now in my first video about this configuration the one in front of me
which you can check out here i talked about the media consumption experience
and the productivity implications of having literally
eight feet of monitor in front of you
then i committed to follow up with you guys with a part two video where i just
dug into the gaming performance of this bad boy of a setup it took a while just
like part three of mineral oil which i promise is coming next week so make sure
you're subscribed so you don't miss it but at long last i took some advice from
you guys some advice from skip over at widescreen gaming forum and i found a
nice cross-section of games from different genres to throw at it to
investigate the performance of our system at this mondo resolution and how games
react to being stretched in some cases over three times wider than they were
ever intended in fact in most cases over three times wider than they were
intended
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megapixels that is the pixel count of
our triple surround curved 34-inch monitor setup from lg we're talking
about a surface here that is just slightly harder to drive than even the
brand new 5k imac retina display
kajigger thing that apple recently released and when you consider that even
high-end gaming pcs these days are only really designed to operate from about
1080p up to 4k at the max expecting them
to not to buckle when we throw seven times the resolution of 1080p at a
gaming rig it seems a little unreasonable so we needed more than just
a high-end pc we built the autobahn hammer equipped with a core i7 5930k
at 4.7 gigahertz aio liquid cooling a
1500 watt power supply and 32 gigs of dominator platinum ddr4 RAM from Corsair
an ASUS rampage 5 extreme motherboard and the centerpiece three sapphire
vaporex r9 290x 8 gig graphics cards
running in crossfire why 8 gigs you might ask well when you scale raw GPU
power by adding more cards you are still stuck with the amount of RAM of a single
card so the only way to kit out our three-way setup with more RAM was to use
cards that have more each in the first place
so let's start with the games that deliver a great ultra wide screen
experience dirt showdown is almost the perfect poster child here for how
awesome this gaming setup can be the
resolution just shows up in the menus it
runs great averaging 52 FPS at ultra with two times msaa and while it doesn't
render the game with multiple cameras to eliminate stretching on the side
monitors it handles this better than most single camera games with only the
outside 15 or so where you'll rarely be looking anyway being unpleasantly
distorted the next one is iracing the popular online racing sim this one could
earn poster child status too if not for the small rendering errors in the
protective cage on the left and the harnesses on the right menus were
perfect field of view adjustments are handled with a simple hotkey in game and
being surrounded by the cockpit with a very wide field of view legitimately
makes it feel more like you're in a vehicle it also ran very well at around
80 FPS at max with mirrors enabled uh
2048 by 2048 textures and all the RAM sliders cranked
the next game type and uh games where you sit in a cockpit being good for
surround is definitely a pattern at this point that can benefit from our surround
setup is star citizen but as we discovered it's and whether it's
an optimization issue a bottleneck elsewhere in the system or just the
sheer demand of running it at this resolution star citizen ran at 8
FPS in the racing module at low and then curiously ran at 8 FPS at very high the
game isn't released yet so they've got time but while the menu system wasn't
perfect at least everything was visible on screen which is an excellent starting
point our next game is civilization beyond earth and this is a bit of a
unique one in that it's the only top-down view game that we're running and it's a
mantle title and that it also features an unusual crossfire mode thanks to the
way that mantel allows game devs to leverage the GPU or gpus more directly
than has been possible in the past so instead of each GPU rendering
alternating frames the gpus divide up the workload and each renders part of
the same frame neato the game looks beautiful and runs at just over 30 FPS
at medium settings in the worst case scenario built-in benchmark with a
massive amount of terrain visible on screen and that's fine for a turn-based game
but the experience really wasn't that great
to actually play it because ui elements
are so spread out to the left and the right that i found myself getting very
frustrated this could be addressed with a patch though and not all top-down
games will have this issue our second
mantle game i mean you got to try to leverage those 290 x's somehow right is
dragon age inquisition third person view games tend to handle widescreen better
than a lot of other genres and even though dragon age inquisition renders
from only one camera angle causing stretching on about the outer half of
the outside monitors it ran at about 31 FPS at high with ultra textures using
the built-in benchmark it kept all the ui elements on the center monitor where
they can be more easily accessed and it makes a reasonable case for widescreed
gaming one of my favorite games to test with
well anything is tomb raider 2013 and it
handled this setup really well as well as another third person game it required
no fov adjustments it leverages multi-GPU configurations extraordinarily
well man that game's well optimized so the game was playable at around 48 FPS
at very high with tres fx enabled and
other than the usual single camera issue of objects appearing to be nearer to you
than they actually are in your peripheral vision it ran flawlessly
shadow of mordor i threw in just as an interesting case study it allows me to
demonstrate some of the issues that can occur when trying to run games in any
multi-monitor setup let alone a super ultra megawide one like this because
even with the brilliant flawless widescreen utility by hayden the game
itself runs okay but the menus are completely impossible to navigate and uh
the other cool thing about this game is that it's super easy to create a very
demanding scenario for GPU vram with their ultra texture pack so running
shadow of mortar at whatever settings i was running at that
one time i got it working with ultra textures i i i have no idea i mean it
was spent across the monitors it looked really good frame rate was balls around
30 FPS and average performance was over four gigs
of vram per GPU the only time that happened where we would have actually
needed more than a four gig GPU um i i
wasn't able to verify anything because i couldn't navigate the menus so
yeah i only ran one FPS game because frankly
first person shooters are not a great genre for this kind of setup in general
and they're just mostly not made for it too valve games are about as seamless an
experience as you can expect to have with launcher arguments available to
force a given resolution and field of view adjustments available through
simple commands in the console but given how hectic and disorienting the
first person view can be compared to third person when you're moving around
quickly even under normal circumstances having objects appear to move towards
and away from you as you turn is only going to make matters worse so while it
ran extraordinarily well at over 200 FPS maxed out
portal 2 was just not that great of an experience
so i guess it's conclusion time what is what is this whole thing what's it
really like to use well when it works it's really cool when it doesn't work
which is more often than not like like
vastly more often than not most of the games i selected are from widescreen
gaming forums silver or gold certified games list because they have relatively
few issues with field of view heads-up display elements and menu navigability
um when it doesn't work it's absolutely
infuriating i think the worst ones for me are the ones like beyond earth where
the experience is really cool but then it gets crippled by one glaring
oversight like if i want to use mouse look for moving around the view of the
map i'm going all the way from the left to the right edge and back and back and
forth like that so the big question is would i invest the
six thousand dollars required for three
eight gig gpus and three 34-inch monitors for myself
no while more vibram is cool i think we
demonstrated that unless you're actually playing modern titles at resolutions
beyond 4k where even our triple 290x
crossfire setup that pulled a massive 800 watts from the wall in games
struggled it's not the kind of thing that you'll need at the moment but maybe
that was the point of this video just building something no one will buy
because they know better just for the sheer spectacle of it am i right
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