Widescreen Gaming Forum

So I got myself three 22" monitors the other day to plug into my 6950 expecting to enjoy the benefits of triple screen gaming as I play a lot of racing and fps games...

to my disappointment I quickly noticed that in every game I play the side monitors stretch the image horribly. For example in the new deus ex game a character will be in the middle of my screen and then wander to my left and as he moves over onto my left monitor he gradually starts to wider and wider and bigger and bigger as he gets to the edge of the monitor. When i turn round to look at him and put him in te centre monitor he suddenly looks much further away and no longer looks stretched/wide... He looks normal.

I have the same issue in every game I play, in BFBC2 and Arma 2 it's especially bad and in DIrt 3 it's frankly ridiculous from the cockpit perspective, it looks like I have the longest car the world has ever seen which stretches back for miles and miles... Frankly it looks horrendous.

I probably should have done some better research prior to going down this route but with all the eyefinity hype I assumed it would at the very least be able to give me a non stretched image on all three monitors...

I know some people will say it's just meant to give you peripheral vision but let's be honest that seems like a load of nonsense, in real life things do not appear twice as wide/big and close in the corner of my eyes.

are theare any fixes for games like BFBC2/ARMA 2 etc which get rid of this horrible stretching ?

The only game out of many which has no strecthing is Iracing, it's perfect no distortion or stretching whatsoever. Why can this game manage when no others can ?

Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated.

It's expected, and normal. The side screens aren't really for looking at directly, but for peripheral vision. I've only heard of a single game that corrects the stretch properly.Yes, i think it's teh one you mentioned. Developers have been so stupidly slow to catch on to the proper widescreen methods in single screen, I
m not at all surprised they don;t know how to do 3 screens properly. Even now, many brand new, big budget games don't have proper support for more than one screen, and various folks in this awesome community come up with solutions.

Did you not notice this behaviour on screen shots and video samples of game using triple-monitor?

Personally, i love it. Playing on a single display is just wacky, to me. Plus, having extra screens outside of gaming is pretty damned handy.

I'm guessing that the real sense of disappointment is not doing proper research? Since if you looked at any of the videos or screenshots then this distortion would've been obvious.

I ran in landscape mode for 4-5 months then switched to portrait and I like it much better. ALOT less stretching.

what I love that when in BFBC2 I can use it to scout with, use a 4x scope zoom then look left or on the side and you can see really far. Comes in handy allot. I have Nvidia but my son has ati they all do the same thing.

I did check out screenshots prior to getting three monitors, the problem is they were iracing scenshots... And thus I saw no stretching whatsoever.

I did check out screenshots prior to getting three monitors, the problem is they were iracing scenshots...

You could have checked our galleries - http://widescreengamingforum.com/galleries , there are thousands of surround / eyefinity screenshots of different games.

You can severely lower your FOV in BC2 to get rid of stretching, but that kind of eliminates the purpose. In all honesty I had the same issue when I first got my setup. It has to do with how games are rendered -- stretching even occur at 16:9 aspect ratios if you know what to look for. Play some 3rd person games, driving games, etc. before you hop into FPS. Once you train your eyes to only look at the center screen you will begin to love it. I play a lot of Arma 2 and DCS A-10c -- eyefinity/TrackIR is amazing in those games. Sure, there is some stretching, but with trackIR if you find yourself moving your head to look at the side monitors the screens turn -- it's both a good training tool, and an incredible experience. I can't imagine gaming without eyefinity now.

That is actually how the human eye perceives the world. Your peripherals are much more distorted than your center of focus, except that you can never focus on your peripheral vision with your eyes without relocating everything like a dog chasing its tail.

I know some people will say it's just meant to give you peripheral vision but let's be honest that seems like a load of nonsense, in real life things do not appear twice as wide/big and close in the corner of my eyes.

I disagree, you don't focus on the left and right of your monitors, So why care?

It's still helpful not to have the sides distorted cause then you could have a wider peripheral vision. But oh well, it's better than just a single monitor and it's a LOT easier to implement standard single camera wider FOV than using triple cameras (which is what R-Factor did to eliminate fish eye).

Believe it or not it's actually pretty easy to set up multiple cameras in DX/GL but it's probably not plumbed through all the way up the game engine and would require a lot of rearchitecture.