Widescreen Gaming Forum

Am I the only one (other than Paddy, who also commented he found the distortion unacceptable), who is taking issue with how the TH2Go handles three Widescreens?

Half-Life 2 and Source games are extremely stretched and distorted on the outside two monitors. I don't really feel like I'm seeing more of the game at all.

And the World of Warcraft FoV issues are... debilitating to say the least. The zoom out hack works.... but it fuggers the camera control, and there are still many places in the game that FORCE a zoom in, putting you once again, in an extremely hard to play (effectively) with, FoV.

So distortion on top of an extreme loss of resolution. ~ 1 million pixels by messing with Ultra 16:9 instead of 3 4:3's, is disenfranchising me.

I really only got the TH2Go so I could utilize SLI again, after losing it when I got a second monitor.

Anyone want to buy a Digital TH2Go and a Viewsonic VX2025? :P


Edit: I first started with just two screens and the Dig TH2Go in Dualhead mode. Obviously games were unplayable because the crosshair in FPS's was cut down the center, and the WoW character was broken in half. But if I could sort out my single screen resolution issues, I could go back to Dual Head mode and just play games in full 1680x1050 windowed mode on one monitor, while still utilizing SLI. I didn't do this before because I could never get it to give me 1680x1050 as an option on my resolution lists. Then I'd just have to find someone to buy the third monitor. =) Post in: [url]http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/node/8242] please, if you have any ideas about getting resolutions to be selectable.

WOW needs a fov hack something fierce.... :shock:

Am I the only one ... who is taking issue with how the TH2Go handles three Widescreens?

Why are you taking issue with a specified specification?

... (other than Paddy, who also commented he found the distortion unacceptable) ...

I think that was with the analog version running 1280 x 720 a 16:9 res on a 1920x1200 16:10 screen and also had a lot to do with the up-scaling of that particular res to the 1920x1200 screen.
Hopefully I would find a 16:10 res and it's associated FOV on 3 16:10 screens to be OK ... but I haven't tried it.

I'm taking issue with it because it doesn't look very good, nor function very well in the games that Matrox advertised their product working in. And may I point out that the Matrox's 'specified specification' (?) of "3 (Wide)" does not support the resolutions of widescreen monitors, it simply preserves the aspect ratio.

Almost everyone out there is running 3 4:3 screens it seems. And all of Matrox's pictures are of games on 4:3 screens. And I imagine things do look good at those ratios, which is where all of the exclamations of 'wow!' are coming from regarding how it looks.

I tried C&C3 at 3840x800 and it too was unplayable. That was before a reboot that left me with a black screen on all three monitors. Subsequent reboots and PowerDesk reinstalls left me with monitors that wouldn't even show images when plugged directly into my video card with native resolution set (perhaps TH2Go was statically charging the cable or something?). I had far too much hassle just getting the triple head working properly, and now to have it mess up from just a regular reboot has been too much. It's a paper weight at the moment, until I get the energy to mess it with it again.

Who else out there is ACTUALLY running three widescreen 20.1" or greater monitors? Tell me if you enjoy seeing your character in WoW take up half of the vertical on your screen, or having images on the sides in CS, and DoD stretched so greatly you aren't even sure of their position relative to you. Or seeing 40% less of C&C3 with a loss in image quality. Or tell me how you got it working great for you. =)

The way TH2Go works will never look good on three widescreens. TH2Go is designed to work best with 5:4 screens and I'm not talking about TH2Go maximum resolution.

TH2Go pretends to render on a single screen. This is its primary advantage that allows TH2Go to run most 3D games through simple hacks, even if the game was not designed with TH2Go in mind. Rendering on a "single" screen means there's no specific code for multimonitor support, the game still works with a single camera view.

In 3D graphics, the maximum field of view per camera is 180 degrees, that's just the way perspective matrix works. If you want to display greater FOVs than that, you need to setup multiple viewports and render each one with its own camera view. There are very few games that support this.

With the maximum horizontal FOV set to 180 degrees, your vertical FOV will be limited by your screen's aspect ratio. Three 4:3 screens give a total 4:1 aspect ratio or 45 degrees in vertical at maximum. With 5:4 screens you get somewhat better 48 degrees but widescreens will give you less. Consider that most games have vertical FOVs about 50-60 degrees and you can see the problem.

This is the reason why many TH2Go games are a combination of horizontal+ and vertical- at the same time. You gain a lot on the horizontal view but you also lose some visibility on the vertical.

Bottom point, there really is such a thing as being too wide but only when dealing with a single camera games, which is about 99.99% of all 3D titles. So there is nothing Matrox can do in this case. The only way to get reasonable 3D presentation across three widescreens is to have native multiviewport support in a game. Those few games that actually support this don't even need TH2Go.

Is arrived today!!
Fantastic in triple head 2 go!!!!!
But I can't operative my trackir !!!

Cool, I was told this doesn't release till the 30th? If it's out today I'm going looking for it. :D

I have my copy from GoGamer.com and TH2Go works fine right out of the box. Hard ass game though.

Jason

Patch 1.02 (badly needed to fix the sea of bugs) totally breaks TripleHead support for me.. anyone else?
http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=75560

A lot of other people have game breaking problems in the new patch, I hope they fix it soon.

Cool, I was told this doesn't release till the 30th? If it's out today I'm going looking for it. :D

Was out in UK/Ireland last Friday and Germany a few weeks before that. I assume the US version will roll in a couple more patches for launch.