ummm sorry to get your hopes up but I am gaming at 3072x768 @75Hz.. I dont think the matrox box can do that high a HZ..

I found a Graph and at 1280x720 you will ONLY be able to do 60HZ..:

http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/produ ... tions.html

Exactly, hence the other options I'm exploring. For projectors, dual-projector can actually give you wider vertical FOV with the same horizontal FOV range in comparision to triple-projector, so it's preferable to go dual over triple projector if you can configure it. The downside is pixel size. It's way too early in hardware development to take 1080p S3D and short-throw seriously though because it doesn't exist in that combination yet. So 2560x720 is what I end up with.

Another option is 3x1P 2160x1280, but there are a few problem with that. #1, projectors don't like portrait orientation. #2, if it's already short throw, it'll be super ultra short throw in portrait mode. #3, you lose 15% of that 2160 pixel width to each edge blend applied. Makes me wish 5x1P was applicable to NVIDIA Surround. 3600x1280 sounds like a nice theoretical resolution for circular screen S3D projection. I run 5x1P 6000x1920 on my AMD Eyefinity 24" LCD setup. That is a ton of pixels to push.

Ok, got the first projector in and am testing a few things with it. 852x720 @ 120hz might be possible. I'm getting conflicting results with my experiments. It says 3D Vision is using an incompatible resolution settings but it's working. Anyone know how to get that annoying red incompatibility message off of the screen? control-alt-insert isn't removing it? The 3D works perfect other than the warning message showing.

You might try with a VGA cable. Not sure if that will remove the message, but its worth a shot.

Actually, I've been using a VGA cable currently. The 25 foot DVI-HDMI "high speed" cables just shipped today. It's always been commonplace to prefer digital signal over analog, but at 1280x720 the difference between either is very marginal. So, I just am using a VGA cable I had sitting around until the cables I'll use for the build arrive.

I ended up purchasing three of these:
http://www.cablematters.com/pc-159-68-2 ... cable.aspx

A few more pics. Gathering up hardware for the build. Debating Tri-SLI GTX260 or Tri-SLI GTX470. If I intend to game I'll probably go in preference with the GTX470. Been playing around with the 3D Vision Kit shown and the first projector. I think I'm going to use that projector under the table as the phantom #3 projector. It'll lock 1280x720 @120 just fine. I'll just put it out of sight, out of mind next to the computer case turned off.

Largest issue so far is I need to pull the room ceiling fan. It interferes with projector mount locations.

Wow dude! Looks promising.

I'm really learning towards making a modular wood frame and tacking plywood or masonite to it for the screen surface. It'll I'd then mud and sand it to look good and smooth finish and trim out the edges. It'll be a semi-permanent build that is easy to remove at a later date. Undecided on if I want to use screen material or just paint. I have enough screen material left over from the original AMD 6800-series launch event build to do the screen with though. Initially we were going to do two setups head-to-head and it turned out we only had room for one.



There are the two S3D projectors and the third that I'll just hot-swap in to enable NVIDIA 3D Vision Surround. I confirmed awhile back that my old projectors will emulate 1280x720@120 but don't really do 120hz so it'll work as the third.

Nice.

Wow Im Excited can hardly wait till you get the setup done and you are enjoying S3D..

I hope the Dual Projector trick you are going to try will work out for you..

If not, I'll pick up a third projector and do 3x1P to best fit the screen area. I'll know more in a few days. I don't need to have screen built for testing, just have to know the settings stick and work.

Just finished up a for-pay project and have time freed up to work on this a bit more for the next few days. I'm a bit apprehensive still on the idea of portrait rotating the projectors in the design. I don't like the idea that I might have to do a silly kludge to do dual-display 3DVS. If I 100% were sure that "high altitude" fan mode on the projectors would keep them sufficiently cooled, I'd gladly go 3x1P on this. I just hate the expensive prospect of the unknowns if a bulb go terminally/destructively bad during testing. Projector bulbs can explode when they go bad, also damaging the projectors they're installed in. The closest I've had to that on my end is actually picking up a "dead" projector on ebay only to diagnose that part of the glass refractor when the bulb exploded was lodged in the projector fans causing an error out and auto shutdown. Pulled the errant piece of glass and that projector has worked ever since. Pondering setting up a single projector and just running it 24 hours straight and see how it handles it. I'm still within the 30 day bulb and 90 day projector warranty, so now or never is the time to experiment.

