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NVIDIA Surround not working?

SomethingRoyal

SomethingRoyal

SomethingRoyal

Associate
Joined
2 Dec 2012
Posts
50
Location
Lincolnshire.
Hello everyone,

So today my third monitor arrived finally (Woo!) and I've been waiting so long to have three screens, but my excitement unfortunately is short lived.

My two monitors that I've been running for about a year now are Samsung S24B300HL 24" 1920x1080 monitors, however nowhere sells them anymore so I had to get a different third monitor (arrived today) which is my BenQ EW2440 which is now my middle screen, with the two Samsung's at either side.

All 3 screens run at 1920 x 1080 and 60Hz, they're all 24" too.

My Graphics card is an MSI GeForce GTX 660Ti 2GB OC

Monitor 1 (Center, BenQ) HDMI -- HDMI card
Monitor 2 (Left, Samsung) HDMI -- HDMI TO DVI-I -- DVI-I into card
Monitor 3 (Right, Samsung) HDMI -- HDMI TO DVI-D -- DVI-D into card

Now, When I go into NVIDIA Control Panel -> 3D Settings -> Configure Surround, PhysX, I check the box "Span displays with Surround" in t he "Surround Configuration" category, and then the three display boxes below which are looking like this:

baf89bb9e1.png


Turn into this:

04d1865da8.png


After this, clicking the "Configure..." button does absolutely nothing. Nothing at all. Not even a process initiates or starts itself in the processes tab under Task Manager.

Have I done something wrong? Is there something glitching here?

I eagerly await replies! Thanks!
 
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You say in the text that the BenQ is into a HDMI port but the diagram shows one of the Samsungs on the HDMI port?
 
chaparral said:
You have clicked the apply button at the bottom right corner ??
Click to expand...

Yeah, it doesn't do anything. Doesn't even prompt me with a Save changes pop-up or anything, You can literally spam it and it doesn't do anything.

Rroff said:
You say in the text that the BenQ is into a HDMI port but the diagram shows one of the Samsungs on the HDMI port?
Click to expand...

Odd, Let me look. One moment.

EDIT: Okay so my BenQ was running into the DVI adapter by accident without me knowing. I must have overlooked it. I'll edit the OP with new screenshots.
 
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Can you not plug 2 of the monitors into DVI directly? IIRC you need 2 of the panels directly driven from DVI for 2D surround and all 3 from DVI for 3D (Vision) surround.
 
Does anyone know if it meant to say 1 of 2 and not 1 of 3 ?? :confused:

As it looks like it knows the BenQ EW2440 is a different monitor to the Samsung S24B300HL's ones
 
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SomethingRoyal said:
EDIT: Okay so my BenQ was running into the DVI adapter by accident without me knowing. I must have overlooked it. I'll edit the OP with new screenshots.
Click to expand...

That might be your problem but I can't be 100% sure - On the 600 cards I think you need atleast 2 of the panels to be using DVI directly and not through a DVI to HDMI adapter. But don't quote me on that.
 
Rroff said:
Can you not plug 2 of the monitors into DVI directly? IIRC you need 2 of the panels directly driven from DVI for 2D surround and all 3 from DVI for 3D (Vision) surround.
Click to expand...

I'm confused what you mean by this. Do you mean can I get to monitors running off the same DVI port? Because if so I've never heard of that. And I don't use 3D surround, I just want 2D surround.

chaparral said:
Does anyone know if it meant to say 1 of 2 and not 1 of 3 ?? :confused:

As it looks like it knows the BenQ EW2440 is a different monitor to the Samsung S24B300HL's ones
Click to expand...

It says 1 of 2 because of 2 my monitors are identical, So it means 1 of 2 and 2 of 2. If they were all the same it would say 1 of 3, 2 of 3 etc. But one is a BenQ so it doesn't.

Rroff said:
That might be your problem but I can't be 100% sure - On the 600 cards I think you need atleast 2 of the panels to be using DVI directly and not through a DVI to HDMI adapter. But don't quote me on that.
Click to expand...

So even though I'm converting the HDMI connection into DVI before it goes into the card it still makes a difference? I don't have any other DVI cables I don't think...
 
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No not connecting more than one monitor to the same port - I mean having 2 of the monitors each plugged into a separate DVI socket without either of them using a HDMI adapter.

It shouldn't really be an issue as HDMI and DVI are electrically compatible and the HDMI end should be switching protocol not the other way around but I've heard of it being an issue with surround before.

It might be that you need to change some settings in the windows screen resolution panel before you can enable surround on the nVidia side if windows is grouping monitors in certain modes.
 
Rroff said:
No not connecting more than one monitor to the same port - I mean having 2 of the monitors each plugged into a separate DVI socket without either of them using a HDMI adapter.

It shouldn't really be an issue as HDMI and DVI are electrically compatible and the HDMI end should be switching protocol not the other way around but I've heard of it being an issue with surround before.

It might be that you need to change some settings in the windows screen resolution panel before you can enable surround on the nVidia side if windows is grouping monitors in certain modes.
Click to expand...

If I bought a cable which would allow me to connect to my GPU's DVI ports without having to use adapters they wouldn't connect to my two samsungs because they don't share the same DVI port. They only have HDMI or VGA connections.

What settings should I be looking for on windows?
 
Hmm just had a play on a system using a couple of DVI->HDMI adapters and it worked fine (bit of an adhoc setup but it worked).

The only thing I can think of is that there is some discrepancy between the information the system is seeing for the monitors and doesn't think all 3 are close enough to support a surround setup - might be possible to fool it with custom monitor definitions.
 
Rroff said:
Hmm just had a play on a system using a couple of DVI->HDMI adapters and it worked fine (bit of an adhoc setup but it worked).

The only thing I can think of is that there is some discrepancy between the information the system is seeing for the monitors and doesn't think all 3 are close enough to support a surround setup - might be possible to fool it with custom monitor definitions.
Click to expand...

:( Any idea on how I could do that?
 
You can use any connectors for 2D surround

Special Instructions:
> Any connectors can be used to enable Surround.
> Once Surround is enabled, users can use any connector for the Accessory Display.

source
 
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Thank you everybody for your help and responses. After lots of digging I discovered it was something called Monitor Polarity where my BenQ ran at +/- and my Samsung's at +/+. I've found a custom software which can change this, updated my GPU drivers and it works. Thanks all!
 
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