Happy 2013 everyone! First time poster and somewhat long time reader here.

 

I have been reading, with much fascination, the thread entitled "DX10 Flashing Runways - Experimental Shader". I want to insert a big thank you here to Steve for what he has done to help the FSX enthusiast community. Having read the topic thread through to the end (lockdown), I now understand that the needed first step, before attempting to apply this breakthrough, is to verify that FSX will start and run properly the in DX10 preview mode.

 

That is where I ran into a problem. Like so many other FSX users I have been running in DX9 mode for the entire time that I have been using FSX. My FSX DX9 rig is configured with two graphics cards driving 4 monitors. I have two Nvidia GTX 460 cards in SLI configuration and, in DX9 mode at least, I am able to span 3 monitors right to left in front of me for my virtual cockpit view with a fourth monitor mounted above the center one below for additional views as they are needed or wanted. All this in DX9 mode mind you. I run full screen not windowed out of personal preference.

 

So I followed the logical first step and attempted to put FSX in DX10 preview mode and restarted both my machine and then FSX. When I restarted FSX everything appeared to be working fine until I actually loaded a flight. After selecting the fly now button from the flight menu all four monitors just started flashing sequentially (as though an image were about to be displayed from standby). The flash on and off would make the rounds from the center (primary) monitor through the others in sequence and eventually FSX would stop responding altogether.

 

I don't give up easily and proceeded to experiment before asking for help. So far I have found only two ways to get DX10 to load and fly. The first is to deactivate three monitors and set my video cards to drive just the one center montior in SLI. With just the center monitor activated DX10 works fine, in fact incredibly. But I have four monitors and did not build this system to run FSX on a single monitor. The only other way that I have been able to get FSX DX10 to load and run across more than one monitor is to use Nvidia surround. This allows me to span a virtual cockpit view across three montiors but absolutely will not give me a way to activate my fourth monitor for the other views that I really like having in DX9. One other problem with the surround mode is that the regular cockpit view (once it has been selected during a flight but not before) results in a pretty useless cockpit view skewed across all three montiors and way out of proportion (stretched). Also after selecting the regular cockpit view a flickering MS windows hourglass is now visible for the remainder of the flight with a lasting substantial hit in frames rates as a result. This hourglass icon and the performance hit in frame rates stays for the remainder of the flight regardless of subsequent views selected.

 

I have loaded and tuned my OS & FSX according to NickN's guides herein.

I have added and removed both payware and free add-ons.

I can and do experiment with both the Nvidia Inspector & FSX config files.

I have not yet applied any DX10 fixes as it is my goal to get all four monitors working in DX10 first.

 

Sorry for writing a book here but I wanted to give some details before asking any questions.

 

I have many questions and would greatly appreciate an answer to even one of them.

 

Has anyone else using Nvidia cards been able to run FSX in DX10 mode across multiple montiors without resorting to the surround mode?

 

Since I have been running in DX9 for so long with so many add-ons should I do a complete re-install of FSX alone and test that way?

 

The one subject that I have a hard time finding reliable information on is multiple monitors (NickN has made clear that he does not address this). Can anyone point me to a good guide for multiple monitor/SLI/Nvidia Inspector settings for such?

 

Any help appreciated.

Any help appreciated.

 

Shakeystick, to clarify, are you really in SLI mode or just dual graphics card mode?

It's just that nVidia FAQ says SLI supports a maximum of only two monitors.

 

http://www.geforce.com/hardware/technology/sli/faq#s1

 

At the risk of high jacking your thread I thought it was impossible to get a three monitor continuous VC view before NV Surround came along. How do you do it with your two 460's and Surround not activated.

 

Thanks,

gb.

Hi Shakeystick,

 

Let me chime in here with my experiences using multi-monitor setups, and some of the common problems you are experiencing.

 

- Not a DX10 issue. :-)

- I believe that the only multi-monitor scenario allowing a panoramic cockpit view would be to use Nvidia's surround mode with it's cards (or TripleHead2Go). Not sure how you did it without using surround. Understand, that to use surround effectively, you must ensure you have three monitors of equal size, resolution and refresh rate. It will not work without. Even fair to say to avoid problems to use identical monitors.

- SLI will not bring you any performance boost in FSX, but I realize in your situation, this is the onloy way you are able to use multi-monitors. (I had a similar setup)

- you can run your fourth monitor, but it will be independent of the primary FSX display. I use a second (or 3rd card in your case) dedicated to this monitor as a support reference hosting 2D panels, mapping and charts. However, to do this, you have to run FSX in windowed mode. In full screen mode, the fourth monitor will be blanked out and not useable.