A bit of a mixed success. 3072x768@120 is success. 3840x720@120 is fail. NTHUSIM edge blending and scaling 3072x768 to only two projectors is a success. Plugging third cable into an analog VGA port on one of the two active GT720 is fail -- NVIDIA control panel won't activate HDMI-HDMI-VGA mixed Surround. Plugging third cable into spare EX525ST DVI port worked.

It disappoints me that I can't just plug VGA into a spare port to jumpstart Surround. I'm pondering making a DVI-DVI adapter dummy-plug and trying that to jumpstart the third.

A bit blurry, but that is a pic of successful 3072x768@120 S3D NVIDIA 3D Vision Surround over only two projectors and edge blending and pre-warping by NTHUSIM.

Now to mount the projectors and build a circular wall sized screen for this setup.

Looking good man. Unfortunate that 720P mode isn't working, but at least you've got something functional. That setup is really coming along, I imagine it looks nice with the glasses. I've been really thinking that projection is the way to go, right now I'm waiting for that Acer H5360BD to come out in the US. Don't really have the space or money for triple-head just yet, but maybe one day...

Another thing I saw while digging around in the drivers is they say portrait rotation is not available for 3D Vision. What is dumb about that is I think they purposefully omitted it is a bias to LCDs with the diffraction film they use in TN panels make it a bad match. No such issue for a projector though, so I find I'm being penalized for LCD TN panel shortcomings. NVIDIA makes it really difficult to do anything exotic with their 3D Vision kit. I wonder if Iz3D or DDD isn't the solution. The problem there is I think only 3D Vision properly syncs the displays uniformly across all at the NVIDIA driver level. If I knew TriDef or Iz3D could do it, I'd just use my AMD 5870 E6 cards and do 3x1P that way. At issue is I only have the 3D Vision kit for glasses and those are proprietary.

The limitations forced on the project for "thinking outside the box" can get frustrating at times. I can do 5x1L and 5x1P projection on my AMD setup, but only at 85hz. I can do S3D but only on my NVIDIA setup as 3x1L faked as 2x1L. In an ideal world things would be flexible enough to do whatever I wanted to. I'm really limited on my multi-display S3D options though. If I wasn't restricted to 3DVS for S3D, I'd go 5x1L 6400x1024 with the projector scalers for 5x 3:2AR. That would be crazy in MSFS. Could almost get 360 degrees. Problem is 3D Vision requirements kill that exotic thought.

Yes, Nvidia is very picky about what they allow you to do with their hardware/software. AMD, in theory, is better about it but their solution is not very mature at this point. I think the first game which they played an active role in is the new Deus Ex, which will support AMD HD3D natively and also Eyefinity in 3D. However, you still have the issue of syncing with the glasses, which I am not sure is solved at this point. And that doesn't even address iz3D/DDD compatibility. Not saying support won't come at some point, but there are a lot of question marks right now.

AMD is really pushing hard on Codemasters racing titles, LotRO and new Deus Ex. If any of them get the ability it will be those. Problem is I worked closely with AMD at the 6800-series launch event and later at CES 2011 and we could never get TriDef drivers to sync right. We were fully ready to show off S3D at the 6800-series launch on my DIY screen to the point they even had a suitcase with 24 XpanD glasses brought in. So far I've only seen NVIDIA pull off multi-projector S3D though. I suppose if anyone is to do it for the AMD side it would be me though as they wanted me to show it off in the last 6 months. Maybe I could get in contact with TriDef devs and help test things? Although my main contact at AMD has moved to a different job, I still have a few other contacts at AMD I guess I could look into also. I'd just as soon see this work on AMD, because of my 5x1 options for projection spanning.

The AMD sync issue might be an inherent flaw in using DP vs legacy clocks for the ports. My guess is I could use two passive DP adapters using up the legacy clock ability on the card to span and still do S3D, but the moment I put that third display in with an active adapter that transcodes DP->DVI I think it'll screw up. Maybe if all are active DP adapters they'd all be the same latency then? Using all active adapters would force a common DP clock on the ports and not be mixing two ports on athe legacy clock and one on the DP clock + transcode latency.

I just tried out Eve Online with the setup and all I can say is WOW. Playing that game with depth perception is awesome so far. Ship icons are at wrong depth, but everything else is really cool.

Cool. Glad to hear that its working. I'm still impressed with a 27" screen. I can only imagine what a multi-head PJ setup would look like in 3D.

On a whim I turned off 3D Vision and set portrait rotation on my Surround grouping in the control panel and then turned on 3D Vision again. The 3D Vision wizard works on portrait rotated projectors. Here is portrait rotation on the two projectors (ofcourse without them being mounted portrait at the moment)

IMHO, this opens up more interesting 2304x1024 and 2400x1280 options to me if I get that third projector. It's dumb the drivers tell you portrait rotation S3D doesn't work, when clearly it does.

