metalnwood

On the softth thing. It pretty much gives you unlimited options for running on different sized monitor with different resolutions. I just moved my 3x42" screens to have the side ones in portrait mode so I have 1080x1920 1920x1080 1080x1920 1920x1080 640x480 Here was a quick vid I did trying it out.

I am just running the 7970 single gpu. I have my setup framerate limited to 30frames with everything on high and it sits there most of the time. Sometimes on the ground it gets lower, closer to 20 on occasion but in the air its always on 30. For my CDU I am using a 4" screen I got from the crowd I linked to. You will not be able to use eyefinity to get the kind of setup that you want. I dont think nvidia surround will do it for you either. You will have to run DCS in windowed mode or use softth as I have just been playing around with. The ram on gpus is not cumulative I am afraid :) BMS is far less gpu intensive than DCS so expect your frames to be higher there.

PS, I have got a couple displays from here. http://www.good-display.com/products_list/&pmcId=3d702ab4-7549-440f-9643-c4f495154024&comp_stats=comp-FrontProductsCategory_show01-1299132101301.html They turned up fine, working well and no problems. I think the prices would be a lot better.

Your CPU is good for what you want to do but there is no doubt that the ATI cards are offering more outputs right now. I am running 5 monitors off my ATI 7970. Thats 4x1920x1080 monitors and the CDU at 640x480. The leaves me with one port free on this card that supports 6 outputs. The 7970 comes with 3GB memory and I think there is a4GB coming if not already here. That doesnt matter so much for you if you are only using one display for your main graphics. For triple screen it would be more beneficial. For multiple cards you cannot run crossfire if you want to use all of their combined ports. If you want to run 8 monitors you need more than 1 graphics card or some esoteric mix like a th2go running off on eof the ports and then feeding two or three monitors. When you put more than one card in you can use their ports as well, so 3+3 = 6.

Can't be a good reason that has anything to do with user preferences though. Must have been a good answer as to why it's too hard to change it :)

It's possible that the controller id's have been mixed around. You have probably been switching out your controllers, adding or removing one at some point. DCS and some games wont care as they will look for the correct controller all the time but TIR is most likely looking for controller 'x'. The problem there is that when you plug and unplug stuff that 'x' could change and screw up your in game/program controller settings. Just remap it in TIR.

Hope you didnt buy them off the guy I lent mine to.. :)

CaptHawk, I installed softth which wasnt too much hassle. At the same time I took PeterP's advise from another thread and use softth to set my triple screens up in portait-landscape-portrait. Its working well and you can press a hot key when in CA mode to have everything render on one screen, in my case I made that my center screen. sorry, it doesnt show CA, just softth with new monitor orientation but it only took 30 mins to set it up. It should take less if you just have a simple monitor config and just want to use it for the CA fix.

Of course your configuration makes a difference. It's the difference between why some systems see no change in frame rates and why yours does.

Thanks Peter. What I played around with doing in the mean time was just extending the overall vert height of my render area. ps, it was 10-15 fps I was loosing which was enough to take me from comfortably over the 30fps I like to just far enough under that I didnt, i.e. 24-25. So as it is really the CDU I want going I added another 240 pixels to the Y and rendered it as 320x240. Softth can pull it out and transpose it on to the cdu at 640x480. I dont think it will make any difference that amout of stretching for that kind of text. Good thing is my frames are back up and that little extra didnt seem to do anything. I am not back to 35-40 FPS, yay :)

Im really not a fan of doing it like that. Having tried it, yep I think it is good alternative for other aircraft that dont have the helios profile but for the a10 that does I like having the mfds at full size permanently in place with the gauges not moving etc. Just a preferenc thing but I do like it a lot more with helios. At least the mfd's are solid so they dont have the game background. Just checking and the CDU is not a solid backgeround! If you have seen my thread where I am making a CDU you can understand why I need to fix that. OK, just some more playing around, no biggie :)

I am a bit stumped as to what it could be? I put the black square where you suggested and the same thing, they really dropped. So, I changed the resolution of the side monitors but no change in framerates at all. They were still low. I removed the black square all together and I could then see the a10 dash on my 4th monitor again with all my exports on top but my frames were maybe 3-4 fps higher than before. Possibly because I stall had the lower resolution on the side screens. It seems something to do with the black square. I would rule out vram or bandwidth based on the fact that all of my exports are already showing in the 'hidden' area under the portrait monitor and run fine when sent to the 4th screen. Baffling for sure!

See thread here http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=91091 I am experimenting with softTH and it fixes it for me. I may not have bothered doing it if I didnt have other uses for Softth but at the moment it works fine and no framerate loss.

