ASUS VG236H 3D Monitor and NVIDIA 3D Surround Review - PAGE 5

• AMD Phenom II X4 965 BE processor

• MSI NF890-G65 motherboard

• 2x NVIDIA GTX260 videocard

• Patriot Inferno solid-state drive

• Thermaltake Toughpower 1000W power supply

• 2x2GB Corsair Dominator DDR3-1600 7-7-7-20-1T memory

Testing

Upon trying out a few games, it is clear that having two extra monitors gives an advantage. Iin first-person shooters, the middle monitor displays what one would normally see with a single display, and the side monitors expand the peripheral view. In this type of game, most of the time it's the one who sees the other first who gets the kill; having a vision field three times bigger is very beneficial. Being in 3D didn't help much though in that regard, except for enhancing the gaming immersion itself.

Colin McRae DiRT 2 was another game that was greatly enjoyable on three 3D monitors, although it isn't recommended with 3D Vision since shadows and dust tend to look a bit weird. This time, the peripheral view helped a lot when using the third-person camera view; the player sees much more of the environment, which really makes a differecen during those steep curves.

Some other games worked great in 3D. Some of my favorites were Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, and Assassin's Creed. Both of these games would not span on all three displays, though, as well as some others including Microsoft Flight Simulator X and Worms: Reloaded. It looks like the games that were released before the advent of multi-monitor gaming in September 2009 are not made to use odd display ratios in general.

There were a few bugs with the setup, too. In DiRT 2 especially, the game would freeze during a few minutes when entering or leaving the caravan if 3D was enabled. It would also get the same symptom while watching race replays, although it took much less time to restart.

Finally, one will note that it takes a heck of a good computer to run such a setup. Three monitors puts three times as much load (duh) on the graphics card. Add to that the 3D configuration, which requires the system to generate twice as many frames per second to top the 120Hz refresh rate. Furthermore, the bezel compensation increases the resolutions a bit to make some part of the image disappear on each side. This means the load is more than six times what a standard 1920x1080 60Hz monitor would be. Needless to say the SLI of GTX260s could not run the games maxed out. In every case, the resolution was backed up to 4545x900 and the graphics quality lowered a bit.