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Kuky's Tripple screen setup


Kuky

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To start off... I used 3x 27" screens, model is Viewsonic VA2703-LED with 1920x1080 res, 3ms (typ) response, 300 lumens, 3000 contrast (typ), DVI/VGA connector, very basic but cheap (AU$225 each).

 

I didn't want anything expensive as this is my first try at tripple screen setup. These monitors cost me AU$725 delivered, I wanted to take the plastic bezel off so I had to make some sort of stand and that cost me little under $90 (I've used aluminium, 2 hinges, some screws and some wood, all in all it does the job, granted not the best looking thing from the rear, but who cares :D) in the end I've voided my waranty (hence why I wanted cheap monitors to start with)

 

 

The panel is not fixed to the screen panel so first problem was how to fix panel to back of monitor - I used L shape aluminium matching screen height, then cut out U shape pieces to hold the panel and riveted it all together.

 

Then came problem of what to use to hold the 3 monitors together, I went simple and cheap - just piece of wood, then I used some strong ginges and screws to hold the 3 wood pieces together... then fixed the monitor to the wood using existing 100x100 Vesa mount holes. I forgot to say, I have monitors set at about 50° angle and I sit about 70cm from main screen (screens are 63cm wide) so when looking left right I'm mostly looking straight at left/right monitor (to reduce colour change when viewing at angle since these are TN panels which have that downside)

 

The came prblem of trying to figure out how to have 3 screens sit on my dest, but not be too far away (meaning side monitors would be extending over the desk and nothing to hold them - again simple but not so good looking solution was use again aluminium square tubes which are light but strong to hold it in place... again it works so all is good

 

Last issue for now is I need 1 longer monitor cable to reach the PC, shold get it tomorrow.

 

Performance wise... well as expected running 3 camera views really does make strain on the PC, on exact same settings I was running single 24" screen in 1920x1200 resolution, with these 3 27" I am getting 1/2 to 1/3 the FPS... naturally I had to reduce districts draw distance from 20km to 8km, reduce forest distance from 13km to 8km and bushes from 1200m to 800m ,rest of setting I did not touch - I dare not turn on mirrors :music_whistling:. Right now I can still squeze 20-30fps on average I'd say but it does dip bellow 20fps when things are going on in mission.

 

Now need to get some PC upgrade also to get some FPS back :smartass:

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Edited by Kuky

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Nicely done Kuky! :joystick:

 

Are you using Eyefinity or SoftTH?

Im running 24P, 27L, 24P, 23L bottom center, and it struggles for 17-25 fps even with options turned off. Last night I instead tried 1680x1050 rather than native 1900x1200 and with all maxed settings except MSAAx4, I get a more stable 25-30fps. Much better when the mission action starts and fires and smuldering wrecks litter the map.

 

Can you post your graphics.cfg or mod list to try out?

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I'm using HD7970 card and no SoftTh or any other software... just video card ATI catalyst driver and good ol' DCS World settings.

 

3 camera views

70° FoV in cockpit

windowed mode

windows runs Aero theme

in game 4xAA, TSAA on, HDR off, mirrors off, Civ traffic off, Water medium, rest in game settings is on default high. Bushes are 800m, trees 8km, tree shadow on, and edited High.lua to 8km (I might have to reduce notch down more to get more FPS) and in Graphics.cfg structures are set to 30, 20000

 

I use my smoke/fire mod only and RICARDO Su-25T pit so far, nothing else

 

I'll have to work on estethics of the setup bit more, even my mum says monitors look ugly from the back and that I should have left them in plastic casing :D


Edited by Kuky

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Very nice setup Kuky!

Thermaltake Kandalf LCS | Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R | Etasis ET750 (850W Max) | i7-920 OC to 4.0 GHz | Gigabyte HD5850 | OCZ Gold 6GB DDR3 2000 | 2 X 30GB OCZ Vertex SSD in RAID 0 | ASUS VW266H 25.5" | LG Blue Ray 10X burner | TIR 5 | Saitek X-52 Pro | Logitech G930 | Saitek Pro flight rudder pedals | Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit

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I really like what de-bezeling does for triple-head setups. It's still surprising to me just how much a plastic casing can add to the bezel size for panels. In most cases it at the very least doubles the bezel size.

