Widescreen Gaming Forum

I was at CES last week and dropped by the nVidia booths. The first thing that struck me was that the demo they were running (Avatar the game in 3D) was playing across three monitors. At that booth I talked to an nVidia tech that seemed pretty knowledgeable and he confirmed that
1) Fermi was powering the setup
2) Mulit-Monitor Support will be standard.

Later I went upstairs and saw Batman:AA in 3D, also across three screens (1080p Acers). For that demo you could see the PC. It was running two nVidia cards (current gen as confirmed by the rep). I asked him about the setup and he said that the multi monitor capability is coming in an update. That setup had two dvi cables running from one card and one from the second.

They had a third setup running NFS:Shift, but the booth babe didn't know anything...

I haven't been paying as much attention to nVidia since I got my eyefinity display going. Is this something new or is it old news?

Check the MM forum categories, they got their own cave now.

Moved to the nVidia MM cave ...
Thanks for the heads-up ... some nice info there ... particularly this bit ...

Later I went upstairs and saw Batman:AA in 3D, also across three screens (1080p Acers). For that demo you could see the PC. It was running two nVidia cards (current gen as confirmed by the rep). I asked him about the setup and he said that the multi monitor capability is coming in an update. That setup had two dvi cables running from one card and one from the second.

:onethumb

I haven't been paying as much attention to nVidia since I got my eyefinity display going. Is this something new or is it old news?

There is nothing new with multi-monitor gaming or 3d, but there is new ways of doing it and products where its available.

Matrox Parhelia have been a single card solution earlier. Matrox TH2G gave multi-monitor gaming to all GFX cards, ATI Eyefinity is ATI's new multi-monitor gaming solution and Nvidia surround is the new one from them (they have offered multi-monitor setup for Quadro series for years though).

The same goes with 3D. As far as I know, Nvidia has been the only GFX manufacturer who has been offering 3D, but there is many middleware offerings for this.

Personally, 3D is a great thing, but I get headacke from gaming with it. There is too much going on, so I find it noisy. But its fun to try and I hope it gets to a stage where its something for me. There are also others who love gaming in 3D, so the experience is very individual I think. Nvidia has been doing 3d for years and kudos to them for continuing to develope this.

3D in multi-monitor setups isn't new either. People have successfully used 3d vision from Nvidia with Matrox TH2G and you can achive the same with Eyefinity and as example IZ3D. 120hz 3d is new and currently only works with Eyefinity and soon Nvidia 3d surround. For that, you need 3X 120hz 3d monitors like iz3d with use of polarized glasses, or 3 "normal" screens with shutter glasses.

You can even try it out now, if you have those red/blue(cyan) glasses or similar colored glasses and download the iz3d software. Its free in Anaglyph mode. Works with Eyefinity.

Even though those things are not new, it doesn't mean its bad. One of the biggest problems with multi-monitor gaming has been that the user base is small, which means that developers doesn't have the big incentive to support it. Now that ATI, Matrox and soon Nvidia supports this (with the addition of SLI increasing the multi-monitor support drastically) developers will have more reason to support this ingame.

Nvidia has got a lot of pepper for having the tech on Quadro and not giving it to gamers and also for "only supporting it because ATI does". Truth is that Nvidia isn't obliged to support multi-monitor gaming and they are a welcome addition to support it. It doesn't matter which hardware people have, because the broader the support, the more it benifits EVERYONE with multi-monitor setups! :)

This is good news for those of us having issues with native resolutions being stable with TH2Go setup; but it's always hard to tell where the issue is when you have multiple hardware (video cards, TH2Go box, monitors), software and drivers (PowerDesk and Nvidia drivers) running the whole thing.

My next concern would be, does the multiple monitor support include HDCP compliance? Currently, I have to remove a monitor from my TH2Go box and plug it directly into my Nvidia card so I can watch BluRay movies.

Ooo...and what resolutions would be supported? I don't suppose we'll see 5700x1200?

I see no reason why HDCP shouldn't be supported. :)

I think also that each output would support a resolution of 2560x1600 for a total of 7680x1600 (I base this assumption on the advertised 3D support, which require a bandwidth for 3X 120hz screens at 1920x1200, so bandwidth will probably also support higher res then).