John - part#3: some thoughts on multi mons.1.You like me, use outer monitors of different sizes. To equalize the size of objects between mons: Drag the view from a side mon onto the larger main mon and size it same width as main view. Drag it back to the outer mon and keep dragging till the inner edge of the view is exactly at the bezel. This causes some of the far end of the view to "fall off" the far edge of the outer mon but that's ok- all objects/ paint marks etc are now same size as main mon. In effect I display a 19" image on a 17" monitor!!2.NEVER let the edge of a side view overlap the adjacent monitor!!! Big frame rate hit. But popups appear ok for overlapping. Big popups such as Overhead Panels seem to hurt FPS- I open them only as needed. Most other popups seem to have little effect on frame rate.3. When you have a flight set up perfectly, save it- then reopen it to start up with the display settings ready to go. You may need a few very minor tweaks to repostion something but on the whole it reopens 98% as you saved it.4. You need to adjust Panel Config for each aircraft.5. Full screen doesn't work for me. However you can easily hide task and menu bars and change colours of title bars/lettering. I use black with dark green letters. The result is VERY close to the appearance of full Screen.6. Don't be unduly concerned by the apparent frame rate drop with triple mons. Remember there is only one CPU so only one monitor/view is being updated at any moment- the other two are always static- they have an infinitely high frame rate. With 2/3 of your view being displayed with "perfect smoothness" and 1/3 at an "acceptable" frame rate- what does the pilot see? A very smooth wide picture! Frame rate seems to mean very little here. I can even fly comfortably with the FPS as low as 7-8. There is some nearby object chatter then but overall the whole wide scene is very flyable! The secret of course is that the 3 images are correctly blended into one wide picture.Generally my display at say 18-22 is just as smooth as single monitor at 35-45 FPS.The attached screenshot gives an idea of how closely the 3 views can be integrated. And this pic distorts my visual reality because it assumes the 3 monitors are in line- not angled, and it removes bezels and shows the views as touching rather than bezel separated!Alex ReidDreamFleet Bonanza ready for T/O at Duluth R27

Alex;Very sweet. I now want to leave early and go home and try this :)I do not use full-screen either. I usually get fps around 16 - 18 at the aiport ans in the 20s to 40s when flying (clouds seem to be the biggest hit here). I recently tried Contrails Pro and while I liked it, is was killing my fps. I lost 20 fps in some cases. My airport fps dropped to 6 and I used all the FS2004 recommendations they supplied. Not bashing the product, but the hit wasn't worth the eye candy.I had also read that view overlaps were killers. I had never messed with the pop ups overlapping to see but it would be nice to have the left and right views be full screen with the CDU and radar only on top of them.I will definitely set this up and see how it works. Now I am really wondering about the video cards as a separate CDU would mean that all I need is a throttle quadrant and I have nothing but the panel on the screen.I will let you know how things go for me. Again, many thanks.John

Alex;I do not use full-screen either. I usually get fps around 16 - 18 at the aiport ans in the 20s to 40s when flying (clouds seem to be the biggest hit here). I recently tried Contrails Pro and while I liked it, is was killing my fps. I lost 20 fps in some cases. My airport fps dropped to 6 and I used all the FS2004 recommendations they supplied. Not bashing the product, but the hit wasn't worth the eye candy.I had also read that view overlaps were killers. I had never messed with the pop ups overlapping to see but it would be nice to have the left and right views be full screen with the CDU and radar only on top of them.I will definitely set this up and see how it works. Now I am really wondering about the video cards as a separate CDU would mean that all I need is a throttle quadrant and I have nothing but the panel on the screen.John

Yes- On my 6 yr old AMD XP2200 1.8 GHz 'puter (2 GeForce FX 5200 GPUs) I keep clouds Simple, sight distance 60, cloud draw 30, AI about 30. Autogen medium. Scenery Complexity Very Dense. Overall settings generally mid to upper. These work beautifully for low and slow around the BC coast and mountains. Reduce them a bit for major airports. Not bad for a system the Smithsonian museum is lusting for!! No plans to upgrade hardware here!!!If you set the L & R view heights to slightly less than main view (x value in that magic Panel Config line) you can end up with a view about 1/4 " less height than full view. You can place a popup on an outer mon so its bottom edge is just barely visible. Click on the view and popup disappears below = Full View!!! click on that popup bottom edge and it again overlays the view to set a switch, then reclick on view to hide again. (See the Duluth pic above where the switch panel can be hidden.)Yes an extra small LCD to display CDU is one I've thought would be very useful. Can you find an old cheap GPU that would utilize your present driver? Used 15" LCDs are cheap- look in your "used" web sites. Perhaps rotate image & turn LCD sideways?Let me know how this all goes! And get rid of the horrible Microsoft blue on the title bars!!Alex Reid

