I am planning to make a 3 HDMI projector 210 deg. Eyefinity setup + 2 extended DLP monitors for panels and gauges. I did some testing already and the AMD Sapphire FleX HD 7950 3GB seems to be the perfect card at present for what I want. Unfortunately, thanks to this topic, I learned I should go for Nvidia in terms of quality. But Nvidia to my knowledge has no equivalent 5 monitor card.

 

What I hope for, however, is that with the expected coming of Prepar3D v.2 which already proofed to do better rendering than FSX, the difference in quality between Nvidia and AMD could become smaller.

 

What is your opinion?

I think for your setup Edward, it just may be better to go with AMD. I guess it depends how far of a throw onto those projector screens? Your gonna loose some detail I think anyway and you probably won't notice it like if you had three 30" displays right in front of you. The cost to go this way with Nvidia could be prohibitive. Wouldn't you need three GPU cards in order to get five displays going as opposes to one AMD card?

 

If I were you, I would try to test everything before a final purchase. Not always easy but it sounds like you did that with the 7950. If you are happy with the results, that's all that matters - it's working for you. My final thought is running five display off one card would seem to put a lot of burden on that card... maybe not though. That's why I am going three displays off one PC and my gauge display running off a 2nd machine.

 

Be sure to document your results here in the forums to see see your progress and pitfalls. May help other simmers down the road. I believe there is a dedicated cockpit forum here as well to get more input.

 

Clutch

I think for your setup Edward, it just may be better to go with AMD. I guess it depends how far of a throw onto those projector screens? Your gonna loose some detail I think anyway and you probably won't notice it like if you had three 30" displays right in front of you. The cost to go this way with Nvidia could be prohibitive. Wouldn't you need three GPU cards in order to get five displays going as opposes to one AMD card?

 

If I were you, I would try to test everything before a final purchase. Not always easy but it sounds like you did that with the 7950. If you are happy with the results, that's all that matters - it's working for you. My final thought is running five display off one card would seem to put a lot of burden on that card... maybe not though. That's why I am going three displays off one PC and my gauge display running off a 2nd machine.

 

Be sure to document your results here in the forums to see see your progress and pitfalls. May help other simmers down the road. I believe there is a dedicated cockpit forum here as well to get more input.

 

Clutch

 

My experiments sofar with a HD6970 card, a 3840 x 800 eyefinity group (based on 3 WXGA projectors resolution), one 27" 1920 x 1080 dlp monitor, gave promising results in terms of frame rate and quality. FSX is configured full screen with 1 large base view and 3x 70 deg. scenery views on top. I noticed that the 2D panel gauge display had a very low impact on frame rate provided that I do NOT use an external frame rate limiter.

 

My opinion is that in this particular configuration I even could use a second gauge display without any problem running from the same card. For that, however, I need the earlier mentioned Sapphire FleX HD 7950. This card is also faster than my present HD 6970. If you add the expected performance boost when Prepar3D 2 comes out, one PC with one card should be able to do the job well. One remark: the present add-on's should be patched I understood, in order to profit from DirectX 11. OK, this is the way I see it now.

 

Because I am a perfectionist and I'm quite impressed by Word Not Allowed's findings and tweaking, I still like to investigate the other, a bit more costly, route: nVidea (e.g. Asus GTX680-DC2T) in combination with a Matrox TH2go for my 3 projectors + two 27" DLP panel gauge monitors of course. IMO this combination would offer the best speed and quality. Correct me if I'm wrong.

 

I like to realize this in about a year from now, so time is in my advantage.