Maximizing Performance on triple monitor setup

[sinelnic]

Hi Community,

 

I´ve just splashed the cash for two additional 24" lcds, and am beginning to enjoy this new thing that now lives in my house. The panoramic view is sooo goood...

 

I´m a bit reality freak like most of us here, so I went for a configuration that gave me the most possible real feeling. Hence, even though I went for SofTH, I´m using a 3 Camera configuration, with front plus aprox 45º to the sides. This eliminates the need for cylindrical lens correction, and if used at the appropriate zoom level, gives a tremendously real feeling with correct perspective at every angle. Also makes a better use of the engine by not forcing it to render an infinite volume (as is the case when you use +180º FOV).

Side effect is, though, that the zoom level has to be pretty high, so I had to tweak some files to move the virtual me´s head a little back, and the HUD looks horrible.

 

But back on topic, with all this and applying all my previous knowledge, I can merely extract 15-20 fps on avg (aprox 10 over cities... which is almost all the time, I´m covering almost a 180º view!!), and to be honest, it´s too low. I´d like to know if somebody else went down this road before, and can help me get more fps. My config below:

 

Core2Duo E8400 @3GHz - 6 GB RAM - 8800 GTX - 8400 GTS (for 3rd monitor)

Windows 7 RC

 

3*1920x1200 - 4x AA - 16x FF

SofTH 1.09 beta rc1 in full screen mode

3 camera config in DCS (same as sample only with corrected resolutions)

Water normal - shadows active planar - effects=2

everything else on max (will not go to shorter view distance)

 

Thank you!!

Edited September 8, 2009 by sinelnic

[JG14_Smil]

Hello,

 

4x AA and water and shadows to '0' in the BS\data\scripts\options.lua should help you a bit. 3*1920x1200 is hard to run.

Edited September 8, 2009 by JG14_Smil

[hannibal]

i gave up also on triplehead... i was running 3x 1440x900 = 4320x900, and it gets choppy when i zoom out. (it freezes if you dont set that server.lua or view.lua with a maxdistance angle of 175.. forgot the actually line was...)

and i do have the matrox triplehead 2 go digital

 

anyways, long story short, i am happy right now running 2x 1680x1050 , vertical span, so

its actually 1680x2100 some things off, like heat blur civ traffic, textures High, 16x AA & AFF

 

i get to see the guages, which i find most important at the same time being zoomed in to search for targets...

 

have to keep eye on the on VSI...to keep myself out of vortex ring...

 

triple head was killin me on lockon...somethings were not getting rendered on the right half, like labels and some other gfx..

but for the most part performance with wide fov what really concerned me...

so, it wasnt feasible for me any more...

Edited September 8, 2009 by hannibal

[luke88]

I have also gone down this road and had great success with my setup. I get 20-30 fps in most situations with 3camera view.

 

The 3 main factors I would chose to adjust in your situation be...

 

1 - increase CPU speed (overclock if possible)

2 - get a Triple Head 2 Go unit (expensive I know, but softth uses too much computer resources)

3 - chose a lower resolution (3x1024x768 still gives great results)

 

Also reducing the field of view has the double benefit of getting rid of distortions where the screens meet up as well as lightening the rendering load. FOV of 60 seems to work best in the view.lua config flie. < This is 60 degrees per screen.

Edited September 8, 2009 by luke88

[sinelnic]

Guys, thanks indeed for your responses!! I'll continue the journey, I'll try the water and shadows=0. Also I mistyped AA, it's actually 4X, but as always my GPU doesn't seem to be noticing the load.

 

The way to go seems OC for me, as I'll try very very hard to avoid compromising resolution or overall visual quality. Last night I made the Mineraln'ye Vody - eastern georgia trip, at sunset, and the views were incredible!!

[Tbag]

2 - get a Triple Head 2 Go unit (expensive I know, but softth uses too much computer resources)

 

Is there any hope that the resolution can be increased to support 3x 1920x1200 in the future? From what I understand Triple Head 2 Go is limited by the bandwith of dual DVI to 3x1680x1050.

 

P.S.: How can i find out if I can run my Monitor (SM2693HM 26") @57Hz and 1680x1050 resolution?

Edited September 8, 2009 by Tbag

[sinelnic]

Is there any hope that the resolution can be increased to support 3x 1920x1200 in the future? From what I understand Triple Head 2 Go is limited by the bandwith of dual DVI to 3x1680x1050.

 

P.S.: How can i find out if I can run my Monitor (SM2693HM 26") @57Hz and 1680x1050 resolution?

 

If there's demand, there's always hope!!

