Widescreen Gaming Forum

Hi,

2006 was a tremendous year for hardware: The fantastic Core2Duo processor from Intel was released. The fantastic nVidia GeForce 8800 GTX graphics card was released. The prices of LCD monitors kept falling while response times got better. And Matrox came out with the TripleHead2Go! At the same time SLI chipsets got better and climaxed with the nVidia’s nForce 680i release to provide gamers all over the world with the best set of hardware ever available for surround gaming.

What is surround gaming? Take three monitors, spread your favourite games across them and you’re in surround gaming mode. It requires tremendous processor and graphics power for 3840x1024 pixels to be coloured at least 20 times per second. You need state-of-the-art hardware to make this happen and now you have it!

If 2006 was the year of the hardware, could 2007 be the year of the software? DirectX 10 holds great promise. New games in surround mode hold great promise. Unfortunately Microsoft Vista does not hold great promise. If we were to stay with Windows XP we should need much tweaking and patching for frame rates to improve. We all hope software companies will clean their code in 2007, instead of trying to release new features and bloat.

What about hardware? Well, we users only ask for two things in 2007: bring the prices down and bring the power consumption down too… please? We don’t need more speed, we need the same speed at a more affordable prices, consumption and noise levels. Thank you.

What do you think?

we don't need more speed? When you see trailers for games like crysis? I think we'll ALWAYS need more speed! 2007 is gonna have a whole lot more in terms of hardware than 2006, we have the ati/amd solution appearing and that is supposedly something very special indeed for the gaming world, I'm holding off my next upgrade until i've seen benchmarks. With directX10 (no longer blasphemy to use that term) firing up too... a whole new breed of gfx cards will be out there, I know we have the 8800s, but that's just the 1st gen and by the time it's needed, an 8900 and the r600 will be out, then things will start flying! As for power consumption... good luck! The quad cores are real power whores, and looking at what companies like valve have in store for those extra processors... It's very difficult to ignore their advantages! Though again, I'll be waiting for the 2nd gen of quad cores before I dive in, I still haven't found a game I can't run on max settings that I like... and no, flight simulator x isn't my thing!

2006 was rather the year of SG.
This year matrox has to prove that SG usable with the upcoming games

( I hope not 2007 is the YEAR OF MATROX's RETREAT... :( )

Matrox don’t have to prove anything. We complained about the Parhelia being too slow for games in triple view. They gave us TH2G to get with the program. Now they don’t have to do anything. They did their job.

Matrox don’t have to prove anything.

If they regulary update the SGU with upcoming games and / or tell us the right settings for sg games then 2007 will be a SG year!

I'll be truly impressed if they enable it to support the resolution of 4240x1050, which I kind of know is impossible, but if they released another version maybe...

I suppose other than the size of the resolution possibly overloading a vga cable/port's capabilities (I'm guessing) the fact that 2 of my monitors have different numbers of vertical lines to the centre is the main issue

f they enable it to support the resolution of 4240x1050,

AFAIK this is not in Matrox Hands due DirectX restrictions but what with OGL and DX10 ?

Anyone can update the SGU. Ones you find how to edit some of the games for surround view you will notice that most of them work the same way. There are only so many game engines out there.

As for higher resolution its not up to Matrox. They can add more resolutions with a simple firmware update anytime.

I'm not sure setting different resolutions for different monitors is as simple as a firmware update, I'd imagine that if at all possible, I would have to letterbox my 1050 screen to 1024 when in surround mode

TH2G is a simple device designed for straight forward task by combining 3 identical signals. It’s providing an exact replacement for Parhelia ... nothing more nothing less.