- the VC when spanned across the monitors will be grossly exaggerated, but can be easily fixed by adding the setting WideViewAspect=True in the [Display] section, if it's not there already. See this post. Still not perfect, but a big improvement and far more useable.

- the spinning, always active, frame busting, Windows icon is a result of accessing 2D panels in surround mode. I don't know the technical details of it all, but from what I understand, the panels weren't intended with such high resolutions in mind. When I first encountered this, it annoyed me huge! Nothing worse than being 45 minutes into a flight and accidently pulling up an instrument panel only to have tyhis happen and be forced to abandon the flight. Try this link, it explains the problem and goes into the solution. It will involve a manual editting of each of your aircraft's panel.cfg files. (I have a small Excel application that has made this task less painful allowing me to perfectly resize and reposition the panels as I see fit.

 

I currently use 1 EVGA GeForce 660ti card to drive Nvidia surround across my 3 23" ACER LCD monitors. This was an upgrade from my previous 2 EVGA GeForce 560ti cards in SLI similar to yours. I use an older GeForce 8500 card to drive my fourth 15" resource monitor. It doesn't have to be anything high end for it's purpose. As mentioned first off, this isn't a DX10 issue. I am running FSX in DX10 mode with Nvidia surround with a resolution of 5760x1080x32 with great satisfacftion. Frame rates are averaging about 20-25FPS.

I can back up RKillins excellent post above: I run the Matrox TripleHead2Go Digital Edition from a single port on the EVGA GTX 580, with 3 Viewsonic 19" 1280 x 1024, giving 3840 x 1024, and Bezel management being a snap.

Over a couple of days, Les Hesley and I set up his very nice Nvidia Surround system, with two GTX 580's feeding three 27" 1920 x 1080 for the max 5760 (I think) x 1080. Bezel management is very different from TH2Go, (and will also not allow a TeamViewer connection while setting up the monitor position or calibration, so we used "JoinMe" instead, switching back when it was done). I run PlanG (or other app) on a second pc, connecting to FSX via simconnect, as Windowed mode has it's own set of problems.

Shakeystick, to clarify, are you really in SLI mode or just dual graphics card mode?

It's just that nVidia FAQ says SLI supports a maximum of only two monitors.

 

http://www.geforce.c...logy/sli/faq#s1

 

At the risk of high jacking your thread I thought it was impossible to get a three monitor continuous VC view before NV Surround came along. How do you do it with your two 460's and Surround not activated.

 

Thanks,

gb.

 

My MOBO is an Intel D5400XS and it has Dual nForce 100 SLI Bridges. Maybe that is why the enable all monitors option appears in my Nvidia control panel? It says in the description when I hover my mouse over that option that it will drive all four and use SLI when advantageous to do so.

As four for my four monitor VC I load a flight and then create three new views and drag them to the extra montiors and resize them. On the bottom three I just use spacebar and mouse to make the edges of each VC view align. I save flights in this way to avoid doing it all over again on the next flight. Hey I did not know any better. If I use surround I lose the ability to change the view on just one monitor. In surround if I change views it changes all of the montiors to that one view.

Hi Shakeystick,

 

Let me chime in here with my experiences using multi-monitor setups, and some of the common problems you are experiencing.

 

 

 

Thanks for all the great feedback. And thanks to all of you for your quick replies.

It is a DX10 issue for me because I had to change to surround (three monitors and only one view) from all enabled (four monitors with four completely independant views) to get DX10 to load a flight successfully. I don't want lose the fourth monitor and I sure don't like the idea of being stuck with only one selectable view at a time while flying across the remaining three. What if I fly into a hill while I am looking at something else? With four separate monitors and each being independant of the others that has not been a problem in DX9, I want to load DX10 in the same way and see if I am able to. Something seems to be preventing this from happening. I was wondering if anyone else has been able to run DX10 in the manner I describe. I am certain I have read of others doing things exactly the way I have in DX9. I have read some saying FSX only "sees" one GPU of a an SLI enabled pair and others saying that FSX "sees" both SLI GPUs as a single GPU. I don't know for sure which is exactly true but logic and my general impression after flying in a variety of different settings (both SLI enabled and disabled) that there seems to be nothing but benefit from running SLI enabled. I could be wrong as I have done no real testing and say this just based on my impression of the performance. I do watch FPS in the upper left corner by pressing shift Z.

