Multi-Display Gaming Artifacts Shown With AMD, 4K Affected Too 148
Vigile writes "Multi-display gaming has really found a niche in the world of high-end PC gaming, starting when AMD released Eyefinity in 2009 in three-panel configurations. AMD expanded out to six-screen options in 2010 and NVIDIA followed shortly thereafter with a similar multi-screen solution called Surround. Over the last 12 months or so, GPU performance testing has gone through a sort of revolution as the move from software measurement to hardware capture measurement has taken hold. PC Perspective has done testing with this new technology on AMD Eyefinity and NVIDIA Surround configurations at 5760x1080 resolution and found there were some substantial anomalies in the AMD captures. The AMD cards exhibited dropped frames, interleaved frames (jumping back and forth between buffers) and even stepped, non-horizontal vertical sync tearing. The result is a much lower observed frame rate than software like FRAPS would indicate and these problems will also be found when using the current top-end, dual-head 4K PC displays since they emulate Eyefinity and Surround for setup."
AMD multi-display problems (Score:5, Insightful)
AMD also seem to have some serious problems, which seem to be worsening with each new driver, on their premium workstation cards when driving multiple displays. We've seen numerous video playback issues, including glitches away from the video area itself, on multi-display configurations. The most likely culprit at the moment seems to be changes in the GPU memory timing. I really hope they fix this soon, because our "professional" workstations are giving our professionals headaches right now.
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That's what you get with duopoly (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember when we had those Matrox cards to go with our video editing workstations. Those things were stable as hell
Back then there were more vendors competing fiercely in the market, and all of them were on their toes as they knew even one slip could turn out to be totally fatal.
Nowadays, other than AMD and Nvidia, what other serious players do we have ?
None.
With the market turns into duopoly both the players no longer have the urge to bring new and innovative features into their new products.
How many times we have heard of the horror stories brought on by their crappy drivers ?
Other than lamenting online, the users (no matter if they are casual gamers or professional users) have no other option but to wait for a newer version of the drivers, or roll back the drivers to one that worked.
ps. I still have several of those Matrox cards with dual video outputs.
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Matrox are still making some serious professional 2D video cards, my favourite at the moment is a low profile quad head card we use with our operator workstations. They are no good for 3D graphics, but in many situations that's perfectly fine.
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Plus bringing up crappy video drivers brings all sorts of fanboi responses.
My dual AMDs were pretty much crap, blue screening on start pretty much from the start and even having the company check them found no issues with the hardware. One update bricked the system and required a full reinstall of Windows XP.
I finally replaced them with dual nVidias which also had crappy driver issues from the get go. I stumbled on a forum comment suggesting I use the 306 drivers and the system has been stable ever since (I
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With the market turns into duopoly both the players no longer have the urge to bring new and innovative features into their new products.
If AMD doesn't get any more urges soon, it might end up being a monopoly. Here's Anandtech's take [anandtech.com] on the server market right now:
At the end of last year, AMD was capable of mounting an attack on the midrange Xeons by introducing Opterons based on the "Piledriver" core. That core improved both performance and power consumption, and Opteron servers were tangibly cheaper. However, at the moment, AMD's Opteron is forced to leave the midrange market and is relegated to the budget market. Price cuts will once again be necessary. Considering AMD's "transformed" technology strategy , we cannot help but be pessimistic about AMD's role in the midrange and high-end x86 server market. AMD's next step is nothing more than a somewhat tweaked "Opteron 6300". Besides the micro server market, only the Berlin CPU (4x Steamroller, integrated GPU) might be able to turn some heads in HPC and give Intel some competition in that space. Time will tell.
I think we all know FX-8350 is no match for Intel's high end in the desktop market either and they're struggling with power efficiency in the laptop market. AMD is exiting all the markets where they're exclusively competing with Intel and entering all the markets where they're competing with Intel and half a dozen ARM competitors. As the saying goes, out of the frying pan and into
There is another option for let down users (Score:2)
Other than lamenting online, the users (no matter if they are casual gamers or professional users) have no other option but to wait for a newer version of the drivers, or roll back the drivers to one that worked.
