hi TonyNothing to be scared :-) Curently i have parhelia with 3 screens and four additional pci adaptors on the same mashine and as i still have two pci lots available may be i will push my luck even bit futheri have 3 indetical Ati Lt pro 8m pci cards wich cost about 20$ each hand some S3 pci-- alsow 8m i had some stutters with the sim until i disabled the hardware acceleration for the pci cards-realy not needed for gauges displaying anywayThe Fps hit is not significant

Greetings - I have been looking for a thread on multiple displays and came across this one on the Matrox Parhelia.I am fairly new to flight siming about to take delivery on a new system that will have a 256mb Radeon X 800XT Pro AGP video card. I would like to have a three monitor display, but have no idea how to hook them up. Can someone please refer me to a good source/reference for what equipment is necessary and exactly how to go about setting it up? Do I need more than one video card, and, if so, do they need to be identical cards?Also, will the three screen set up give you any peripheral view of the ground on either side of the airplane without using the hat switch?Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance.Bruce Scott

Use the Forum Search, Luke :-)//Tuomas

The forum search strong with this one.

Hello everybody,Last week I did some test with 4 outside view monitors and 1 pc !My pc was a P3.2 / 1024 DDR 400 and a Fx5950 Ultra 256 mb.The setup was with one expanded desktop over 2 monitors.After that I tried with a pci XfX Fx5200 256 mb added to it.That worked .Then a seconds XfXpci card.So a total of 4 outside views.My system has been optimized on every point , from Windows to the register and FS.Imagine a very detailed Airport , sunset and using only 2 monitors.My lowest framerate is 16,9.I like to test with heavy situations to be sure that I always have good fps. With 3 views it went down to 13,6.With 4 views it went down to around 10.My conclusion was that 3 monitors where no problem, as changing some sliders helped to raise the framerates.However with 4 I had to adjust to much to have it like I wanted the scenery to look. This was not due to the card, but to my pc.Calculating everything from scenery to AI traffic was just to much for my 3.2Ghz.However I am sure that with a 4+ Ghz processor it will work.Tip : if you have a fast Nvidia based graphics card now , you can drive two ouside view monitors with it and also by adding a Fx5200 256 mb pci card you can have 3 outside views.I had the opportunity to compare to a Parhelia 128 mb and the Nvidia approach had better performance.That is because of the faster GPU's and the larger memory ( total of 512 mb ). Happy flying,

Hey - let me know where to get one of 4Gig processors! I'll take 2 :)You have a 512MB video card? What is it? Note that video memory on seperate cards is not cumulative...I plan on using 3 monitors with parhelia. The question I have not been able to get an answer to is what is the widest FOV I can expect to acheive? I really would like to get at 120 degreees. I don't care about AI traffic... I will be flying mostly with VATSIM.