I can back up RKillins excellent post above: I run the Matrox TripleHead2Go Digital Edition from a single port on the EVGA GTX 580, with 3 Viewsonic 19" 1280 x 1024, giving 3840 x 1024, and Bezel management being a snap.

Over a couple of days, Les Hesley and I set up his very nice Nvidia Surround system, with two GTX 580's feeding three 27" 1920 x 1080 for the max 5760 (I think) x 1080. Bezel management is very different from TH2Go, (and will also not allow a TeamViewer connection while setting up the monitor position or calibration, so we used "JoinMe" instead, switching back when it was done). I run PlanG (or other app) on a second pc, connecting to FSX via simconnect, as Windowed mode has it's own set of problems.

Hi Paul, I have four Acer AL2017s here. Seems I can pick them up cheap not working and put some new capacitors in the power supply to have a good working monitor.

I guess I should mention I have the Gold edition full blown FSX accelleration installed. Come to think of it that must be obvious because if I did not have all service packs plus accelleration then I would not have DX10 preview available, duh! Right?

Thanks all you guys for all the feedback about surround but I think you all missed my point a little bit. My real question is why can't I take a setup that runs fine in DX9 and select DX10 preview and get it to load a flight without changing my "all four monitors enabled" prefered confguration? I was wondering if anyone else has had this problem. So far it sounds like the answer is no, no one else has. I want to gain DX10 and the fix Steve provided, but I don't want to lose what I like about my DX9 experience which is four independant views dragged onto four separate monitors. I promise I'm not crazy here just a little eccentric, lol.

 

 

My MOBO is an Intel D5400XS and it has Dual nForce 100 SLI Bridges. Maybe that is why the enable all monitors option appears in my Nvidia control panel? It says in the description when I hover my mouse over that option that it will drive all four and use SLI when advantageous to do so.

As four for my four monitor VC I load a flight and then create three new views and drag them to the extra montiors and resize them. On the bottom three I just use spacebar and mouse to make the edges of each VC view align. I save flights in this way to avoid doing it all over again on the next flight. Hey I did not know any better. If I use surround I lose the ability to change the view on just one monitor. In surround if I change views it changes all of the montiors to that one view.

 

To remove one more variable have you tried disabling SLI when in DX10 mode and seeing what happens.

 

gb.

I have the same problem, 2x TH2go, on 6 screens, but two outputs in windowed mode.

All is black. No SLI or other things installed.

DX10 will not work (windows 7 64bit)

Well, I went ahead and did the modification as per the guide in the sticky. Flying in Nvidia surround across three monitors. Test flight in the default 747 around Dallas and landing at DFW. Landed at DFW with aircraft casts shows on ground and itself and ground object shadows too! All the way in it stayed smooth with FPS at 30 or just a few below. Awesome! I am sold on this. Thanks Steve and thanks Paul. I'll worry about the fourth monitor later. Time to have some fun and really check this out. Thanks again guys. If I find anything useful to share I will be sure to do so.

Well, I went ahead and did the modification as per the guide in the sticky. Flying in Nvidia surround across three monitors. Test flight in the default 747 around Dallas and landing at DFW. Landed at DFW with aircraft casts shows on ground and itself and ground object shadows too! All the way in it stayed smooth with FPS at 30 or just a few below. Awesome! I am sold on this. Thanks Steve and thanks Paul. I'll worry about the fourth monitor later. Time to have some fun and really check this out. Thanks again guys. If I find anything useful to share I will be sure to do so.

 

With my surround setup the fourth monitor works fine.

Sure it goes black but you just create another view and click drag it onto it.

This is in Full Screen mode.

 

gb.

With my surround setup the fourth monitor works fine.

Sure it goes black but you just create another view and click drag it onto it.

This is in Full Screen mode.

 

gb.

Are you in DX10 with four monitors? If so then what are the details please?

Are you in DX10 with four monitors? If so then what are the details please?

 

No DX9.

Only problem was that NV Surround Control Panel had it's own ideas about which of the four monitors it wanted to use for Surround.

For an hour it would not let me use the specific monitor I wanted to use for the forth.

Then suddenly it did.

One thing for sure is that when you plug the forth monitor in it will break your existing Surround setup and you will have to reconfigure.

After set up just create a new view on the Surround monitors then click/drag it to the forth and resize.

 

gb.

My setup is working fine in DX10 : Th2Go connected to 3x 26" IIyama Pro Lite

 

Tomorrow I will check if I can use the second output from my GTX680 for my external CDU. In DX9 that was possible.

GTX670 and a 3head2go working fine here on win7 64 dx10