 

One thing I've pondered but never really seen anyone do yet would be to mask off the panels and have them painted matte black to mute the high contrast metal casing the panels end up having once de-bezeled. With how the panels need to be custom mounted the warranty is gone on them so no real limitation there worrying what paint would do to a warranty. Only real consideration I'd have was to ensure they were masked off really well before painting so no electrical components were inadvertently sprayed in the process. No clue what the conductivity properties are of spray paint, but it would be eliminated as an issue if properly masking off everything.


Edited by BHawthorne
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I'll have to work on estethics of the setup bit more, even my mum says monitors look ugly from the back and that I should have left them in plastic casing :D

 

I can't argue with your mum.;) Otherwise, very nicely done.

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One thing I've pondered but never really seen anyone do yet would be to mask off the panels and have them painted matte black to mute the high contrast metal casing the panels end up having once de-bezeled.

 

Just use black electrical tape to cover the silver parts. ;)

 

Reduce the visible Bezel-size by placing the middle monitor before the side-monitors.

 

yup, thought about all 3 ideas, I'm gonna leave it as is for the moment, I find bezel's only annoy me when I am looking in direction and I know some object/aircraft/unit is in area "behind" them (due to bezel compensation)

 

PeterP, to move the panel behind another it's lot more work now since angle on sides is fixed, possible easiest solution would be to move center panel little towards my, to leave space for side panel to move over it... I'm still thinking what to do next and at the moment trying to tweak files more to get most compromisable perfomance/visal ratio in game.

 

PS:

I just ran default Su-25T SEAD mission and was checking my system and GPU RAM usage... system usage was topping out at little under 3.8GB and on my HD7970 with 3GB of vRAM memory usage reached 2GB. Funny thing I noticed when I was in cockpit view my GPU was only used at most 90% but when I crashed and jumped to external view, GPU usage went up to 100%.. weird as I before I always had other way around (more FPS in externals)


Edited by Kuky

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I noticed when I was in cockpit view my GCP was only used at most 90% but when I crashed and jumped to external view, GPU usage went up to 100%.. weird as I before I always had other way around (more FPS in externals)

 

You get almost 100% GPU usage "outside" because the GPU don't has to wait on CPU delivered data like the cockpit-avionics anymore.

Think about the "every frame" option for the mdf's . That's exactly why this option exists.


Edited by PeterP

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I just tried Eyefinity group and running DCS full screen, 1 screen option with wide FoV... much better FPS but the streching is sooo ugly... so I am back to 3 camera view, no streching distortion there

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Kuky,

Thanks for this vid - I will maybe reuse it to explain where are the limits of a 3Camera render at a "desktop setup".

 

I'm interested in your "acclimatization" to use a TH set-up.

 

Q#1: Do you notice the bezels at all when "In-Game" ?

 

Q#2: Did your brain got "trained" to accept the sides as "new" reality , so the "bend horizon" doesn't bother you any more like after the first time using it ?

 

Q#3: Can you imagine to go back to a 1 Monitor solution that is only projected in front of you?

 

I think/hope you will catch my thought/what I mean - many underestimate that there is always a "learning-process" involved that they can't steer when adapting a "new" view.


Edited by PeterP

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Oh man, that looks nice. Is that the 3 camera lua?

 

When I do this I will blame you first!! :D

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I'm interested in your "acclimatization" to use a TH set-up.

 

Q#1: Do you notice the bezels at all when "In-Game" ?

 

Q#2: Did your brain got "trained" to accept the sides as "new" reality , so the "bend horizon" doesn't bother you any more like after the first time using it ?

 

Q#3: Can you imagine to go back to a 1 Monitor solution that is only projected in front of you?

 

I think/hope you will catch my thought/what I mean - many underestimate that there is always a "learning-process" involved that they can't steer when adapting a "new" view.

