NVIDIA Geforce Surround Gaming Setup Guide Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
978 words · ~4 min read
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So, this is a bit of a follow-up to my guide on how to install the NVIDIA
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GeForce drivers. So, what I've decided
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to do in addition to that is a little guide on how to configure your system
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for 3D Vision Surround. So, first of
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all, you will need three monitors, all
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120 Hz. You will need two GeForce GTX.
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No, not necessarily GTX. You'll need two supported GeForce graphics cards. In
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this case, I've got a couple of GTX 480s. You will also need NVIDIA active
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shutter glasses as well as an IR emitter. So, you'll need to have the
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latest beta drivers installed. And by the time uh you watch this, I guess
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there might be an official driver for this, a Wickle one. So, you go to the
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NVIDIA control
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panel. You wait for it to load. Once it's done loading, you go ahead and go
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into the configure SLI physics and
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surround. So, I'm going to go ahead and
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span displays with surround. So, I'm
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going to apply that first and then I'll configure it after. So, the surround
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option is the new one in this particular menu. We've always had SLI. We've always
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had activate all displays and disable SLI. So, it says connect displays to
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graphics cards as shown. I have already done this. So, I'm going to go ahead and
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click apply again. This might take a moment. Yes, I
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am sure. And then we hope that it all
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works. All displays are blank. No
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signal. Wait for it. Hey, there we go. Okay, so now the NVIDIA control panel is
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up on the middle screen. Uh my start menu is also on the middle
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screen, but my start menu spans to the right hand screen as well as the lefth
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hand screen. So you can see that we do have to rearrange the displays. So the
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easiest way to do that is with the little uh wizard that's up here right
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now. So you just click identify. So we've got
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312. So what I'm going to do is I'm
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going to make it so that three is over here. Just going to drag it over. 312.
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So that should match the identify function. And then once I've
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done that, I just click apply. It'll rearrange my
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monitors. And it's that simple. Okay. So there's one more thing that we need to
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configure for the surround option. So we can either configure it to adjust for
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the display bezels. What that means is it's adding a little bit of resolution
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here. I'm going to sort of try to explain this. It's adding some resolution behind the bezels. So that
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means that if you have say for example like NVIDIA's uh got displayed here a
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road you can either make it so that the bezels will hide some of the picture or
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you can make it so that the bezel will simply just be in between and the
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picture will will have that gap in between it. So oh
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uhoh okay looks like I've configured it one way or the other. I missed which one
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I configured. Personally I prefer this way. Um, I don't mind having that gap,
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but it doesn't really matter. Oh, no. I see what I've done. Okay. No, I did
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click the wrong one. Okay. So, yeah, you
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can either configure it to have them line up or configure it to have them not
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line up. You know what? Why don't we go through really quickly here? And I just
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want to show you. Okay. Configure. I just want to
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show you how to do the bezel correction, even though I don't prefer it that
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way. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yes. we want to adjust there. Okay. So, NVIDIA
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gives us this little road thing, and I'm going to go ahead and change the width
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right here. I'm going to change the width of my extra resolution that I'm
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adding until the road approximately
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lines up. So, I'm holding it down. That looks pretty close to me. So, that's 150
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pixels. So, I'm going to go ahead and click create
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resolutions. And once that's done, that will be applied across all monitors. So
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what that means is that my configuration which is now set up uh let's do 3D
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really quick and then I'll show you exactly what that means as far as
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resolutions are concerned. Actually I'll show you that right now. So we'll go to screen resolution. So we are running at
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5760x 1080 rather than the full
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resolution which is 5910x 1080. 5910 x
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1080. Hold on a minute. 1920. No, that doesn't make any sense. No, 5910 x 1080
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is probably the uh the offset
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one. Oh, now I've gone and confused
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myself. Adding extra pixels for the width of the bezels. Yeah. Yeah,
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definitely. Okay. So, yeah, we've added a little bit of extra of extra width for
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the bezels to our resolution here. So you can see that if I drag a window over
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here, it's actually going to block out
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words. So here, see, if I drag this to the side, set up stereoscopic. The
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entire word stereoscopic can be blocked out by the bezel because of the way that
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I've altered the resolution. It's not really ideal for desktop use, but it
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does provide a little bit of a better experience for games. So you don't have
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kind of like the wing of your plane like
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starting here and then like coming up over here or something weird like that,