GTX 670 monitor setup question

[mrniel]

So i decided to upgrade my GTX 560 TI to a GTX 680 4GB.

Although i did not buy it to do triple monitor setup. I probably at some time would try it. My only problem is, that my monitor is a samsung S27B970

that cost a lot, and buying 2 more to try a triple monitor setup is simply

out of the question. So here is the question

Would it be possibel to buy 2 cheaper 27 inch monitors with fsx a 1920x1080

resolution and get them to work together with the S27970, wich by the way also can be lowered to 1920x1080.

The gforce site states that you have to use 3 similar monitors to use surround 3D. But i'm only interested in 3 monitor 2D setup.

 

Anyone tried to use a similar card with different monitors ?

 

Mikael

[mrniel]

well, seems like i'm the only one, with this problem.

Think i'll just continue with 1 main monitor and a secondary for MFDs.

too expensive to buy 2 extra monitors only to find out it dosent work.

if not exaxtly the same.

to bad.

 

mrniel

[JG14_Smil]

I'm pretty sure people use different monitors all the time. It does not matter a bit when using SoftTh.

 

Good luck. I am learning about it too, so that is all I know. I am rearranging the room for my 3 37" HDTV's as we speak, so I'll know more soon.

[Waxi]

For testing purposes I mixed a 24" screen with a 1920x1200 resolution (center) with two Asus VE276Q 27" screens with a 1920x1080 resolution (left and right) on a GTX 670 with 4GB. Nvidia 2D Surround adjusts the resolution on all three screens and scales the picture such that everything looks right (i.e., no distortions and bezel compensation) on all three monitors with different resolutions. However, the performance was worse with the mixed screen configuration than it was when I used the three identical Asus VE276Q 27" screens.

 

Anyway, I went back to my double screen setup (one for main view and one for the MFDs and gauges) for performance reasons. While the GTX 670 is a very powerful card, it is still not powerful enough to run a triple-screen setup with DCS - at least not in my system that is based on an Intel Core i7 920 overclocked to 3.2GHz and 12 GB RAM.

[mrniel]

Thank you for your time and efford testing this, answers my question perfect.

So it can be done, but is not worth the money as the framerate drop below playable ?

Again ty all replyers.

 

mrniel

[Kuky]

I have 3x 27" monitors and I can tell you framerate is pretty much 1/3 on 3 screens compared to 1 monitor. There is something within game coding that affects this (as it renders 3x times the same world in game) and even with me lowering the resolution on all 3 monitors framerate is not much affected at all.

 

You can do some tweaking to get bit more FPS out and I have found lowering farclip value in graphics.cfg helps. I tweaked by install to have about 15fps min with this setup now still being able to keep degault high settings, I have to keep mirrors off and HDR is still screwed up also so I don't use it.

 

You can see my current PC in sig, and I want to note that going from i7 950@4.2GHz to i7 3930K did not change my FPS in DCS at all which was big surprise for me as I thought having more powerful CPU would help (so looks like video card is bottleneck with 3 screen setups), and although in single screen FPS are really great with 3 viewpoints/cameras it's like I said about 1/3.

[mrniel]

Did a fast test. with my normal setup running 2 monitors and a ipad.

2560*1440 monitor Primary

1024*768 monitor secondary running

A10 VC server for ipad

Track IR 4 running

 

All on max execpt

Only MSAA on 4x as the greater res does not make jaggies so greater is not nessesary.

Trees 6000

bushes 0

 

Gives me around 40-50 FPS

 

On a i7 OC with gtx 670.

 

If I disable a few things, the framerate goes to 60-70 FPS.

 

However, i like to have a high framerate when flying, it make finecontrol possibel, low framerate makes you overcorrect all the time.

 

mrniel

[Waxi]

There is one thing to note: When using the mixed configuration (different monitors with different resolutions) Nvidia 2D Surround seemed to somehow compensate the size difference of the pixels on the 27" screens and the 24" screen. At least the picture looked consistent on all three screens despite the different resolutions and pixel sizes. However, it also seemed to me that the performance was worse than compared to the setup with three identical screens.

 

Anyway, using the triple screen setup with three identical screens, in the A-10C campaign missions my framerate was somewhere between 18-30 fps. Personally, I found the sim to eb more immersible with higher framerates and decided to go back to a double screen setup using one screen for the main view and one for the instruments export, where I have something around 55-60 fps on maxed out graphics settings (with vsync enabled).