Eyefinity "Stretching" on outer screens

[snedie]

Hey guys.

So I just bought a 5970 a couple of days ago (With a second one next week, or maybe just a 5870) but I'm having a few troubles in game.

Basically, all games appear stretched on the two outer screens, yet on the centre appear perfectly fine. As I pan around a scene, lets say to the right, the scenery rendered on the now left screen becomes increasing bigger as it approaches the edge of the FOV.

Please refer to my crude drawing:

Any help is greatley appreciated. For reference I play Metro 2033, BF2142, L4D2 among others. All games show this identical problem. I am also running the Cat 10.7 Drivers with Xfire Profiles.

 

[snedie]

Well that did occur to me, but to be honest it truly is a pain in the ass. If your always moving its pretty good, but the fact is most of the time your stood still or moving slowly. Surely it makes sense to have the ability to disable this?

Take Metro, when a cut scene comes on and it's close quarters (Say a small cubical) everything is massive on the outer screens (By quite a bit). Maybe if there is a way to adjust the ammount of this magnification true peripheral vision could be accomplished?

 

[snedie]

Its to do with the fact that most games don't officially support the the resolution you get with eyefinity so the game is stretching the image.

I wasn't aware a game had to be optimised for a particular resolution, and that this was handled at driver level by the GPU Drivers?

However, it would not surprise me if this was the case

 

[snedie]

I think a game would need to render three separate viewpoints for this not to happen, whereas Eyefinity just stretches a single viewpoint across 3 screens.

But as far as the game is aware, there is only a single rendering plain, right? For a game engine to render multiple instances would require a massive amount of threads to the GPU, something that right now is limited to a very small number.

I'm certain this is something that has been done deliberately by ATI as an attempt to create peripheral vision, but as with any new technology it doesn't work (Or as with any ATI product).

Think of it this way, you have a video at 640x480 and blow it up on a 50" plasma to 1920x1080; The video simply lacks quality, and quite often those cinematic black bars are added to compensate for Aspect Ratio, but no distortion is witnessed.

Taking this into account with game, the larger viewable are presumably would only require more horsepower but as long as the aspect ratio is say 16:9 or 16:10 then what is rendered by the GPU across the three screens should be almost identical to that of a single screen.

Now if aspect ratio is the problem, and this is not an intentional feature by ATI, than adjusting the resolution should in affect solve the problem....


Ideas?

 

[snedie]

So, any way of stopping this; Make the game display a true flat image

 

[snedie]

I'm using the Asus VH222H monitors, which unless I purchase VESA stands (At a considerable price I might add) this functionality isn't possible. Although I do like the concept of vertical screens.

 

[snedie]

Well my whole reasoning for purchasing the 5970 was for eyefinity, I was considering just a 5870 or dual 5850's instead for single screen use....So selling my screens would probably tick the other half of to no end (and result in my need for a hospital).

 

[snedie]

Most games will do that. Older ones can be especially obvious but most of them can be tweaked around.

Though, I'm pretty sure bfbc2/moh:b doesn't. That said, I don't really notice it. Too busy playing the game.

As for going vertical. It's great for about half an hour then the bezels become annoying as the screens aren't wide enough, you ideally want 3x30" displays if you're going vertical. Not exactly cheap though.

Your not kidding, those Dell screens are well over the £1k barrier. I would much rather purchase dual 5970's and a single 24" screen and have done with it; Unless I was a rich guy like some people (Feel free to donate money to my cause...a Fat guy has to eat)

I'll try running through a few more games I have lying around and see if any of them run normally. As I said before, I only notice it the most on metro when I get close to an object and it suddenly becomes 1" away from my face.

 

[snedie]

Also, any one in the thread know anything about Espresso Machines?

 

[snedie]

Yep, that is a problem. Just stop walking into walls . However, metro is one game I have it switched off for turning up the eyecandy instead.

I have a la pavoni 2a, great bit of kit. Not failed since I got it. Highly recommended. I think it's been rebranded to the europiccola - el now.

Hmmm, I don't think I am skilled enough to be pulling shots with a hand operated machine

A point about metro for those having problems. Before the 10.7 drivers, I was unable to launch the game at all in DX11 mode at 5760x1080, but since installing I can run in DX11 with 4xAA + AAA + No Tessellation.

 

[snedie]

The stretching is just something that comes with PC games as u get to the edge of ur FOV, and it is more pronounced the wider u get, so there is no "fix" as such.

U will get used to it after a week or so playing and wont even look at the side screens directly, then u wont ever want to go back to one screen!

Glad to hear Metro works in DX11 with Cat 10.7s, will have to try it. Also metro has weird mouse acceleration so i used Logitech software to change the x (400) and y (1800) axis speeds.

Thanks for the info on the logitech software. I have the MX Revolution, never installed the software for it but seems like it may just be worth while.

 

[snedie]

What you're seeing is "persepective distortion" it's not really a "problem" as such, in terms of, it's not something going wrong with your PC or games.

The wider your FOV, the more you will notice perspective distortion, as an object's relative distance changes the more off-centre it gets from the middle of your field of view.

This wiki article explains it quite well http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_distortion_(photography).

But basically, to have wide FOVs in games, you'll always see perspective distortion until they have separate view points for each monitor, but I think that separate viewpoints for first person games would end up looking really weird and disorientating.

You can "fix" this issue of course, by decreasing your field of view, but that would have the effect of cropping or "zooming" in on the image, so while you'll get very little perspective distortion, the relationship between objects and the overal viewing space will be very odd.

You wouldn't be able to judge distance very well with a low FOV and find moving about in games very awkward and confusing.

Great post, that really clears things up for me. I've started to get used to it now, and for those games that really don't adapt well to large resolutions I simply just run them in standard 1920x1080 and the drivers disable the other two screens for me.

I did experiment with the FOV in some games, and your absolutely right. Movement becomes very difficult, and even doing simple tasks like approaching an object become quite difficult. The idea of independent view points for eyefinity is a great idea, but could possibly lead to excessive processing no?