No, I think we have at least one other option: next time we're specifying new workstations, we can just use (relatively) cheap gaming cards, instead of paying a factor-of-several premium for workstation cards. The latter are often the same basic hardware, but cost more because their "certified" drivers supposedly have better performance and guaranteed compatibility with major content creation applications. Why pay the premium if the reality is that the premium drivers are no better (or, in this case, much w
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all the old fireGL 1000/2000/3000/4000/5000/4 cards. SGI's Extreme series. all designed for pushing acurate polygons at the expense of texture mapping performance. And these were pushing the envelope not graphics cards for gaming. But you also paid through the nose for them.
game cards aren't crippled any more (Score:3)
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Actually there is more to it than just crippling them artificially. The pro cards go through more extensive testing to make sure that their output is pixel-perfect correct. It is debatable how much difference a very slight rendering error or discoloured pixel will be when working in a CAD package, especially when the screen is updated rapidly anyway.
The pro cards are also calibrated and guaranteed to produce accurate colours, where as the consumer grade ones are not. Of course these days that isn't much of
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Actually there is more to it than just crippling them artificially. The pro cards go through more extensive testing to make sure that their output is pixel-perfect correct.
That's the sales pitch. I'm still waiting for any practical evidence that a meaningful amount of extra testing actually happens, or produces measurably better results if it does.
Historically, a lot of the practical difference between workstation and gaming cards has been in their floating point precision and performance, and that is definitely an area where major product lines have been artificially nerfed. Sometimes this has been embarrassingly obvious, for example when a new, high-spec gaming card that sh
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Nvidia's 32x.xx drivers have actually been destroying hardware
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I think you mean you wouldn't have these problems on a Mac (*ducks*)
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*wings a macbook at Andy_R*
Re:AMD multi-display problems (Score:4, Interesting)
As a useful point, this has been an on-going issue with Nvidia drivers since about 290ish--and in the last three releases on 400,500 and some 600's where the drivers were so bad that they caused hardlocks across the board. Where either the drivers have been crap, or causing hardware lockups, or the various reports that can't be confirmed of them nuking hardware. In fact, it got so bad back 6mo ago that nvidia was looking for people in the continental US to send their entire rigs in to their hardware labs for testing. So, people thinking that this is a "flameware" or some other asinine thing, need to realize that there's driver issues on both sides. Sometimes however, the issues are more serious than reported for one side or the other. And between the two, nvidia has the more serious driver issue, and that's coming from someone who's last 6 cards have all been nvidia made by evga--three of which that had to be RMA'd because of a sudden hardware failure after a driver update.
Thinking on this a bit more, it reminds me of how nvidia was at one point blaming the driver reset issue only on "bad configurations" and "PSU power issues" until it was found that undervolting or overvolting(mainly) the cards solved this problem. Especially on the 500 series cards, this was of course after they had adjusted the voltage supplied to the cards downward, in order to make them run cooler.
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I have second hand cards, and very few problems myself, but when somebody puts a thing on sale for quite some $$$, I expect the damn thing to deliver.
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Driver nightmares? I have zero driver problems on my PC. Of course I never buy the "bleeding edge" brand new "hot video-card for this year just in time for Christmas", either.
That's nice for you. This PC has a very expensive workstation-class card because it's used for content creation and high performance is necessary, and hardware from a generation or two ago couldn't do what we need to do. Maybe that makes us "early adopters", but in that case probably so are most people who buy this type of card, and when we're all paying so much extra for that kind of power, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect AMD to deliver on their most basic promises.
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I understand, and it must be a PITA for you if you absolutely must have the latest tech, bugs and all. But the software and even firmware industry now have a policy of "release THEN patch". I've always thought this irresponsible since the trend started in the 80's (before that programs were usually shipped bug free and fully tested - of course they were simpler programs too). With the advent of the internet companies got even sloppier. I mean, who DOESN'T have an internet connection to download a patch nowa
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I understand, and it must be a PITA for you if you absolutely must have the latest tech, bugs and all. But the software and even firmware industry now have a policy of "release THEN patch".
Apparently so, but the entire point of buying one of these expensive workstation cards is to not be in that category because the bugs and downtime really hurt. If the premium cards with "certified" drivers still have obvious serious flaws anyway then there is no point spending the cost of several gaming cards instead of just buying one of them. Really, you couldn't possibly miss the bug we're seeing all the time here with even a basic level of testing of the affected feature, and I've seen way too many simi
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Driver nightmares?
Yes, look at the posts in this thread, the suggestion that you should buy a card from either manufacturer is met with 'Company XYZ's cards have all these driver problems' and 'All my Company XYZ cards have failed buy my Company ZYX cards are fine' with links to forum posts and anecdotal evidence eachway all over the place. I certainly wouldn't blame a gamer (not a gearhead) for avoiding PC gaming, asking what video card you should buy just creates a massive flamewar.
