Surround Gaming

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Be sure to check out Paddy's review of the TripleHead2Go

1 What is Surround Gaming?
2 How Does It Work?
3 Resolution
4 Game Configuration
5 Compatibility
6 Links & Our Review

What is Surround Gaming?

Surround Gaming provides up to 45" inches across the diagonal.

The Surround Gaming Setup.

The newest Digital TripleHead2Go.

Surround Gaming is Matrox's push for widescreen taken to new widths. Surround Gaming uses three monitors to deliver an immersive experience on three screens at up to 3840x1024 resolution and a 45" total diagonal (three 19" LCDs). Surround setups run an aspect ratio of 16:4 (for 3x4:3 configurations) or 15:4 (for 3x5:4). Compare this to 4:3 for a "regular" monitor, and 16:10 for a widescreen. Surround Gaming fully engages your peripheral vision with games running at up to (and above) 135 degree wide-angle field of view. Compare this with a 90 degree FOV (with a 4:3 monitor) for most games, and a 105 degree FOV for those games in a single widescreen. To calculate the Surround FOV of your favorite game, use our FOV Calculator (recently updated for Surround).

How Does It Work?

Matrox achieves Surround Gaming using its new TripleHead2Go. The TripleHead2Go is not a graphics card but an external palm-sized box that harnesses your system's existing graphics solution (including SLI™) for rendering of all 2D, 3D and video, and adds multi-monitor support. TripleHead2Go appears to your system as an ultra-widescreen (up to 3840x1024) monitor and simply connects to your computer via a standard analog VGA monitor cable. Using Matrox patent-pending technology, TripleHead2Go then splits the 3840 x 1024 Microsoft® Windows® desktop into three separate 1280 x 1024 screens of information, and displays across three independent 1280 x 1024 monitors. There is no image distortion and no scaling to the original raw pixels generated from the existing graphics accelerator.

Resolution

The resolutions you can archive are 5040x1050*, 1440x900*, 3840x1024, 3072x768, 2400x600, and 1920x480. A greater resolution will get you a stretched picture.How this is in your opinion I don't know, so you must see it for your self.

The * stand for: A new firmware has been released for the Digital TripleHead2Go, There are some restrains on it, like 57Hz for the 5040x1050 and only new nvidia cards support it. Also the latest nvidia beta drives don't work.

Game Configuration

TripleHead2Go comes with Matrox Surround Gaming Utility software for automatically adding widescreen support to video games. Enjoy an extensive list of gaming titles across a wide variety of game genres including: first person shooters, racing and flight simulations, role playing games, real-time strategies, third person action and sports, as well as a host of massive multi-player online games. Matrox is continually working to add new games to the SGU, for easy configuration. In addition, most (if not all) of the widescreen solutions from the WSGF work to enable Surround.

Compatibility

TripleHead2Go supports over 250 popular games including id Valve's Half-Life 2™, Blizzard's World of Warcraft™, UbiSoft's Brother's in Arms: Earned in Blood™, Microsoft's Age of Empires III™, 10tacle studios AG's GTR™, Microsoft's Flight Simulator 2004: A Century of Flight and many more, and is compatible with many high end gaming GPU solutions including SLI.