com/user/n11skid
While this video can be watched on any screen it has been encoded to look best on a multi-monitor system, so if your running such a system, then select original quality from the drop down box and watch in fullscreen.