It helps AMD fanboys feel better about themselves! (Score:2)
AMD has long had driver performance issues, compared to nVidia. Their hardware started really kicking some ass with the 4000 series and was just dominant with the 5000 series, but the software side has had some issues. I'm not sure what the issue is, maybe they need more people, maybe they need better people, maybe they need a better process. Whatever the case they end up having more issues. Stuttering and rendering partial frames has been one (that they have largely cleared up with single display setups),
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See, people say AMD has the driver issues, but the only issues I've ever had with drivers in the past 7 years or so was with an Nvidia card (and, actually, that was more a problem with the game). OTOH, the only video card hardware failure I've had was also Nvidia. Really, I think it's a case of YMMV. Some people have no problems with AMD, some have tons. Some have no problems with Nvidia, some have lots. I personally buy AMD stuff in part to help keep competition alive (and because their stuff is usually pr
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I have tried a small handful of ATI/AMD cards over the years and have never had good results. Performance in Windows was always mediocre and I had massive stability or features not working on Linux. I will admit my last attempt was several years ago (less than 4 though). I'm not talking about embedded or mobile chipsets either, but dedicated AGP or PCIe.
(before you go all AMD fanboy on me (I'm hoping you wouldn't but just in case), I should mention I've been using AMD processors since I abandoned my old Pen
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OTOH, the only video card hardware failure I've had was also Nvidia.
With video card failures, be they AMD/ATi or nVidia, you have to realize that the only part those companies make is the actual GPU, they don't make the actual card so the cooling system, caps, RAM and all the other components are made by others and assembled by an OEM so there are many points of failure that are completely unrelated to AMD/ATi and nVidia.
Re:AMD multi-display problems (Score:5, Interesting)
I've got 5 monitors connected to 2 ATI cards (Linux + Xinerama).
The most interesting artefact I've seen is some apps can corrupt the cursor so the pointer is a little bit of random memory contents.
But only on some monitors. Move it to another monitor and it may come back, move it to the original monitor and it dies again.
There must be some really fun bugs in their drivers that rear their heads with massive setups.
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I'm running 5760x1200 across three monitors on an ATI Flex card using the radeon driver. No problems here. But then again, I don't game, I don't run multiple GPUs in a CrossFire setup, and I don't get near the ATI binary drivers, so it's all good.
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I'm running 5760x1200 across three monitors on an ATI Flex card using the radeon driver. No problems here. But then again, I don't game, I don't run multiple GPUs in a CrossFire setup, and I don't get near the ATI binary drivers, so it's all good.
3 monitors probably works a treat, have you tried with an even number though?
When I tried running this a few years back it annoyed the crap out of me that alert boxes would always end up centered over all the displays so bang on the boundary of two monitors. What I wanted was two separate displays I could drag windows between but have everything default to appear on the primary monitor like it did under Windows.
Not bothered experimenting with multiple monitors since as it was such an arse last time. Have th
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No I haven't. I was going for a obscure setup (3 monitors on one card, 2 on the other) and I wanted it running quickly (ooh shiny) so I just went with the binary driver.
Probably should give the radeon driver a whirl when I get some time.
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I can confirm this happens even on dual-monitor setups with the default driver. It is extremely common when playing a full screen game on one monitor and leaving the other up for your background stuff, even with the cursor stuck to the gaming monitor. This happens to me when playing Dota 2.
It is common to the point where there's threads about it spattered around the internet.
Re:AMD multi-display problems (Score:5, Interesting)
I've got 5 monitors connected to 2 ATI cards (Linux + Xinerama).
The most interesting artefact I've seen is some apps can corrupt the cursor so the pointer is a little bit of random memory contents. But only on some monitors. Move it to another monitor and it may come back, move it to the original monitor and it dies again.
There must be some really fun bugs in their drivers that rear their heads with massive setups.
I actually get this exact same problem on my Windows 7 desktop (3 monitors). The primary display cursor will sometimes have fragments of the cursor graphics or loading animation displayed but moving the cursor across each screens fast and back again can sometimes resolve it. Interesting that its a problem on both platforms.
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I too get this issue.
It is repeatable by moving the cursor along the bottom edge of a monitor boundary and bringing it up at the other side a few times.
This is also the fastest way of returning the cursor back to normal.
I have had this issue for nearly 3 years with countless driver updates, no fix in sight.
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We have numerous workstations using AMD video cards and two displays with no issues.