Wow! I was under the impression that didn't work (based on documentation). Guess you always have to try it to be sure.

One thing I've always learned about this kind of stuff is it never gets done unless someone tries it. I put one of the projectors into high altitude mode and panned it to portrait mode on the wall. The 3D Vision glasses work just fine once you pan the projector to portrait.

The only big unknown now is can the "high altitude" mode make up for the thermal differences in portrait mounting on the GT720. That's another unknown I'll need to experiment with.

Hrrm, with experimentation in a few games it looks like depending upon what version of DX renderer you use portrait is very broken. Some versions will portrait rotate the second eye while others won't. Definitely a current quality control fail on the 270.61 Win 7 NVIDIA drivers. My eyes are still hurting after seeing that portrait on left eye and landscape on right. Ug.

After seeing how totally buggy portrait mode is, I'm definitely leaning towards just doing a standard 3840x720 circular screen build. I'm getting way too experimental on some of this stuff. While two projector is more cost effective, the scaling is a bit off. I think it's a case of proving something can be done then moving on to something more standard, which is probably 3840x720 set for 3840x800 16:10 hardware scaled (for a bit more projection height).

Leave it to me to flop around like a fish out of water. New puzzle pieces keep on dropping into my lap though. I have learned I can pick up MView MV103 boxes and do 1600x600, 2048x768 and 2560x720 @120hz using these boxes much like a Matrox DH2G, but 120hz capable. This throws new options into play, with a NVIDIA 3D Vision Surround using 6 projectors. Would only be useful for X-Plane or MSFS though because of the FOV range. And as an alternative there is still the AMD Catalyst 10.12a driver that does 5x1 Landscape. the problem with these crazy concept builds is there is no way to ultimately know if they'll work, until they're built and tested.

How can you go beyond three 3D screens? The MView device is like 3D TH2go? Why couldn't other games work this way, they work with Eyefinity6?

The devil is in the details. Eyefinity has sync issues people are working through or are simply not daring enough to drop the money needed to test it on multiprojector. Multidisplay Eyefinity S3D is a large unknown right now, while NVIDIA 3D Vision Surround is tried and validated as possible.

Yes, basically the MView box is like a TH2G, but allows for higher hz options with two and three displays. To do 6x1 landscape for NVIDIA 3D Vision Surround would require three of the boxes (a box for every two projectors) to match the required triple display restriction NVIDIA Surround has. That's how you get 6 displays to work on a three display limitation with 3D Vision. Personally it's a really crazy setup, but it seems like it would be a bunch of fun.

Wow, that is sounding even more crazy than I already thought.

Here is the sales link for the box: http://www.dhgate.com/p_ff8080812c2fb77 ... 3759f.html

They have to slow boat the product from China when shipping, but they're programmable via RS-232 port for custom resolutions unlike the Matrox boxes. If only Matrox had programmable firmwares in theirs. I already own 4 Matrox boxes.

Interesting find. But will 3DVS definitely work with more than three monitors? I see that for 1080p the refresh rate drops to 50hz. Isn't 60hz required for 3DV? Or is it 120hz (I don't know if the specs mean 3D or 2D refresh rate)?

NVIDIA 3D Vision Surround uses three separate ports out of two or three video cards in SLI mode total to push that pixel count at 120hz through three separate display cables. If we were talking only one port out there would be no way, but we're talking three Dual-Link DVI ports in this configuration. The NVIDIA drivers only see it as three displays but with how it's configured in this example it's actually six. Basically we're pushing the upper limits of what Dual-Link DVI is capable of. No way this would work with 6 1080p projectors. Simply too much pixel width total for the hardware and not enough cable bandwidth to pull it off. But for 720p x 6 projectors this is very plausible. It makes for a total of 7680x720 resolution, which is under the video card's hardware 8192 limit by several hundred pixels. For the NVIDIA side of things, there is a hardware pixel width limit of 8192, while on the AMD side it's 8000. You'll most likely see that double in future cards. If it does double in the future and DP 1.2 spec finds it's way into projectors, you'll be able to see this occur with 1080p 120hz S3D eventually, but not with current tech. That a bit of random trivia to see how video cards have progressed, DX9 generation cards were limited to 4096 way back in the NVIDIA era of 6000 and 7000-series cards. DX7-8 was capped at 2048.