Yes- On my 6 yr old AMD XP2200 1.8 GHz 'puter (2 GeForce FX 5200 GPUs) I keep clouds Simple, sight distance 60, cloud draw 30, AI about 30. Autogen medium. Scenery Complexity Very Dense. Overall settings generally mid to upper. These work beautifully for low and slow around the BC coast and mountains. Reduce them a bit for major airports. Not bad for a system the Smithsonian museum is lusting for!! No plans to upgrade hardware here!!!If you set the L & R view heights to slightly less than main view (x value in that magic Panel Config line) you can end up with a view about 1/4 " less height than full view. You can place a popup on an outer mon so its bottom edge is just barely visible. Click on the view and popup disappears below = Full View!!! click on that popup bottom edge and it again overlays the view to set a switch, then reclick on view to hide again. (See the Duluth pic above where the switch panel can be hidden.)Yes an extra small LCD to display CDU is one I've thought would be very useful. Can you find an old cheap GPU that would utilize your present driver? Used 15" LCDs are cheap- look in your "used" web sites. Perhaps rotate image & turn LCD sideways?Let me know how this all goes! And get rid of the horrible Microsoft blue on the title bars!!Alex Reid

Alex;I think I have it setup correctly and I will have to do some taxiing around to see how well I set it up. Many thanks. You posted a pic above where the left and right monitor views fill the screen. when I stretch my view to do that it distorts the image. My views (as you can see from my pics above) do not fill the monitor. If I would want to fill the screen, how is that accomplished?One answer leads to another question :)John

Alex;I think I have it setup correctly and I will have to do some taxiing around to see how well I set it up. Many thanks. You posted a pic above where the left and right monitor views fill the screen. when I stretch my view to do that it distorts the image. My views (as you can see from my pics above) do not fill the monitor. If I would want to fill the screen, how is that accomplished?One answer leads to another question :)John

Alex;I figured it out with the xx setting. Thanks!

Alex;I figured it out with the xx setting. Thanks!

John- delighted you got it going- welcome to the world of what I call "Wide Horizon". Hope you enjoy.I've always regarded View Forward Right as being the windscreen in front of the copilot. (Pilot of course, looking staight forward sees view forward.)That implies that View Forward Right is directly over the right half of the instrument panel. Therefore I try to create a dummy panel (below that view) with various popups. I think the pilot- when he looks out view fwd right , will see the panel below in front of the copilot. View right would be the window on the copilot's right side.It would be nice if the designers gave us a matching co pilot panel to synch with pilot's panel- NO duplication of instruments.(I should add that I have set my desktop colour to black- which gives an unobtrusive background any where I don't place a popup. see below.)PMDG provided a 1st officer panel with their 747 except there is much panel overlap and the two cannot be synched together on separate monitors. (it is not a popup panel)I did a mockup of this pretending I had a very large monitor- with everything on one screen- including triple views. It worked and flew but quite overpowered my ancient computer and was too small on a 19" mon. Here's a pic-Alex ReidPMDG 747 triple views, dual ckpt panels & many popups on a single screen. Aloft at CYVR. Got a 45" screen to try this???