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I have the same problem, but in my very old WIndows XP Pro. SP3 with dual screen setup (19.5" CRT TV + 19" LCD monitor) and ATI Radeon 4870 video card (PCIe; 512 MB of VRAM). ATI/AMD's software is buggy. I had to downgrade back to old ATI Catalyst driver v9.4 since newer drivers cause Windows XP's clock to slow down with DVI and rare, random hard lock ups with videos. :(
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You don't need multi monitor to corrupt the mouse pointer in ATI cards, a problem very similar to what you describe happens sometimes when you play certain games in full screen windowed mode. It fixes itself after a restart, or when you open a new app that steals mouse cursors, like the Windows 7 Magnifier.
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I had an artifact like that pop up on my desktop, except that was under Windows. More peculiarly, it corrupted the pointer slightly differently - columns were out of order - and it did so even after changing the pointer. And just like yours, it was only on one monitor, even though both my displays are being driven by one card. I eventually fixed it by disabling then re-enabling the affected monitor in the Catalyst control panel. I'm sure a reboot would have worked, but who wants to do that?
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I highly doubt this is related as this thread has gotten surprisingly full of 'me toos' from ATI people.
Also it isn't a Xorg bug as in this configuration the cursor is actually hardware accelerated.
With HW acceleration Xorg actually has nearly nothing to do with the cursor any more. It only specifies the cursor image once and the X,Y coordinates.
AMD Experience (Score:2, Informative)
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I've had both over the years, and both have bugs and issues, though the ATI driver folks are certainly more consistently stupid, and they're the only ones to leave me so ragefaced that I decided to buy a new card instead of deal with a bug (stupid card re-queried the GDI table from the monitor/tv at every boot and overrode the existing settings so even if you forced it to use 1080p if the monitor reported 640*480 it would reset to that every single boot), something not even the fine folks at 3dfx had manage
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I started off having problems with ATI drivers twenty years ago with Windows 3.1 and the Mach32. Even Radius could make more stable accelerated video drivers. Hell, so could S3.
Today, people are still having serious problems with their ATI video drivers, now they're just called AMD.
ATI can't code their way out of a nutsack.
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My favorite AMD card story is my Radeon 6750. In an AMD Phenom II system with an AMD chipset motherboard the thing was nothing but trouble. The video drivers would blue screen the computer every few days. Tearing problems playing videos, and other random glitches. Well, time came to replace the motherboard and CPU, and I went with Intel. I wanted to replace the graphics card too, but lacking the money at the time I held my nose and put the AMD card in the new PC... and haven't had a problem with it sin
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Why does Catalyst use 150MiB of RAM and take 15 seconds to open from the tray? Why does it then take 5 additional seconds to switch tabs inside it?
The Catalyst Control Center is created using .NET Framework and probably badly optimized anyway. It's sad that a simple program to flip some switches is so heavyweight.
getting worse? (Score:2, Interesting)
I was playing flight sims on my Quadra 900 in the late 80s/early 90s with 4 displays. The resolutions and detail may be higher today, but I never had any issues or failures of the system. FA/18 Hornet was my favorite.
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Wow, another F/A18 Hornet 3.0 player! I still play this occasionally today - I haven't found anything like it. Know of anything comparable that is newer (other than the updated version of Hornet which has a jittery cockpit view)?
</offtopic>
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Single and Multi-GPU configs (Score:2)
That pretty much hints at a driver issue, or bad GPU sync.
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2 years of work? I bet you ten to one it was two years of negotiating with Matrox for the patent licensing.
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So we have a problem. Now the hard work of narrowing the problem down can begin. My money is on all of the above. Subtle errors all over the place that nobody could test for and thus couldn't know they needed finding and fixing.
You mean narrowing down the problem that is already known and already being worked on [hardocp.com]?
Perhaps the problem is rather, why does this article, which pretends nothing of this is already known, exist? If this is a new issue, they totally failed to show it.
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As far as I know no other article anywhere has published what problems actually exist with Eyefinity, as they are very different than the problems that exist with CrossFire on single display configurations.
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Subtle errors all over the place would have hopefully been picked up by the OS people, Intel, Nvidia, game testers, hardware makers over time?
Guess we might need a next gen card buy up for 4k
FUD, Nothing but FUD (Score:1, Interesting)
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except its true and measurable
Even me on my shitty 4870 with two monitors have problems under windows 8. Everything is fine with one monitor active, but turn on dual monitors and all of a sudden I get flickering artifacts in 3D game on the main monitor.
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Maybe you could make a deal with Matrox by offering them your experience as a customer success story.
Seems like a bullshit article. (Score:2, Interesting)
Note that the words "driver" and "version" don't occur on the page. There is a know issue that AMDs been working that sounds a lot like this issue. It's been known for months, they've got a "two phase" plan to attack it, the first of which is implemented in the current beta driver-set.
