2007: The year of the surround gaming!

ruirod · Post by **ruirod** » 03 Jan 2007, 18:31

Hi,

2006 was a tremendous year for hardware: The fantastic Core2Duo processor from Intel was released. The fantastic nVidia GeForce 8800 GTX graphics card was released. The prices of LCD monitors kept falling while response times got better. And Matrox came out with the TripleHead2Go! At the same time SLI chipsets got better and climaxed with the nVidiaÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s nForce 680i release to provide gamers all over the world with the best set of hardware ever available for surround gaming.

What is surround gaming? Take three monitors, spread your favourite games across them and youÃ¢â‚¬â„¢re in surround gaming mode. It requires tremendous processor and graphics power for 3840x1024 pixels to be coloured at least 20 times per second. You need state-of-the-art hardware to make this happen and now you have it!

If 2006 was the year of the hardware, could 2007 be the year of the software? DirectX 10 holds great promise. New games in surround mode hold great promise. Unfortunately Microsoft Vista does not hold great promise. If we were to stay with Windows XP we should need much tweaking and patching for frame rates to improve. We all hope software companies will clean their code in 2007, instead of trying to release new features and bloat.

What about hardware? Well, we users only ask for two things in 2007: bring the prices down and bring the power consumption down tooÃ¢â‚¬Â¦ please? We donÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t need more speed, we need the same speed at a more affordable prices, consumption and noise levels. Thank you.

What do you think?

Richy · Post by **Richy** » 04 Jan 2007, 09:39

we don't need more speed? When you see trailers for games like crysis? I think we'll ALWAYS need more speed! 2007 is gonna have a whole lot more in terms of hardware than 2006, we have the ati/amd solution appearing and that is supposedly something very special indeed for the gaming world, I'm holding off my next upgrade until i've seen benchmarks. With directX10 (no longer blasphemy to use that term) firing up too... a whole new breed of gfx cards will be out there, I know we have the 8800s, but that's just the 1st gen and by the time it's needed, an 8900 and the r600 will be out, then things will start flying! As for power consumption... good luck! The quad cores are real power whores, and looking at what companies like valve have in store for those extra processors... It's very difficult to ignore their advantages! Though again, I'll be waiting for the 2nd gen of quad cores before I dive in, I still haven't found a game I can't run on max settings that I like... and no, flight simulator x isn't my thing!

starfighter · Post by **starfighter** » 04 Jan 2007, 16:45

2006 was rather the year of SG.
This year matrox has to prove that SG usable with the upcoming games

( I hope not 2007 is the YEAR OF MATROX's RETREAT... :( )

RUS007 · Post by **RUS007** » 04 Jan 2007, 19:50

Matrox donÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t have to prove anything. We complained about the Parhelia being too slow for games in triple view. They gave us TH2G to get with the program. Now they donÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t have to do anything. They did their job.

starfighter · Post by **starfighter** » 04 Jan 2007, 19:57

Matrox donÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t have to prove anything.

If they regulary update the SGU with upcoming games and / or tell us the right settings for sg games then 2007 will be a SG year!

Richy · Post by **Richy** » 04 Jan 2007, 20:08

I'll be truly impressed if they enable it to support the resolution of 4240x1050, which I kind of know is impossible, but if they released another version maybe...

I suppose other than the size of the resolution possibly overloading a vga cable/port's capabilities (I'm guessing) the fact that 2 of my monitors have different numbers of vertical lines to the centre is the main issue

starfighter · Post by **starfighter** » 04 Jan 2007, 20:13

f they enable it to support the resolution of 4240x1050,

AFAIK this is not in Matrox Hands due DirectX restrictions but what with OGL and DX10 ?

RUS007 · Post by **RUS007** » 04 Jan 2007, 21:45

Anyone can update the SGU. Ones you find how to edit some of the games for surround view you will notice that most of them work the same way. There are only so many game engines out there.

As for higher resolution its not up to Matrox. They can add more resolutions with a simple firmware update anytime.

Richy · Post by **Richy** » 04 Jan 2007, 22:34

I'm not sure setting different resolutions for different monitors is as simple as a firmware update, I'd imagine that if at all possible, I would have to letterbox my 1050 screen to 1024 when in surround mode

RUS007 · Post by **RUS007** » 04 Jan 2007, 22:42

TH2G is a simple device designed for straight forward task by combining 3 identical signals. ItÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s providing an exact replacement for Parhelia ... nothing more nothing less.

JohnnyWakko · Post by **JohnnyWakko** » 05 Jan 2007, 13:44

Ruirod.

Nice write up, it sounds good and I hope it is true. However history tells us that "the market" has been and is still addicted to "Bloatware" and thus I feel hardware will always be sped up no matter what the need at the time.

andybris · Post by **andybris** » 09 Jan 2007, 23:15

I think you are about spot on, point well made and you obviously are very wise, looking at your choice of monitors :wink:

RUS007 · Post by **RUS007** » 10 Jan 2007, 02:00

I actualy have the same frame monitors that were used in product shots for Parhelia. :wink:

ruirod · Post by **ruirod** » 16 Jan 2007, 12:59

If games and drivers are optimized to take better advantage of multi-core CPUs and multi GPUs, as well as multimedia extensions of modern CPUs, then we could play all the games of 2007 using the current hardware.

The problem right now is that most games don't take advantage of multi-threading and multimedia extensions of CPUs and the graphics drivers don't always offer the best SLI or Crossfire performance possible by the hardware.

If the software becomes better then I'm convinced we could see huge performance gains at high resolutions with the currently available hardware. If you think about it, modern home PCs have super-computer characteristics, offering up to nine processors/cores per system: take a quad-core CPU, quad-SLI graphics, add an AGEIA physix card and you could predict the weather like they do with super mainframes :-)

My prediction is that the weather will only get worst if we don't bring down the power consumption of these machines :-)

ruirod · Post by **ruirod** » 09 May 2007, 19:57

It's happening! Software is slowly being optimized to take full advantage of the current top hardware.

nVidia graphics drivers are a lot better than at their first release. When I could only get 5 frames per second in Flight Simulator X I now get 10. SLI is finally achieving 80-90% card cooperation.

On top of that, Microsoft is working on a Service Pack 1 for FSX which takes advantage of multicore!

By the end of the year I expect to have 20 fps on FSX with all settings maximized, in very dense scenery areas, with resolution 3840x1024.

Optimize, optimize, optimize!

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