John- delighted you got it going- welcome to the world of what I call "Wide Horizon". Hope you enjoy.I've always regarded View Forward Right as being the windscreen in front of the copilot. (Pilot of course, looking staight forward sees view forward.)That implies that View Forward Right is directly over the right half of the instrument panel. Therefore I try to create a dummy panel (below that view) with various popups. I think the pilot- when he looks out view fwd right , will see the panel below in front of the copilot. View right would be the window on the copilot's right side.It would be nice if the designers gave us a matching co pilot panel to synch with pilot's panel- NO duplication of instruments.(I should add that I have set my desktop colour to black- which gives an unobtrusive background any where I don't place a popup. see below.)PMDG provided a 1st officer panel with their 747 except there is much panel overlap and the two cannot be synched together on separate monitors. (it is not a popup panel)I did a mockup of this pretending I had a very large monitor- with everything on one screen- including triple views. It worked and flew but quite overpowered my ancient computer and was too small on a 19" mon. Here's a pic-Alex ReidPMDG 747 triple views, dual ckpt panels & many popups on a single screen. Aloft at CYVR. Got a 45" screen to try this???

Alex;No I wish I did! I had to reload and recreate everything as I kept getting crashes during about 1 in 3 flights. There was some kind of a bug in one of my UT bmp files and I think things are now working. The monitor setup is great and I am looking forward to more flights soon.Thanks again!

Alex;No I wish I did! I had to reload and recreate everything as I kept getting crashes during about 1 in 3 flights. There was some kind of a bug in one of my UT bmp files and I think things are now working. The monitor setup is great and I am looking forward to more flights soon.Thanks again!

John - Now I have you hooked- here is a really far out idea re triple views on a single screen- as in the pic above:Scrap the big monitor idea and instead use a projector to create a large (50-60" ?) image.Make the screen from a sheet of white Masonite- curved in a nice arc to replicate the multi monitor setup. (Movie screen reflective crushed glass is still availlable I presume.)I don't know the focal length of a projector but I suppose it could be placed on a shelf directly above the pilot's head so it would be same distance to screen as pilot's eyes.Why the curved screen?Each view needs to be square to the pilot's eyes or each horizon segment will bend/twist when the aircraft rolls- the horizon will develop a curve. If you keep each horizon segment square to the eyes- problem solved! Hence a curved screen - just like triple monitors arranged in an arc- each square to the eyes.-----------But that doesn't solve the bending horizon in aircraft pitch up or down- we need a screen that is also curved vertically.(No such monitor or screen I know of that has compound curvature. There is one that curves laterally.) UNLESS- Take a good sized weather balloon and make a fibreglass mold from it. Bingo- a screen that is curved in all directions. Wonder what a triple view projector image would look like on the inside- concave surface of that???And that is how we see the real world- as if it is a picture on the inside of a giant sphere!Any experimenters out there with time on their hands?Alex Reid

John - Now I have you hooked- here is a really far out idea re triple views on a single screen- as in the pic above:Scrap the big monitor idea and instead use a projector to create a large (50-60" ?) image.Make the screen from a sheet of white Masonite- curved in a nice arc to replicate the multi monitor setup. (Movie screen reflective crushed glass is still availlable I presume.)I don't know the focal length of a projector but I suppose it could be placed on a shelf directly above the pilot's head so it would be same distance to screen as pilot's eyes.Why the curved screen?Each view needs to be square to the pilot's eyes or each horizon segment will bend/twist when the aircraft rolls- the horizon will develop a curve. If you keep each horizon segment square to the eyes- problem solved! Hence a curved screen - just like triple monitors arranged in an arc- each square to the eyes.-----------But that doesn't solve the bending horizon in aircraft pitch up or down- we need a screen that is also curved vertically.(No such monitor or screen I know of that has compound curvature. There is one that curves laterally.) UNLESS- Take a good sized weather balloon and make a fibreglass mold from it. Bingo- a screen that is curved in all directions. Wonder what a triple view projector image would look like on the inside- concave surface of that???And that is how we see the real world- as if it is a picture on the inside of a giant sphere!Any experimenters out there with time on their hands?Alex Reid

Alex;Took the bird up for its maiden flight after all the reloading and the panel/monitor conversions you sent. Worked like a charm! I have my two side monitors filling about 2/3 of the screen from top to bottom so I have room for a couple of small panel pop-ups like the weather radar from Active Sky along the bottom. I have the CDU on top of the one view with no noticeable fp hit. FPS in flight between 20 and 38. FSX; why?? with the terrain mesh flying from Palm Springs to Ontario CA through the Banning pass was remarkably like the real thing even had a road winding up the mountain. Thanks again for the monitor settings. I have added the Saitek throttle quadrant as well and now I am just toying with the idea of that CDUII from VrInsight but I would need that extra video card and it is over $500 with shipping :( I think I'll stay with the mouse for a while on that one.Now to just figure out a way to retire and play all day.John