6 1080p 3d projectors would be ~$20,000 lol. But are you sure this would work in 720p? That could be done for $3000, with the Acer H5360, perhaps. Though aren't the bulbs $200 each, so $1200 every 4000 hours or so? Projectors are looking unrealistic to me because of the bulb replacement cost, which is alot, even for three. Plus, I wouldn't really be able to use them for desktop work. Well, maybe pjs could work - 800 days at 5 hours a day. Having a huge projection setup would be cool, but I may end up with 24" or 27" 120hz monitors because they're more practical. I just wish I could find fresnels that large. I can't find above 19". If I could, I'd pull the trigger immediately.


How does Eyefinity 6 handle 7680x3200, then?


I wonder if that means 2560x1600 120hz panels will become available in around five years.

The only way to "know" on these type of setups is to do a proof of concept, because noone else is going to have the experience to say if it would work. That being said, taking the knowledge I have and piecing the puzzle pieces together separately, these things all do work individually. The big question is do the individual successes work as a whole too in this overall configuration. I could say that with 99% certainty that it most definitely would work in 2D fullscreen MSFS, the unknown is how the NVIDIA 3D Vision drivers would handle it. So worst case, you still have a non-S3D setup which is still so exotic that noone else has one like it.

IMHO, for a circular screen configuration you need shorter throw than the H5360 could provide. Preferably 0.5:1, but I'm going 0.7:1 because refurbed GT700/GT720 can be had for cheap. A setup like this is simply too exotic to be a "daily driver". I've ran my current setup since October 2009 without burning through half the bulb life on those projectors, so the 4000/5000 hour life does not bother me. I'm already transitioning over to Optoma GT720 from my previous Optoma EX525ST projectors. They still run good as new, it's just I want 1280x800 in a projector with 120hz capability now and the EX525ST doesn't provide that. By the time the bulb life is on it's last limb for my new GT720's I fully expect two generations newer technology to be around making higher lumen LED based projection appealing and/or actually affordable 1080p entry level, so I could dump these on ebay and upgrade within the bulb life of the projectors a few years from now. Looking for a fresnel lenses above 19", they sell huge ones as solar furnaces on ebay.

Don't let bulb life worry you if you account for it along the life of the bulbs. Looking on ebay, I can find replacement bulbs for my GT720 for $150. Six of those is $900. $900 / 4000 hours = around $0.23 cents an hour for use spread over about two years of use. 4000 hr / 24 months = 167 hrs a month. 167 hours a month * $0.23 = $38 month. Just set aside $38 a month and you have your bulb issue accounted for indefinitely. A very small price to pay to have this exotic of a setup.


Because 8000 is more than 7680, hence within the limits of the maximum pixel width. Eyefinity processes it as a 3x2L not as a 6x1L.


Only if the cable/port standards and your pocketbook allow it. I don't doubt that it'll occur, it's merely when in the future. For now I bet they're going to really push 1080p refinement though and hopefully the prices will tank a bit with more market saturation.

Is there any particular reason why you would be humoring a 6x1L 7680x720 projector setup? A 3x1L will work with 99% more games and applications than a 6x1L will. 3x1L is a generalized configuration, while 6x1L can be only targeted at a very narrow set of games and applications. Mostly just MSFS.

MView just shipped out my first MV103 box. It's going to take a bit to slow boat from China over to US though, but I should have 120 degrees of projection arc working once that box arrives. If it works and the screen design gets refined well enough, I am seriously thinking 360 degree setup for FSX as I already have the 180 degree setup for everything else.

360 degrees would be sick! Can't wait to see some pictures of your setup when its done.

After all this talk with triple-screen I think I am going to have to build an AMD rig to see this stuff for myself. Gonna put together a cheap rig with some 2D monitors for the time being, if its good I can look at getting some 3D ones in the future. Just don't have the space for triple projector in my apartment.

I'd recommend the ASUS 6950/6970 with 4 mini-dp and 2 dvi ports. It's like the 5870 E6, but with DP 1.2 and 6000-series GPU.

The card is a 3-slot beast:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814121431
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814121430

Thanks for all the updates, BHawthorne. I recently started investigating nvidia 3D vision, surround setups, etc. I have a decent budget and would love to set up a multi-projector rig and do some testing of my own. Only problem for me though is I live in the city in a small apartment, so I only have about 11 x 11 feet of space, and I can't alter my place. And, I'm not too great at woodworking and no access to a garage / tools etc. But what I'd do for a even a 150 degree circular screen My current setup is a 100" screen and single projector.