hello and welcome to the first and possibly
the final installment of what i'm calling james
tries stuff for the first time today i'm going to use whatever tools i can find
just laying around to make the most pointless pc gaming setup possible
hey look what are these doing here three 49-inch
32x9 gaming monitors each one of these
is designed to be an elegant stand-alone solution for achieving both the
productivity and gaming benefits usually reserved for double or even triple
monitor setups but hey i'm super naive why not connect
all three of them to create a 180 degree
semicircle of pixel paradise
builds dot gg is at it again with the stock cooling showdown up to four
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welcome back step one is to get a computer particularly one that has
enough video out ports to connect one to one to each of your three monitors now
it is possible to go from one DisplayPort to like a hub where you
split off to other displayport cables that might be possible depending on the
resolution of your monitors but it's always better to have a dedicated cable
especially considering that displayport is pretty janky at the best of times
i'm also using the highest quality cables that i could find because the
displayport spec actually is only built around
a cable length of 3 meters which is about
precisely 9.8 feet so if you're going to go beyond that
which you may well do considering that if you're using monitors this wide end
to end they're like 10 feet if you need to go beyond 9.8 feet with a
displayport cable the longer the cable the higher quality they should be for
our computer we're going to be using a Corsair one pro
because it has an rtx 2080 ti inside
which i know is capable of pushing all the pixels i need to these giant
displays so that's just one less thing to screw me over the next thing you need
is a bunch of monitors now ideally you would be using three identical monitors
at least with the same resolution and the same aspect ratio but it does
help if they're actually the same naked model because then they're gonna have the same sync polarity and more uniform
colors across all of it we don't have that here today what we have although
these are each of them 32 by 9 49-inch monitors
there are three different brands we've got an lg a dell
and a samsung behind me the samsung has a resolution of 3840 by
1080 and a refresh rate of 144 hertz
while the other two although they do share the same lg made panel which is a
bonus they have a resolution of 5120 by 1440
and a refresh rate of 60 hertz so we
we're just gonna have to find out if this mishmash
screws us in the end the first thing i'm noticing here is that
this is kind of stupid
these are already so wide that i don't know if it would be
practical for basically anybody's workflow to have them arranged like this
the other thing i'm thinking about here is the keyboard and mouse okay if i'm over
here it's a little awkward especially if these were turned in more and i was more
surrounded it would be a little weird to be typing over here and cranking my neck
this way i got an idea
okay so i found some scraps
extruded aluminum that we had from 16k gaming and i've never used this stuff
before but alex said it's pretty easy to work with
yeah okay now for the ps3 resistance
that's more like it now that our setup is completely ridiculous let's try
actually gaming follow me okay so you'll see we're only using one
third of our potential girth here so that's no good go into the settings the
resolution 5120 by 1440 is the resolution of one of these if i go into
windowed mode nope no option to do that
okay i think it's time we opened the NVIDIA control panel okay so the point
of surround is to make your computer think that you have just one monitor
with one resolution okay let's play it safe and start with just two of our
monitors one by two we'll pick the lg
and the dell so 10 240 pixels
that's the width of those two screens it's created one combined resolution
because it's gonna treat it like it's one monitor
very cool so let's see if we can get it to do that with all three monitors
we're gonna change our topology to one by three
select every monitor including the samsung okay so i was expecting
what like twelve thousand this is fifty seven sixty by ten eighty
uh if i go to calculator and divide that by three monitors
1920. it's treating this like each one of these is 1920 by 1080.