Alex;Took the bird up for its maiden flight after all the reloading and the panel/monitor conversions you sent. Worked like a charm! I have my two side monitors filling about 2/3 of the screen from top to bottom so I have room for a couple of small panel pop-ups like the weather radar from Active Sky along the bottom. I have the CDU on top of the one view with no noticeable fp hit. FPS in flight between 20 and 38. FSX; why?? with the terrain mesh flying from Palm Springs to Ontario CA through the Banning pass was remarkably like the real thing even had a road winding up the mountain. Thanks again for the monitor settings. I have added the Saitek throttle quadrant as well and now I am just toying with the idea of that CDUII from VrInsight but I would need that extra video card and it is over $500 with shipping :( I think I'll stay with the mouse for a while on that one.Now to just figure out a way to retire and play all day.John

John- Nice to hear you are "good for go" with Wide Horizon. Brings new meaning to the word "realism". Having played with multi mons now for nearly nine years, I can't visualize less.Retirement has its pluses and minuses- been there for more years than I'll reveal. The trick is to keep her happy while you're preoccupied with that foggy instrument approach. I tell her FS is recommended by doctors as an Alzheimer's prophylaxis! (She wonders if it really works.) But giving her the den as a sewing room was the best solution!Cheers Alex ReidBonanza- dawn, on final for R8L CYVR- just across the Strait of Georgia from home sweet home! (note horizon bend as aircraft pitches down- we need vertically concave screens!)

John- The 21/4 " & 2" separations between screens are the equivalent of 5.4

Great info you got here!Can you post the formula to calculate the degrees?. I'm using 3 x 20" widescreen monitors. Thanks!

No trouble. Here goes-(Width of bezels separation divided by Width of main mon SCREEN) times 45 = view shift in degrees. (add this amount to the default view setting of + or - 45

thanks! I'll try that. for divide you use "/"

thanks! I'll try that. for divide you use "/"

Duhhh- it's been 60 years since I sat in an Algebra class. How come I didn't think of that? Senility is creeping in! Thanks.But I still like a good old divide symbol ! And here it is:

Hi Alex and all,I got directed here from another forum by Alex. Thanks Alex, it seems I may have found what I'm looking for.I currently use FS2004 on 3 PCs with WinXpProSP2 and WideView running on 3 x 20" CRT Monitors (they are flipping _huge_ but they were free!)I'm building a B737-800NG cockpit with all the bells and whistles. Home made, and I have zero engineering or woodworking knowledge, so it's a bit rough!I've been playing with the monitor setup and have come across the devilish problem of synchronising traffic across the three monitors. No matter how careful I am with trying to get the traffic levels and de3finitions the same - and trying to synchronise the FS time across all 3 machines, the traffic runs at very slightly different times on the three screens, causing some fairly silly effects!Also, if I want to fly online, I need to connect all three PCs (two of them as 'observers') to the SquawkBox session - and I get some fairly radical zooming around of traffic on the two slave machines.The ideal would be to have _one_ PC running all 3 screens, but I don't know if my old PCs are up to it.They are Pentium 4 2.4Ghz, which is probably fast enough, but the drawback is they only have one AGP slot each, and no PCIExpress. They also only have 2 slots for RAM, so I am limited to 2Gb in each machine.I have tried a dual head in the AGP slot and a single head in one of the old PCI slots, but I do not seem to be getting hardware acceleration on the PCI card, giving lock-ups and very bad frame rates.I got to wondering about a Matrox TripleHead2Go, but am aware of the drawbacks in terms of view settings and needing to use the VC.I have a Chirstmas Bonus coming up of around

Sorry, to hijack this thread back to it's orignal topic/title, but I think the issue of mixing (comletely) different GPU's on the same motherboard at the same time, has to be addressed seriously at least once in this forum.

Is there any issues with having multiple brands/models of video cards installed on one PC? Any thoughts would be appreciated.

name='january' date='Jul 28 2009, 11:46 AM' post='1610974']John- it's my understanding that one PC can have only one GPU driver. In that case, multiple video cards will allhave to run from a common driver- and that implies all cards must be of the same family ...