 

Shouldn't your monitor manual or the web list all supported modes?

[Cyclic]

Remember when over clocking, you will only get 1FPS per 100mhz on average, so if you have a E8400 I would say you could probbaly go to 4-4.5gig water cooled which will maybe give you an extra 15FPS so way up the costs before taking the jump.

[sinelnic]

Remember when over clocking, you will only get 1FPS per 100mhz on average, so if you have a E8400 I would say you could probbaly go to 4-4.5gig water cooled which will maybe give you an extra 15FPS so way up the costs before taking the jump.

 

That's an excellent point Cyclic, thanks! 30 fps with 3 monitors would make me ecstatic.

I believe some people brought my CPU to those speeds using air cooling (not stock, obviously), so I'll try and hope for the best. Also found out that I have 1066 RAM but I'm running them @ 800, so some room for improvement there as well I believe... I'll try this weekend and let you know the results.

 

Thanks!

Edited September 9, 2009 by sinelnic

[G3]

the triplehead and more so the softTH setup is very demanding and can bring the average system to its knees.

as we know, the cpu is often the limiting factor in ED sims but at high res and qual settings trying to drive 3 screens from one (by todays standards) mediocre card is quite probably your bottle neck.

 

that cpu can be stable 3.6 on air and something like a 2xx gtx cards

would have more chance of supplying those multi monitors.

remember with the o/c, take little steps and keep the smoke in the chip :)

 

previous suggestions sound good so far,

such as reducing res and graphics quality,

both in nvidia options, and also in game options.

especially JG14_Smil comments on lua edits.

 

try starting off at the absolute lowest graphics quality in game,

with low or no aa and af setting in nvidia options.

 

performance for my setup drops dramatically with high graphics settings.

 

as for the digital th2go, i am sure one day they will support 3x 1920,

if not already i'm not sure, my old analogue version is max 3840 so i cannot advise.

 

i heard you can also run lower res on the side screens using softTH

that might help you a bit.

 

please share some pics of your new flat panels, they sound great.

 

Hannibal, you have gone vertical, i would also like to see this,

i tried it and thought it would be ideal, please share screens.

[Slick Twitchy]

I have been fighting with the same problem. I ended up using TH2Go, to display on 2 monitors, and the extra port on the GeForce 285 to display on the third monitor.

 

The game has real slow down issues with the extra monitors.

[Panzertard]

Try adjusting Water to 1 or 0 in the \Eagle Dynamics\Ka-50\BlackShark\data\scripts\options.lua too.

It'll gain you a few more FPS.

[ruprecht]

... a better use of the engine by not forcing it to render an infinite volume (as is the case when you use +180º FOV).

Side effect is, though, that the zoom level has to be pretty high, so I had to tweak some files to move the virtual me´s head a little back, and the HUD looks horrible.

 

Didn't realise that about the infinite volume? I have fov set to 200 - is that going to be causing me these "infinite volume" issues?

 

Which file did you change, and how, to adjust the head position back?

 

Core2Duo E8400 @3GHz - 6 GB RAM - 8800 GTX - 8400 GTS (for 3rd monitor)

Windows 7 RC

3*1920x1200 - 4x AA - 16x FF

SofTH 1.09 beta rc1 in full screen mode

3 camera config in DCS (same as sample only with corrected resolutions)

Water normal - shadows active planar - effects=2

everything else on max (will not go to shorter view distance)

 

TBH that seems a little weak to be running at that resolution and detail level. I'm surprised you get the FPS you do.

I found I actually got better performance from a single 9800GTX+ head with a TH2G than I did with the same 9800GTX+ and an 8800GTX, on 3 separate heads. Something to do with the PCIe pipelines I think.

 

I dropped my resolution from the native 3x1680x1050 to 3x1280x768. Makes a nice difference to FPS. If that helps. Also, overclock your CPU if it's running stock - with that CPU you should be able to get 3.6GHz+ easy on air.

 

Note my thread here where I went through similar trial and error: http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=37491

Edited September 10, 2009 by ruprecht

[sobek]

Also, overclock your CPU if it's running stock - with that CPU you should be able to get 3.6GHz+ easy on air.

 

Bought that thing the day before yesterday and took it straight to 3.6 Ghz without messing with the voltage, runs perfectly stable and might even go a bit higher, however, the boxed cooler will not permit much more.

[ruprecht]

http://www.thermalright.com/new_a_page/product_page/cpu/u120ex/product_cpu_cooler_u120ex.htm

 

Best air cooler on the market, bar none.