The timing of this article is very suspect. They're either reporting on a new problem (and totally failing at providing any relevant data on their configuration), or they're simpy regurgitating an already know issue, like doin
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Maybe if you read the story, you'll find the "driver" and "version" are mentioned for both AMD and NVIDIA setups.
This is not a "bug" bug a substantial issue with advertised features.
7 monitors no problem (Score:2)
Multi-Monitor Gaming Just Sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
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What are the odds that VR gear like the Occulus Rift will keep multi-monitor gaming from becoming more than a niche market?
(and with VR, you can render additional informational displays _within_ the game)
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Multi-monitor gaming is *already* a niche market. Most gamers have one display, or perhaps one gaming monitor and one or two monitors that aren't used for the game (for media players, chat or, if playing Eve, a few Excel docs).
The problem is that there's so many things you need:
3-6 identical monitors, or monitors that are very closely matched in one dimension and in pixel density
Monitors need to have small or nonexistent borders
A mount capable of holding them all in exactly the right spots
A video card (or c
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Multiple different monitors doesnt make for a good multi-display gaming setup.
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That depends. If you can adjust field of view in game, or game automatically adjusts it for you, it's of tremendous advantage as it does in fact give you a wider field of view.
If not, then it is indeed useless.
As a point of comparison: it's considered cheating in most first and third person shooting games multiplayer to increase your FoV beyond certain limit. This is so because it gives you vastly superior awareness of your surroundings, making it much harder to surprise you with flanking. Multi-monitor set
FOV limitations are just silly. (Score:3)
An attitude which I never understood. Games designed to enforce a 90 degree FOV fail to take into account that on average, our peripheral vision encompasses about 150-160 degrees for most people.
Well, that's sort of the point o
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Judging by your response, you do not understand the issue at all. Our peripheral vision and our field of view is in fact irrelevant in the discussion of game balance/fairness.
The point is that it's possible to project a much wider field of view onto the screen, up to full 360, giving you complete awareness of your surroundings. It would be uncomfortable to use initially until you trained yourself for it, but after you train your eyes and brain to accept it, you would become vastly superior in any game where
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Oh, I understand the issue perfectly. I've been playing FPSes for about 20 years. Yes, at times I've played on organized ladders (sometimes with a great deal of success). :-) I contend that FOV is in fact the heart of the issue for game balance/fairness or we wouldn't be having this debate.
Older games that allowed complete freedom of the definition of the FOV were generally limited in the ladder play that I participated in. However, the limits were always larger than 90 degrees.
My bone of contention isn
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I know one person who played with 120deg horisontal FoV view per monitor on three monitor setup. He basically had a 360 degrees panoramic view compressed into approximately 160-170 degrees around himself.
It was almost impossible to surprise him in games where he would hack FoV to be like that. He would see someone approach in his peripheral vision even if you came from behind. It was utterly silly, and for him it was playable enough to be worth it. I could never get over the whole fishbowl look, but it work
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I don't play FPSes on consoles so I can't speak to what makes sense for FOV there. I've never been willing to give up the fine degree of control and responsiveness that you get from the keyboard+mouse combination.
I agree with you that three monitor set ups with 120 degrees per monitor does cross the line. That's a bit much to be able to accept. :-)
I used to do things like this in the Quake days (Score:2)
I played Quake Team Fortress (the original, for Quake 1) quite competitively. So there was no zoom key for sniping and the like, you just had to play with FOV. You made some binds to toggle FOV leves as you saw fit. This lead me to try bigger FOV numbers, and that worked too. So I had 4 FOV buttons, 10, 30, 90, and 160. 90 was where I played most of the time, 30 and 10 were for sniping, which I did rarely. 160 was for flag defense, which is often what I was assigned to. I could watch an entire flag room fro
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You'd have to get used to disorienting "fake zoom" effect and fishbowl effect from widening FoV to see the room. But once you do get used to it, it's going to be a great way to play.
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This guy has a point, but... (Score:2)
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Yet, here you are posting, instead of over at wearetheworld.org. Just because people are starving doesn't mean that this isn't a problem worthy of mention for others. This is a tech site. If you want coverage of famine, there's a bevy of leftwing rags out there that talk about it every day. Go read one of those.
This 'first world problem' routine is little more than politically correct shaming language, meant to shame people focused on their own issues into caring only about whatever the speaker wants th
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there's a bevy of leftwing rags out there that talk about it every day
So what about the rightwing rags. Do they not exist, or just not give a fuck?
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