To The Power Of Three

Last EVE related post in a while, I promise! If you had enough of me and EVE, you should stop reading now… otherwise read on to see my latest trickery and hack.

So. On this year’s keynote of CCP held in Iceland (Fanfest), they had shown quite a cool feature: the game on multiple screens. This kinda inspired me, I thought it has to be possible to do this already. And what followed was yet another odyssey into technology and the question: can it be done?

The inspiration for me was one photograph… this one:

New Eden extended by 3

Obviously you have to be able to connect three screens. Now you see the problem is, that most graphic cards, even expensive ones (apart from things like ATI’s EyeFinity) only let you connect a maximum of two screens at any one time. However for EVE, with your ship always in center view, having the ship in one piece is quite important to the experience of the game, so you need either 1 or 3 screens.

Here’s where the first problem comes in. Most mainboards only allow you to connect ONE PCI-Express graphic card. With 16x speed that is for immense bandwidth and thus graphical processing. How do you fit it a second PCI-Express card when your board only takes one? Well. You see it is technically possible to connect a second 16x speed card onto a slot with only 1x speed. Problem is there is a physical blockage. So I went and by hand removed the block on the right side, allowing another card to fit in. Obviously you only get 1x speed instead of 16. This isn’t pretty and voided my warranty – but it works!

A bit crammed, but… well:

Don’t worry, the cooling is perfectly fine. They are not touching – even if it looks like that. Besides the cheap one is a passive cooler – so everything’s… cool. With those two finally placed in, I could in theory attach a maximum of 6 screens… Whoa!

Fancy a TV wall? Six screens, maybe? For now, let’s just use three.

Everything is working. Drivers installed, and the screen is in fact detected and Windows says it now has a new display adapter. The screen is showing its wallpaper. I am impressed about myself how far I have gotten already.

Next problem is that Vista does not allow for horizontal spanning (like you have 3 monitors on your desk, but Windows thinks it is one). This was removed in Vista and is not coming back in Windows 7. Windows XP however did this. With the so-called Windows Display Driver Model, or WDDM, which Vista and W7 uses, spanning is not possible. So full-screen on 3 screens is a no-go. But my journey didn’t end here.

There is this little nifty hack called SoftTH (Software Triple Head). This effectively forces any DirectX based game to use all screens. How does it work?

The image is rendered on your expensive beloved graphic card. This tool then takes care of the rest and divides the image by three, and sends the parts onto its respective screens. Left to left, center to center, and right to right. This involved a bit of configuration and I can provide you with my config file if you need it.

And that was it. EVE is now forced to use all screens! Thus, my command bridge is now complete. Bask in the presence of the most immersive gaming experience. EVE To The Power Of Three.

Threesome: Main view in the middle, communication and information on the left, sensors on the right