[Immermann]

The new ATI cards are rumoured to have support for three monitors at up to 2560x1600. That would remove the need for TH2Go.

We'll see about that in a few days I suppose.

 

 

-----------EDIT----------

A hands on from techradar.com. It supports mixing landscape and portrait modes too (which TH2Go doesn't).

 

http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/hands-on-ati-eyefinity-review-634244

Edited September 10, 2009 by Immermann

[sinelnic]

Didn't realise that about the infinite volume? I have fov set to 200 - is that going to be causing me these "infinite volume" issues?

 

Which file did you change, and how, to adjust the head position back?

 

Hi Ruprecht, for adjusting the head position you can manually use RCtrl+RShft+(Num/ or Num*) in case you don't have TIR, but you also need to expand the movement limits in server.lua so you can move the head further back, even almost into the seat.

 

About the infinite volume, what follows is a very dry, poorly conceptualised and worsely written explanation. Hope you enjoy!

 

Try to picture your FOV as a pyramid with the camera in the apex (or top vertex) and the "viewdistance" parameter as the length between the apex and the base. The graphics engine must compute every object of the virtual world that falls inside the pyramid's volume. Now if you widen your FOV, you're basically expanding the pyramid volume... until you reach 180 deg FOV, at that time, your pyramid turns into an infite volume body, and even more infinite (!) when you surpass 180.

Under this situation what the engine does in my experience is shorten the viewdistance automatically and limit the number of objects (i.e. trees) it displays. You can replicate my experiments narrowing your FOV and seeing if you can spot objects farther away. Try this with different "starting" configurations, although I would believe adjusting FOV in-game should have the same effect.

 

With 3 cameras you're actually having three different pyramids, each one of a finite volume (say 60 deg FOV). Of course this taxes the computer because the covered area is still huge (but not infinite! the pyramids are rotated to the sides!), but this performs much more efficiently in engine terms.

 

The other side effect is correct perspective. In single camera mode with large FOV, the images to the side are completely stretched, because objects there are about 180 deg to the line between your eye and the vanishing point of the computed perspective. This would be a correct projection of the world to your monitors should those monitors be positioned along the same plane. But, you'd normally have lateral monitors rotated towards your eyes, say at 45 deg, and as such, the 1 camera projection is incorrect. You can try this with your own eyes: take a big sheet of paper and put it in front of your eyes, you see a rectangle. Now position the sheet of paper to your side, and rotate it 45 deg, but continue looking forward (i.e. where the sheet was before). Do not move your eyes or head, and you'll now see a paralelogram, which of course is correct. Now the magic part: rotate your head 45 deg towards the sheet, and instead of seeing a paralelogram, you're looking at a rectangle again!! Take your time if you need to, you'll understand what I mean with this poor explanation.

Now the same happens with the images in your lateral monitors. With single camera view, the image is stretched as it should be if you kept looking forward to the center monitor. But if you rotate your head to look at a side monitor, the projected perspective remains the same, which is wrong as per the sheet of paper example. When you look directly at a lateral monitor, the vanishing point should be at the center of that monitor and not remain at the center of the central monitor. You achieve this with the 3 camera setup that gives each monitor its own vanishing point.

 

Hope I made any sense.

 

Now, the downside to this, is that if you have three different vanishing points, the perspectives don't match, and you notice this where screens coincide. You'll see the runway for instance coming in a certain direction in the left monitor, and see it in a completely different direction in the center one. For this issue to be solved, the FOV of each camera must match 1:1 to what your FOV would be should you yourself be inside the virtual world looking through a frame the size of your monitors. Thus, you have to zoom in to about 45-50 deg FOV in each camera, and then all three pespectives match and you get as real as it gets a projection as is possible with flat screens.

When I tried this, I got to see just a very nice close-up of the HUD in the center monitor, not even covering the full windshield. So in order to be able to see more of the cockpit while keeping the perspective correct, the only option as IRL is to lean back the head... hence the tweak in the server.lua file.

 

So far it takes some getting used to, and framerates are not helping (hence this thread) but the feeling of a correct perspective is to me astounding. I still didn't try this with TIR (as the fps is too low) but I think when I'll do, the immersion will go one true step further.

 

Hope I could make myself clear and that all this is of any use to you guys!

[CyBerkut]

The new ATI cards are rumoured to have support for three monitors at up to 2560x1600. That would remove the need for TH2Go.

We'll see about that in a few days I suppose.

 

 

-----------EDIT----------

A hands on from techradar.com. It supports mixing landscape and portrait modes too (which TH2Go doesn't).

