Hey everyone,I wanted to post that my little article about putting together the system to run 8 monitor FSX at the AVSIM conference in Bellevue, WA is finally live. I don't know how many from the forums were there but it was a great experience and I know many people asked about the demo I had running. So anyway, here is a small article with a few pictures of my experience :)http://game.amd.com/us-en/community_articl...id=AMD000000017Jeff

Jeff, thanks for the post, looks great.Couple of questions:What are the advantages of Vista over XP for a multi monitor setup?How come Microsoft or AMD or Nvidia have not figured out how to stretch a desktop over more than two monitors?gb.

>How come Microsoft or AMD or Nvidia have not figured out how>to stretch a desktop over more than two monitors?In Vista I assume you mean, as you can do this in XP?Gary

Two mons? Been running triple mons for the past 7 years! Nvidia GeForce FX5200 GPUs.Alex ReidControl Panel/Display/settingshttp://forums.avsim.net/user_files/184959.jpgDawn KSFO Quiet Two Departurehttp://forums.avsim.net/user_files/184960.jpg

Sorry, "Desktop" is the wrong word.What I mean is if you have say three monitorsat 1280*1024 each a 3D game can see them as:Three 1280*1024 monitorsor one 2560*1024 monitor plus one 1280*1024 monitorbut not one 3840*1204 monitor.In FS it would make life a lot easier if you could justdrag a VC view across three or five screens.gb.

If only it was affordable..... I suppose its nice to know it can be done. sigh...

Can't help with VC- but in the 2D Triple mon pic I posted above- because the 3 images are adjusted to compensate for monitor bezel width, the pilot sees all three as a SINGLE image. For all practical purposes I have a single screen @ 3072x768 resolution- at least that's what my eyes tell me. The bezels "disappear" just as in the screenshot.When done carefully you can easily correct the views for bezel width to an accuracy of 1/10 of a degree. The result is the same as what you see when you are sitting behind the wheel of your car- a single view regardless of the windshield pillars.Alex Reid

>Sorry, "Desktop" is the wrong word.>>What I mean is if you have say three monitors>at 1280*1024 each a 3D game can see them as:>>Three 1280*1024 monitors>>or one 2560*1024 monitor plus one 1280*1024 monitor>>but not one 3840*1204 monitor.>>In FS it would make life a lot easier if you could just>drag a VC view across three or five screens.>>gb.You *can* run a single 3840*1204 monitor with the Matrox TripleHead2Go Digital Edition!See: http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/gxm/prod...igital/home.php-jahman.

I am trying to do a similar thing except I want to have 4 touchscreens and 2 external views.http://www.leveldsim.com/forums/forum_posts.asp?TID=16647the above link is showing our work in progress but we have found a couple of problems.We can only run fsx onto 4 individual monitors before it crashes ( we had 7 running fine on fs9).Our touchscreens do not work with Matrox triple head to go, nor do they perform on horizontal or vertical span mode.FSX works great with just 6 non touch enabled monitors (25 fps) in the span mode but I can't have my cake and eat it.The touch drivers work fine on 6 individual screens.The touch drivers for multi screens do not work on Vista.Any idea on when Microsoft will address this problem? we are using FSX for its comms package for having 6 of these joined together. It seems FSX was a step backwards in some respects. I am open to all suggestions.Malky

Today we rotated the centre monitor for the FMS, got pilot, copilot, overhead and 2 external views sorted so its now 4 touch, 2 non touch. the fps is around 11 but I'll look into other methods to fix that.The video set up is:card 1: pilot and fms (dual view)card 2: co pilot and LH view (vertical span)card 3: Overhead and RH view (vertical span)

Malkymoo- interesting stuff- could you post another pic? Do I take it from your card list that you now have 3 views- LFwd,Fwd,RFwd? If so, does bezel width adjustment/horizon synch via Panel Config work the same for FX as in FS9?Alex Reid

Ahh, I see. No. I was a bit brief. Since I'm using this for Avionics training we only use 2 external views. Those are pilots view fwd and F/O view fwd.(The F/O's view is moved right by using ctrl enter, I think).The other views are the pilots panel, F/o panel, FMS and overhead panel.What do you mean by bezel adjustment?Will post some photos tonight.

Bezel adjustment corrects the visual angle displayed in views LFwd & RFwd to compensate for the width of the bezel(s) separation in triple mon/triple view setups. When it's done accurately, the 3 images blend together and the bezels "disappear" -in exactly the same way that car windshield pillars are not noticeable in the 180

Wow, that looks cool and would have been good to know when setting up the demo :) I didn't have a lot of time and didn't know you could find settings to do that, such as locking the horizon. I'd love to find out how to do that if you can PM me the details.As to the question about >4 monitors I've been working with the FSX team to iron out some bugs but have no comittment for FSX at this point for a patch. What I had to do to get past the 4 monitors was to have the game running on 4 displays while enabling each new display one at a time in windows, then opening a new window and dragging it across to the new display. In this manner I was able to get to 8 monitors without a lot of hassle. However, on the down side saving the views doesn't quite work so you have to do this each time you shut down the sim/pc. We hibernated at the show with the sim running and it worked just fine.

I don't know if there really is an advantage of Vista over XP for multi-monitor setup to be honest. I found it pretty simple and used Vista because of it's DX10 capabilities, though I did run the demo on DX9 instead of DX10.When you ask about spanning across monitors, really you have to think about the amount of data and where it needs to be stored. Consider that each card has independant memory pools, not shared with each other. So the frame buffer cannot be shared across cards. However, for basic windows functionality there isn't necessarily a lot of data so it can be shared and copied across easy enough, a 3D application is a whole other story. The max surface size that a card can render to becomes a barrier so you hit limits that way as well. In the end, there are some cases where it can be done easier than others but in 3D applications it's very tough and requires a lot of programming effort either at the driver level or application level to make it look and work right.