I said when I began to put my rig together in November that I wouldn't go that far, but reading advice in the FSX Learning Center and on Microsoft's website regarding W7, it sounded so easy. Brand new, my Samsung 17" monitor cost £180 so I shopped around and found a site on eBay selling reconditioned ones for £34 each with free postage. A week later I have a three screen set up!

 

I read advive on this forum, and it was as easy as everyone said. The immersion of flying in FSX after a few hours experimentation is not just tripled though, its way beyond that. I have set the screens up as side windows so that I can make base leg turns realistically, it works a treat,in fact i found my self scanning left and right all the time as you would in a real aircraft, especially when taxiing and on approach. Flying low over St Maarten in an Islander, banking over the hills was very very impressive, with the lights in the room dimmed and focussing on the screen in front, I experienced some real motion sickness as my entire field of vision backed up by the peripheral vision, all told my brain we were really banking to the left! Great stuff!

 

I'm over the moon with this, I just wanted to share my happiness. Thanks for the good advice I've been reading (though some of the posts were several years old).

 

I'm working on two issues, very minor: it seems tricky to match up those side windows with the front view and it varies from plane to plane. I guess that's just experience though. Secondly, I bought the wrong cable for connecting the third monitor to the HDMI slot in my GTX 760, so instead hooked it up to the onboard Intel card. It worls, but the third (right) screen does not show a rich, well textured autogen full Orbx landscape quite like the other two Nvidia monitors. I've ordered an adaptor, hope its the right type.finally, there's a slight performance drop, but that was expected.

Interesting - I would like to have 3 screens, but simply don't have sufficient space.  Actually, I have a virtually unlimited source of old monitors If I want some.

 

Also, I wondered how much affect this has on performance - how much lower FPS do you get using 3 screens compared with one?

 

Briefly, how do you set these things up?  how many video cards, triple head to go, etc?

 

IAN

I'm working on two issues, very minor: it seems tricky to match up those side windows with the front view and it varies from plane to plane. I guess that's just experience though. Secondly, I bought the wrong cable for connecting the third monitor to the HDMI slot in my GTX 760, so instead hooked it up to the onboard Intel card. It worls, but the third (right) screen does not show a rich, well textured autogen full Orbx landscape quite like the other two Nvidia monitors. I've ordered an adaptor, hope its the right type.finally, there's a slight performance drop, but that was expected.

 

I don't know what I did wrong, I hooked up 2 monitors and frame rate dropped from steady locked 30 to 3 - 4 frames per second. Care to share how you did it?

I've no idea what my fps is, I have always refused to find out! I should have said 'noticeable performance drop' and, during a thunderstorm, (at an Orbx airfield) had an OOM as well. I'm going to try replacing the Orbx England scenery with my Gen X photoreal scenery this weekend and hopefully that will even things out a bit. The Orbx airfields look great, but when I saw a checkbox for dandelions on the airfield control panel (Fairoaks), I knew they had gone too far! I don't need that level of detail and would rather trade such detailed airports for a three screen set-up. I haven't visited Heathrow yet ....

 

Ian, I just plugged it all in, right clicked on the desktop and everything popped up nicely. After deciding which screen was which, I was finished. It took me 15 minutes and most of that was trying to match the colour resolution of the three monitors. I have a GTX 760 with 3 video outputs. I can't say if it will go as smoothly for you., but I am no expert in computing.

Hey, nice one Paul. Why not post a piccie for us all to see...

Good idea:

 

Upon further investigation it does seem to have lowered performance quite drastically. I run a high end machine with everything to the right, but that is no longer an option with three screens, so I will have to make some careful choices now, and use Sceneryconfig editor to help me group my scenery into packages.

 

I may even have to switch off ASN. I'm doing a series of scientific tests (!) this week to work through options, photoscenery or Orbx? ASN or FSX weather? That kind of thing.

 

So, as always with FSX, its going to be a trade off.

With three screens you will take performance hit simply from having to render more of the world. Also you may bump up against VRAM limitations especially if you are using hd clouds and repaints.

 

I used to run triples as we'll. but went back to I screen with track-ir.

If your screens are the same you should use nvidia surround instead of 3 separate windows. All your perfoance mostly will come back then you will not have to do any of the other stuff. As far as the OOM you should pay a visit to the Dx10 subforum. Although it will not really boost you frame rate it will free up a lot of resources and prevent oom. As far as you adapter if its the mini display port Make sure it is an active display port adapter or you will have issues.

 

I realise you dont want to get caught in a never-ending tweaking loop but when you go to multiple screens its unavoidable

If your screens are the same you should use nvidia surround instead of 3 separate windows.

Steve, I have no wish to hijack this thread but I need some help with my NVIDIA 780. I attempted to get it to display 3x 19200x1080 identical monitors in portrait surround sound but without success. I'm running NI (inspecter). Can you please tell me all the steps to get it up and running!

 

[f the originator of this thread desires I can start another thread]

 

fredpop

I will set up Nvidia surround tonight, I didnt go that route because I assumed it meant I could only display the 'view forward' , when I most definately want side wondows in my set up.

I will set up Nvidia surround tonight, I didnt go that route because I assumed it meant I could only display the 'view forward' , when I most definately want side wondows in my set up.

 

Paul you will definitely get better frame rates with Surround.

However you may be pretty disappointed with the extreme left/right screen distortion you get with it.

This really smears textures and makes it very hard to judge the distance of anything at the edges.

Still, most people get used to it.

 

Three independent screens will also give you a much wider horizontal field (at the same Zoom ratio) than Surround

so you might have to pan a bit more with Surround.

 

gb.

IMO using three screens is great for cockpit builders, where the VC is not used and only the external views are seen. This obviously improves massively the performance due to no rendering of a 3D cockpit. But as soon as three screens are used with the VC view, that's when penalties will be felt. I know lots of guys use this kind of setup but I can't help feeling that it comes with a high cost.

Could I use side view without the vc cockpit? I mean, just show the external view out to the side with no cockpit at all, if that would improve things I'd be much happier, its the side view I'm after, not too bothered about a fully rendered 180 degree vc.

I guess Nvidia Surround would preclude undocking the VC would it? It sounds from what I have read to give you just a single wrap-around image.