 

http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/hands-on-ati-eyefinity-review-634244

 

Hi Immermann... I just tried the link. Linky no worky... :(

 

However, a google search on ATI eyefinity does turn up other places to look.

 

Interesting!

[Immermann]

No, they pulled it :(

NDA's I suppose.

But you can read the text here:

 

http://futuremark.yougamers.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1185103

 

Oh, and one model supports up to 6 monitors...

Edited September 10, 2009 by Immermann

[CyBerkut]

Regarding ATI eyefinity / 5800 series cards:

 

I can't open some of the links where I'm at right now, but along with seeing references to 3 monitors running 2560x1600, I'm also seeing a pic of 6 monitors (3 wide x 2 high).... I would presume those are more on the order of 1080p resolution. [Yeah, throw me in that briar patch.]

 

No specific mention of OS requirements / compatibility yet, but the references to competing against the Matrox TH2Go give me the (wishful thinking here, perhaps) impression that the spanning could be happening as a function of the card, and not the OS. If so, they could have a killer product on their hands!

 

Rumored release of 9/24 or /9/25.

 

Supposedly, 2 of the cards can be combined for approximately x1.8 performance improvement.

 

Anybody got any dope on what to expect from nVidia in the near future?

 

Excuse me, I need to go clean up... :P

[Immermann]

Here's a screen shot of the original article:

 

http://i114.photobucket.com/albums/n273/Wirmish/TechRadarEyeFinity.jpg

 

I think it's Dirt 2 (DX11) running on the 3x30"

[CyBerkut]

Thanks! That article indicates 6x2560x1600... available later. Whoa!

 

I may have to start thinking about eating healthier, so I can stick around longer to see where this stuff goes. ;)

[Immermann]

And from Anandtech.com (while it lasts :) ):

 

http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3635

 

Driving all of this is AMD's next-generation GPU, which will be announced later this month. I didn't leave out any letters, there's a single GPU driving all of these panels. The actual resolution being rendered at is 7680 x 3200; WoW got over 80 fps with the details maxed.

Edited September 10, 2009 by Immermann

[CyBerkut]

And that one explicitly stated that it is seen as one display by the OS... that it would work with Vista, Win7 and linux. :thumbup:

 

It kind of looks like there may soon be a glut of slightly used Matrox TH2Go available.

 

I hope E.D. is looking at this stuff and starting to ponder the impact. I can forsee the requests for some additional options on display choices... (ie. How about a display setup with the cameras on the top 3 *and* the center display of the bottom row [lets you see the gauges along with outside], with a shkval on the bottom left, and an ABRIS on the bottom right?) Hoo man!

 

A display manager application may be in order, as this is likely to get a LOT more complicated.

[ruprecht]

Hi Ruprecht, for adjusting the head position you can manually use RCtrl+RShft+(Num/ or Num*) in case you don't have TIR, but you also need to expand the movement limits in server.lua so you can move the head further back, even almost into the seat.

 

Thanks, I'll look into that.

 

Try to picture your FOV as a pyramid with the camera in the apex (or top vertex) and the "viewdistance" parameter as the length between the apex and the base. The graphics engine must compute every object of the virtual world that falls inside the pyramid's volume. Now if you widen your FOV, you're basically expanding the pyramid volume... until you reach 180 deg FOV, at that time, your pyramid turns into an infite volume body, and even more infinite (!) when you surpass 180.

 

Ah, I was wondering if your infinite volume theory was actual empirical knowledge of the engine or something theoretical. It seems like the latter.

 

My issue with what you've said here is that you make the assumption that the FOV is a triangle with the distance from the apex to the (straight) base equal to the view distance. If you rather visualise it as a wedge of a circle, not a triangle, with the radius equal to the view distance, I believe that's a more accurate representation. As the FOV approaches 180 deg, the render view is simply approaching half a circle, and you can go beyond 180 without having your "greater than infinity" problem.

 

If there's any empirical data that suggests that approaching or exceeding 180 FOV on a single screen crumps framerate (as you'd expect, as computers don't deal with infinity very well) I'd be happy to be told I'm wrong, but my own experience with a TH2G and 200 FOV would disagree.

 

I'm sure that three-view rather than a wide single view gives better and undistorted perspective, but you've still got the problem of looking at a monitor in your 11 o'clock which is displaying from 9 to 11. Unless you actually mount the screen at 10 oclock (which would need very big screens) it looks wierd. That's why I went from 3-view to super wide 1 view. With a TrackIR, the super wide 1-view gives you a good sense of peripheral vision, and simply turning your head corrects any perspective issues for things you want to focus on.

 

$0.02