This may hold for the past and the present.But have you ever heard about the Hydra 200 chip from Lucid which will power the the next Generationof MSI Big Bang motherbords ? AFAIK, unfortunately it is planned to be used only for LGA 1156 but not for LGA 1366 CPUs.http://www.slashgear.com/lucid-hydra-200-p...nboard-2357770/

MSI and Lucid have announced a new mainboard called the MSI Big Bang that uses the Lucid Hydra 200 SoC.The Hydra 200 is a real-time distributed processing engine that acts as an intelligent graphic load balancer.What that means is that the Big Bang board is capable of allowing the user to mix and match multiple video cardsof any model and any make. Not only can gamers use their 9800 GTX and GTX 280 in the same computer, they can use an ATI video card and a NVIDIA card at the same time. MSI expects the mainboard to be on the market in time for the holiday shopping season at undisclosed pricing.

http://www.lucidlogix.com/products_hydra200.htmlhttp://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3646

A year ago Lucid announced the Hydra 100: a physical chip that could enable hardware multi-GPU withoutany pesky SLI/Crossfire software, game profiles or anything like that. At a high level what Lucid's technology does is intercept OpenGL/DirectX commands from the CPU to the GPU andload balance them across any number of GPUs. The final buffers are read back by the Lucid chip and sent toprimary GPU for display. The technology sounds flawless. You don't need to worry about game profiles or driver support, you just add more GPUsand they should be perfectly load balanced. Even more impressive is Lucid's claim that you can mix and match GPUs ofdifferent performance levels. For example you could put a GeForce GTX 285 and a GeForce 9800 GTX in parallel and the two would be perfectly load balanced by Lucid's hardware; you'd get a real speedup. Eventually, Lucid will also enablemulti-GPU configurations from different vendors (e.g. one NVIDIA GPU + one AMD GPU).At least on paper, Lucid's technology has the potential to completely eliminate all of the multi-GPU silliness we've beendealing with for the past several years. Today, Lucid is announcing the final set of hardware that will be shipping withinthe next ~30 days.It's called the Hydra 200 and it will first be featured on MSI's Big Bang P55 motherboard. Unlike the Hydra 100 we talkedabout last year, 200 is built on a 65nm process node instead of 130nm. The architecture is widely improved thanks to muchmore experience with the chip on Lucid's part.There are three versions of the Hydra 200: the LT22114, the LT22102 and the LT22114. The only difference between the chipsare the number of PCIe lanes. The lowest end chip has a x8 connection to the CPU/PCIe controller and two x8 connections to GPUs.The midrange LT22102 has a x16 connection to the CPU and two x16 connections for GPUs. And the highest end solution, the onebeing used on the MSI board, has a x16 to the CPU and then a configurable pair of x16s to GPUs. You can operate this controller in4 x8 mode, 1 x16 + 2 x8 or 2 x16. It's all auto sensing and auto-configurable. The high end product will be launching in October,with the other two versions shipping into mainstream and potentially mobile systems some time later.Lucid wouldn't tell us the added cost on a motherboard but Lucid gave us the guidance of around $1.50 per PCIe lane. The high end chiphas 48 total PCIe lanes, which puts the premium at $72. The low end chip has 24 lanes, translating into a $36 cost for the Hydra 200 chip.Note that since the Hydra 200 has an integrated PCIe switch, there's no need for extra chips on the motherboard (and of course no SLI licensing fees). The first implementation of the Hydra 200 will be on MSI's high end P55 motherboard, so we can expect prices to be at the upper end of the spectrum. With enough support, we could see that fall into the uppermainstream segment.Lucid specs the Hydra 200 at a 6W TDP.Also unlike last year, we actually got real seat time with the Hydra 200 and MSI's Big Bang. Even better: we got to playon a GeForce GTX 260 + ATI Radeon HD 4890 running in multi-GPU mode.

I also wonder, if there are any new opportunities for the flight simulator scene,especially if the new MSI Big Bang P55 motherboard with the Hydra 200 chip cansignificantly improve the FPS rate for FSX (with more than one GPU installed) whereconventional boards using good old SLI and Crossfire obviously fail to do so.BTW, that the US/Israeli company Lucidlogix is said to have strong ties to Intel.