 

A#1: The only time I notice the bezel is when I am looking at ground/object that is in that direction, if I am looking at front or sides I don't notice it at all (doesn't bother me that it's there)

 

A#2: I can definitely say the brain does get used to the new setup, most "training" it has to get used to is the lower FPS, granted in that video I still used 20km districts visibility distance, but I find even if I reduce this to much less (even when its set to 5km) I don't gain much FPS, so I figure I might as well set it to my 20km distance seting. Few days of flying around and tweaking the Graphics.cfg and High.lua I can get 20-30fps most time when in air. On some bases I do get as low as 12fps (for example I get 12fps in default single mission for Su-25T when sitting on runway). higher up and it's bit over 30fps.

 

A#3: honestly I don't think I would go back to using 1 monitor any more, I see it now, I quite like the extra FoV (without the ugly distortion of 1 camera view and high FoV) so with 1-2 PC upgrade and better CPU I should be going to min 15-20fps which is quite acceptable for me for high settings.

 

Oh man, that looks nice. Is that the 3 camera lua?

 

When I do this I will blame you first!! :D

 

yes, this is a 3 camera viewpoint, 70° FoV

 

 

Now, I did a test last night to see what makes such hit on FPS so I created empty mission with Su-25T over the middle of the Black Sea (so I have no terrain or objects around) and I found that with nothing in FoV I get 56FPS when in cockpit. If I use 2 camera viewpoints my FPS goes to about 83FPS and back to 1 camera viewpoint I am at around 140FPS. So surely it's not the video card not being able to push the pixels as I even went for ultra low resolution and gain hardly any FPS at all... it is either the CPU or the sim simply taking a hit with more camera viewpoints.

 

I also tried 5 camera viewpoints and I got about 33FPS in same mission over empty sea :D

 

Hope that answers some of your questions, now back to work for me :(

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I definately think I will wait for the next CPU upgrade (read new machine ;)) next year sometime, but this sounds very workable. I'll have to see what sort of ultraHD monitors are out then.

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I have an eyefinity setup my self and I must say that if you have of those monitors sitting on your desk and in my case in aorner they get harder and harder to manage as the time goes on and I wanted to do somthing similar to yourself with a Racing Seat (I also play Racing sims) and mount my hardware on that to keep it nice and clean.

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  • 1 month later...

I've done short test of how much vRAM usage there is with 3 screens like that, so here's LOG of GPU-Z sensors that will show GPU usage, vRAM usage... also if you're thinking of water cooling check out GPU temperatures when HD7970 is water cooled... in game water loop that cools the CPU as well (gotta love the water cooling :thumbup:)

 

PS: This was in mission with only me in MiG-29A, foggy weather, taking off from runway and engaging F-16A at high altitude.

 

PPS: in short vRMA usage was max at 1670MB, GPU usage never reached 100% (I am capping the FPS to 30 in Graphics.cfg)

GPU-Z Sensor Log.txt

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I have tested Soft TH and boy it slows the game down like nothing else. I dont know if Kuky is using this software but thats the picture I got from this thread. Firstly using Soft TH disaples SLI that slows the game from 80 -> 40 fps. Adding just mfd picture to another screen slows it even further 40 -> 10 fps. Using software is only way to use just two screens with Nvidia cards in any game. Only three monitor surround is officially supported by Nvidia. I am in belief that with Ati card you dont have to use this Soft TH software to get just two screens. Am I correct? With Ati 7970 I should be able to run six screens if necessary.

 

Now here is the interesting part. Even if I dont use two monitors but have Soft TH files in my DCS folder my game slows down. I even check`d that Sli was on during playing while those Soft TH files were on the game folder from MSI afterburner. There was a little difference in memory usage but otherwise everything looked the same.

 

I dont know why does this software slow the game for sure but I think it has something to do with it changing Nvidia profile usage somehow. Now bear in mind that I am using sli setup. With single card it might be different.


Edited by RpSPT
Edited wording (This software) -> (Using software...)
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I am not using SoftTH, also I am not using Eyefinity group. I simply have 3 monitors in row and in DCS I use 3 camera viewpoints. I tried SoftTH and even though many say it gives more FPS for me it didn't. For me less things running is better.

 

With stock 7970 (which has 4 connectors) you can use 4 monitors and if you use splitters for MiniDP ports you can get more (up to 6 I believe) and later ASUS cards have 6 ports already for 6 monitor connectivity without these splitters. About nVidia I don't know so can't comment.

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