Can we get Toms on to this band wagon about eyefinity/surround?

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theholylancer

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Umm ok for those dont know how eyefinity is done, lets recap:

in a traditional multi-screen (well ok radeon and geforece, lets not bring in professional or other specialized cards ppl) set up, the card allows you to set up 2 or 3 or more monitors by extending the desktop on to the other monitors, hence there is a "set primary" option and you see multiple screens in the windows desktop resolution configuarator. Now some games and most movie players especially will ONLY play on the PRIMARY screen and not any of the secondary screens at all, just because they can't due to technical issues, or due to some other factors. In this case the OS handles the positioning of the screens.

what eyefinity does is to MERGE all the monitors into one giant monitor on the hardware level (or driver) and present it as ONE big PRIMARY only display to the OS, whereby any game, or video player should be able to take advantage of (think about it, you can make a video windows scale past ur current screen if you really wanted, just full screen support is buggy as hell on some players for multiple screens without the primary flag) without extra coding, as to them, there seems to only have ONE and only ONE screen plugged in (while there is indeed more plugged in), thus making it easier to interface and etc. The driver will have to handle the position of each picture and etc, not the OS.

How can NV or someone else lock out this tech? By limiting the display resolution to some specific numbers if there is a ATI card in place, for example, limit to 800 * 600 1024 * 768 ............. 2560 * 1600 (and maybe what ever is after that) and then that's it, so weird resolutions made up of six 1024 * 768 screen isn't going to be supported (6144 * 4608) and is only supported by NV surround.

that means a weird setup with say 5 screen or 4 screen (man ur crosshair would be right in the middle...) or what nots would be effectively locked out of the game or application, and you have to run at the max standard resolution possible, which is just useless for eyefinity
 
Yep, and don't forget Field Of View, having a surround setup with a 90 degree field of view would suck for a wrap-around screen(s) setup, that's why I included both, because either by a resolution check/block or by limiting the FOV you would kill most of the benefits of eyefinity gaming, and definitely surround screen gaming.
 

RealityRush

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So you think that preventing the use of a widescreen resolution when an ATI card is detected wouldn't be that bad??? Have you ever tried Eyefinity with 1920x1200 resoultion or something.... it stretches like a woman giving birth. Makes the image look retarded. And the FOV issue would blow just as bad.
 
Yeah most games set a default only just for a standard starting point, but if they slip in an FOV max/cap either in the .ini like my example or as Sabot said by burying it deeper, then they could limit one but not the other, and we've gotta make sure devs understand that's a no-no no matter what the IHVs want.

WideScreenGaming had a list of recommended FOVs but it appears to be a dead link now. :??:


 

theholylancer

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well most games now have a ini setting to fix it, but they could very well lock it eh...
 

randomizer

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You assume anyone of the staff actually checks the forums, traditionally they have always been seperate entities although the comments section of articles may be different.
As Ape said, some do visit the forum. I think Chris has a look through after he publishes an article, since some threads get posted in addition to article comments. I don't know about any other time.