Dirt 2 Multi-Monitor (Triple) Setup and Racing Video

Capturing video of racing around the stages wasn’t quite enough for me. I wanted to go big. I’ve seen YouTube videos of games with 2 and 3 monitors put together and saw one for Dirt 2. So then I said to myself, "hey, I’ve got plenty of monitors sitting, why don’t I put that together and see what it looks like? So I did.

Let me present my Triple Monitor setup for Dirt 2. What you see are 3 of my 27 inch Samsung monitors together side by side. This is powered by my AMD FX 8350 CPU with 2 Nvidia GTX 660 Superclock GPUs in SLI.

With all 3 monitors hooked up you can go to the Nvidia Control Panel and turn on the Spanning or Surround feature (this is an enhancement to the SLI/PhyX feature). This makes all 3 monitors appear as one massive screen. My resolution was around 5870×1080. This was noticeable right away on the desktop as everything was extremely long and flat. There is even an adjustment in Nvidia for how to deal with the bezel of the computer screen. You can adjust the image by a few pixels to match up the image. It worked like a charm and the game was insanely wide. I did have to change this config in Dirt 2, but it understood it immediately and spanned the game across all 3 screens.

This was only a very quick test so don’t expect too much. I may have to try this again later at night, once it’s darker so you can’t see the desk or wall. I think that would be pretty immersive. It might even make me motion sick.

Anyway, it took less than 5 minutes to configure the video cards to work together. For those wondering, I had two monitors plugging into one card and a single monitor plugged into the second card. I know a lot of people use the Eyefinity to achieve the same thing, but this is a dual card solution and it seemed to work fine.

Besides the screen shots, I’ve included a quick game video so you can see my machine in action. Just so you know, the video was shot with a Canon AS2300 Point and Shoot camera. That’s the best I could do on such short notice.

Let me know what you think.