Gadgetory

Now, in my first video about this configuration, the one in front of me, which you can check out here, I talked about that the media consumption experience and the productivity implications of having literally 8 feet of monitors 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 are 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 mongo resolution and how games react to be 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. 14.86 megapixels. That is the pixel count of our triple-surround curved 34-inch monitor setup for LG. We're talking a surface here that is just slightly hard to drive than even the brand-new 5K iMac Retina Display 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 not to buckle when we throw seven times the resolution of 1080p at a gaming rig 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 V Extreme motherboard, and the centerpiece, three Sapphire Vapor X Radeon R9290X 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 on a single card. So the only way to kit up 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-widescreen 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 52fps 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 of where you'll really 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 are handled with a simple hot-key in-game, and being surrounded by the cockpit with a very wide field of view legitimately feel like it makes it more like you are in a vehicle. It also ran very well at around 80fps at max, with mirrors enabled, 2048x2048 textures, and all the RAM sliders cranked. The next game type? and 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, 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 8fps in the racing module at low and then curiously ran at 8fps 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 is the only top-down view game that we are running. And, it's a Mantle title, and that it also features an unusual crossfire mode, thanks to the way that Mantle allows game devs to leverage the GPU or GPUs more directly than has been possible in the past. So instead of each GPU rendered 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 wasn't all 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've gotta try to leverage those 290Xs 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 31fps at high with ultra-textures, using the built-in benchmark. It kept all of the UI elements on the center monitor, where they can be more easily accessed, and it makes a reasonable case for widescreen gaming. One of my favorite games to test with anything is Tomb Raider 2013 and it has handled the setup really well as well. As another third person game it required no FOV adjustments, it leverages multi-GPU configuration extraordinarily well man, that game is well optimized. So the game was playable at around 48fps at very high with Tress 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 it 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 ok but the menus are completely impossible to navigate. And the other cool thing about this game is that it's super easy to create a very demanding scenario for GPU vRAM with the ultra-texture pack. So running Shadow of Mordor at whatever settings I was running at that one time I got it working with ultra textures, I have no idea. I mean it spanned across the monitors, it looked really good, the frame rate was balls around 30fps and average performance was over 4 gigs of vRAM per GPU the only time that happened, where we would have actually needed more than a 4 gig GPU. I wasn't able to verify anything because I wasn't able to 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. 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 are 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 200fps maxed out, Portal 2 was just not that great of an experience. So I guess it's conclusion time. What is this whole thing? What is 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 vastly more often than not. Most of the games that I selected are from widescreen gaming forums’ silver or gold certified games lists because they have relatively few issues with field of view, heads up display elements, and menu navigability. 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 $6000 required for three 8 gig GPUs and three 34-inch monitors for myself? No. While more vRAM is cool, I think we demonstrated that, unless you are actually playing modern titles at resolutions beyond 4K, where even our triple 290X crossfire setup that pulled a massive 800 watts from the wall and 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? Guys, thank you for watching. Like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it. Leave a comment if your feelings are more complicated than this. As always there is a link in the video description to support us. 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