Peter, all was going well... until I did the black area trick to export my mfds etc. When I add the black section my frames drop from the first instant mission from high 30's to a more steady 25. With exports there and black section removed my frames are high again. For some reason that trick costs me a lot of frames on my machine. hmm.

Well, here is the vid but I dont know why I bother, its too hard to get the feeling about the size of it when shooting from a camera. Also, when I did the track I was using my TIR and had a better viewpoint that I couldnt seem to get with the numeric keypad.

OK, I made some progress when I had time during the day. It is now running in full screen mode in PLP. I have a total windows desktop area of 6184x1920 but I have configured softth to only work with a render area of 4264. Same with DCS, its set at 4264x1920. SoftTH is configured to pull out some renders from that area and put them on the other two monitors which were not included in DCS's render area. I set up mu monitor lua like this I removed the exports from the lua for clarity. I havent set them in the right position yet anyway. I put together a quick youtube vid showing it but its still uploading. I added bezel management which was easy and softth is good so far as my rigged up monitor stands could not get the side lined up at the same height as the center monitor. Softth had an easy answer to make the graphics line up at least. It seems a bit strange using it as it is quite different. The side monitors are probably 250mm lower than my knees so you do get a good view right outside the cockpit. All that extra Vert space also adds to takeoffs, landings and low flying. My only issue at this point is what happens with nevada? DX11, will it work with softth? It would be some effort to make a set of proper mounts for the screens to find out shortly that it is not usable in DX11 land. Having said that. I have always used windowed mode and DCS worked the same, minus bezel adjustment in PLP. Softth did sort out the maps and combined arms. I can now play it using the center screen, no stretching across all screens. So far I like it and it's worth using it for a while to see how it goes.

These keys will activate the 1.2.0 a10 module in dcs world. Just nuy it, dont install it via steam and use the key steam give you when you install 1.2

Yep, got it working PLP without eyefinity and softth. Time to see if I can turn on softth and get it going and add the exports etc.

Aha, ytrans. That should do it for me! The configs for softh look ok and the destrec is fairly straightforward to understand but I am unsure how I should have my monitors set up in windows. Right now they are as is shown in the screenshot. A 3x1 eyefinity + two extended desktops, one for helios and the smaller for the CDU. It sounds like I should try and run this all as fullscreen for max FPS as I can keep helios working this way too. So, it looks like I need to ditch my eyefinity group and set them up as PLP in windows, right? I wish the ati drivers were not so fickle when playing with my eyefinity groups!

Well, I am around my pit trying to figure it out. I will do the softh changes largely based on newys to get me started. Once I see it working I will figure out how to change my monitor orientation. It will really require a complete set of new mounting which I wasnt planning on doing for a few weeks when my replacement CNC arrives. In the meantime ti will be more difficult but I will see how I can do it. A 42" screen on it's side looks very, very tall! Also it is wider than the 1/3 view I currently use so in fact with this set up I will have more visible area with less distortion. Can't be bad! My only thought is that it might be a good ide to raise the overall height of all of my monitors. Not by a lot but it makes me think if it will raise the cockpit view too high? I am not sure there is a way to change the view as the viewdx setting in the monitor config is only for head pitch. Anyway, off to get softh and start trying things.

Weltensegler, you are right that the distortion is awful. A long time ago I changed my center view so it only stretches across the center monitor and about 1/3rd of the side monitors. This is enough to give you the feeling of being immersed while not giving enough distortion so that you can actually look at that 1/3rd of the screen. With TIR I find you dont normally look any wider even if I was rendering on the whole side monitor. I am going to give it a try in portrait-landscape-portrait with the black space. That will be enough to put all my exports including the CDU export. The main issue will be supporting the monitors on their sides for the purposes of trying it out.

I somehow missed Peters point about using the center in landscape. Now I am very curious to see how this could look.

steam is $16 right now for an a10 key to turn it in to your new server. I did just that a few hours ago.

This thread has been good, I will give softth a try tomorrow and see what happens with the 5 screens I have, if I can come up with an arrangement to give me better frames. Not that better frames is something I am searching for, I also get 30 most of the time but it cannot hurt and I would like to see if there is something I can do to get a better map view. Another thing that has got me curious is portrait mode. When I was on small monitors, the 24" ones I didnt think I could do it with the bezels so close. You have me wondering about what it may be like with my 42" screens. At the moment with 900mm of viewable center area before the bezels come in to play the 500mm in portrait mode doesnt seem like a lot. I wonder if I will feel cramped. I guess you have to try to know althought thats easier said than done with large screens!

Peter, very interesting. I run eyefinity and didn't realise that softTH can compliment it, I thought it was a replacement when you didnt have eyefinity. I thought the FPS would drop but your other thread suggests otherwise. I will have a look in to it. Thanks!