i think it's because you're not allowed to mix and match
resolutions so
i mean we can try this wow
stretch city okay this is kind of cool and immersive um
it's not working properly but
i don't think it's because of the 1920
surround error thing i think it's because this game is just not meant to
do this see how it gets really stretched out on the sides like that car
and the car looks really close when i go like this it looks a lot farther away
and that's because this game is rendering with only one camera position
games that are meant to be played like this they're going to render from multiple camera positions and then the
result is gonna be that teammates don't look like that
oh boy good god
good gravy can i knife people in this game
okay okay let's get out of here what if
i forced all these to be the same resolution so
one way i could do that which would suck would be to just run my high-res ones at
a lower res so i'd run them all at 38.40
by 1080. that's not that cool
because why did i buy or have sent to this company higher res
monitors so instead we're going to try to super sample the
low res one to render as though it is
5120 by 1440. there are some drawbacks
even if you can get surround to work like let's say i had monitors that were
all the same and surround worked for me and it was awesome there's still some drawbacks because it
makes it seem like it's all one monitor which is not ideal when you're not
gaming if i'm just using my desktop and it's treated like one monitor then when
i go to maximize one of my Windows for example you're gonna have like a Windows
explorer window that's just like
eight feet of white and it's not easy
to just place a window on only one monitor for example
and like your clock's going to be way over there while your Windows start menu
is way over there for that reason a lot of people who game
with surround on will actually turn it off when they're not gaming and then
turn it back on when they go to game again which sucks because it actually takes
anywhere between one and five minutes to get it all configured every time now a
lot of these problems can be mitigated or outright solved by using software
like ultraman or display fusion which is way better because then you can just
stay in surround mode all the time and not have to go back into the display
settings like i have to right now and move stuff around okay let's see if this
worked i go into my Windows display settings
i now have a new resolution for my crappy monitor my crappy thousand
dollar awesome monitor so now we're gonna go back into surround
and see if we can get the coveted 15 360
horizontal pixel resolution that we were looking for no
ah
there's just no there's no making it work you can't even trick it but who
cares because we still might be able to get the result we want sure it's not
going to be exclusive full screen in our games we'll take a slight performance
hit but we can still have lots of fun so let's try some other games that are
designed to be used in setups like this i'm going to look at
a list of games that are actually known
to work with widescreen far cry 5 we have that one this intro sequence is a
far cry from being enjoyable options video
aspect ratio custom window mode
windowed all the way all the way
oh whoa no
no okay now i think i'm going to try just
running the benchmark because i don't want to get caught in the 20 minutes of cutscenes this game starts with
nice nice those hay bales aren't really even
stretched yeah they're closer but it's not super distorted
things look proportional this is pretty dank i don't have to look
over there but having it there is more immersive all right enough far cry now i
want to try a racing game naturally i heard that project cars 2 is pretty
good for this kind of thing so options
holy cow look at this i don't even have to go into video there's a button
specifically saying triple screen configure your settings to match your
triple screen setup hell yeah triple screen spanning
check these are probably wrong but i'm gonna say that's fine
okay and again
you can see on the text of toyota it's not stretched out right
okay this is pretty sweet oh look one hand wow man that rear view
mirror is like the same size as my actual rear view mirror in my car this
is like almost life-size this is pretty cool
and just like real life i go the wrong way okay this was a pretty stupid setup
but i still learned a few things number one if you're into
widescreen surround gaming then make sure that the games you want to play
actually support it because it really comes down to the games more than
anything if you're into racing games and flight sims then you're probably good to go and
i think more and more regular mainstream shooter type games
are supporting it because 21x9 monitors are more mainstream but this aspect
ratio is still kind of rare and then getting three of them is dumb number two make
sure all of your monitors are the same resolution and aspect ratio because that
caused headaches like we just have fewer options because we have the setup that
we do and number three is this worth it
this particular setup with these monitors is this the good way to go i
don't think so because first of all it's super expensive yes
it's more immersive but for the cost like this is 4 500 worth of monitors
is it really that much more immersive than just having i don't know one of
them they don't really have a very tight curve that's an 1800 r curve one if you
had three monitors this aspect ratio that had 1800 r curves then it would be
a tighter circle around you but hey if it's all about dick measuring then this
gives you a huge dick so
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