Multi-monitor gaming software

When it comes to monitors, more than one is almost always better. Beyond the expanded screen real estate for working, gaming across multiple monitors is a beauty to behold.

It’s never quite as simple as the dream. Nvidia’s Surround and AMD’s Eyefinity have their problems and even when these work, there can be issues with HUD placement being out of place or the field of vision being woefully inadequate. Not to mention the limitations Surround and Eyefinity impose with both graphics cards and the monitors used.
Fortunately, there are some helpful tools you can use to not only get your games running across multiple monitors, but ensuring they look great, too. As is often the way, the benefits filter down to single-display users as well.
So if you enjoy your gaming, take a look at these three brilliant programs you can use to take it to the next level.

SoftTH

Website: www.kegetys.fi/SoftTH
Without a doubt, SoftTH is impressive. In essence, it’s a software implementation of multi-monitor gaming (hence Soft TripleHead as its title), independent of either Nvidia Surround or AMD Eyefinity technology.
It can take multiple monitors — even of different sizes and resolutions — and span a game or other software across all the monitors as a single display. This is pretty damn nifty when you think about it, considering the otherwise proprietary implementations required by Nvidia and AMD.
However, it’s not all roses and flaming death to your onscreen enemies. As the name implies, it’s a software implementation and it works differently to the solutions by the big boys in team Green and Red; namely, a single card does the rendering for the whole display, whereas Nvidia Surround and AMD Eyefinity can use multiple cards in SLI or CrossFire to distribute the load. Note that you can still use multiple video cards to output, which in some cases is required depending on what video cards you have, in order to hook up multiple monitors.
Still, it’s an impressive piece of software that works by first rendering the game at the desired multi-monitor resolution and then splitting the resultant image into a number of frames. The middle frame is sent to the middle monitor, while the other frames destined for other displays are sent to main memory and then onto other video cards to display on their respective monitors.

SoftTH enables multi-screen gaming through the clever use of frame buffers.

 
While SoftTH is slower than using a Surround or Eyefinity setup, it has a number of advantages over these systems. It can use more than three monitors, these monitors can be of different sizes and resolutions, and you can mix and match video cards to power the displays; for example, powering a main display with a GeForce GT670 card from Nvidia while using a much older generation card like the 8800GTS to power the other displays. You can even combine cards from both Nvidia and AMD — since rendering is done on the primary card only, any video can be used to output frames on alternate connected monitors.
Technically, it could also be used to set up a PLP (Portrait-Landscape-Portrait) display, something that can’t be done with Nvidia or AMD’s solutions. For many multi-monitor aficionados, this is considered the ultimate: a large central display with small portrait-orientated displays on either side, thereby keeping immersion-breaking monitor bezels further out of your field of vision.
In fact, SoftTH is unique in the sense that you can also render a display beyond the size of your monitors. This can be useful if you’re using different-sized monitors or in configurations beyond 3x1, for example. SoftTH has actually been around for quite some time and was initially made popular by racing and flight sim fans who wanted to expand their field of view for a more immersive experience.
To that end, it works well for most popular simulation games; however, there is one caveat: SoftTH only works with DirectX 9 titles. Fortunately, DirectX 10 and 11 games are still only gaining traction today, with most current games being Direct 9 including blockbusters like Skyrim and Mass Effect 3.
Setting up SoftTH is easy, too: it works as a DLL file injection much like the ENB or SweetFX tools (which we’ve previously covered) to enhance games with antialiasing and other effects. Installing it is just a matter of copying the ‘d3d9.dll’ file to the binaries folder of the game of your choice and launching the game. The first time you do so, you’ll be prompted to create a new configuration file. Doing so places a file called ‘config.SoftTHconfig’ in the same directory where you placed the DLL file and is easily editable in a text editor.
This is important, as you’ll need to then edit the file and configure your desired resolution and the number of displays if it’s not correct. Then, it’s just a matter of selecting the new resolution in the game, which the replacement DLL file conveniently supplies.
You’ll note a number of settings in the configuration file that you can set, from ‘vsync’ and ‘frame rate’ limiting to various fixes and workarounds — it’s essential to read the ‘Readme’ file to understand what you need to set and when.
Finally, note that as a DLL injector, it’s essentially incompatible with other injectors like SweetFX or ENB unless you chain-load them. SoftTH supports chain-loading another ‘d3d9.dll’ file after it, as does ENB, but SweetFX doesn’t at this time so if you use SweetFX, you’ll want to chain-load it from SoftTH. And given that SoftTH is providing the full-size frame buffer that SweetFX would operate on, this is generally a good idea.
SoftTH was released not long ago as open source to encourage ongoing development. Check out the thread here if you want to get involved.

Flawless Widescreen

Website: www.flawlesswidescreen.org
While SoftTH is a method for spanning games across displays, Flawless Widescreen is a useful tool to get them running, well, flawlessly. Because multi-monitor gaming is still in its infancy, invariably running games across multiple monitors tends to cause certain artefacts.
Usually, this involves issues with the game’s HUD (heads-up display) not working well (for example, being centred on the main screen and not spanned across all three monitors), aspect ratio problems in menus or most frequently, incorrect FOV (field of vision). Inherently, the FOV of most games is tailored to a single monitor, which when expanded across multiple displays often creates a ‘fishbowl’ effect that can be seriously disorientating.
It’s worth noting this can happen even if you’re using Nvidia’s Surround or AMD’s Eyefinity — it’s not a function of the technology, but the game not being designed to run this way. Unfortunately, this includes pretty much every title ever made, so until multi-monitor gaming becomes the norm, fixes are needed to correct the FOV to appropriately accommodate the expanded field of view that multiple monitors provides.
Some games — the good ones — have a field of view setting. This is useful even on single monitors for those who feel the game’s default FOV is ‘cramped’ when playing. Many games don’t provide this, though, and so tools like Flawless Widescreen exist to correct this.
And an impressive tool it is: if a game doesn’t support altering the FOV and its publishers don’t exactly release their source code, Flawless Widescreen works its magic by fixing the game in-memory after it’s loaded, basically altering the binary on the fly. It works rather well, although it’s dependent on users creating plug-in files not just for every game, but every version of every game. That’s because each time a new patch is released, the contents of the binary executable change and hence so do the addresses at which the FOV fix needs to be injected.

Flawless Widescreen makes it easy to correct FOV and apply other widescreen fixes for multi-monitor and widescreen gaming.

Flawless Widescreen at least makes it easy to use: simply click on the game title under ‘FWS plugins’ and the plug-in will be installed. Go to the settings page to set your expanded FOV and enable any other fixes that may have been supplied, and then simply launch your game. As long as Flawless Widescreen is running, it will detect when the game loads and patch it in real-time in memory.
The plug-ins are reasonably up-to-date; for example, you’ll find plug-ins for Dishonored and Far Cry 3, while also supporting classics like Skyrim and the Mass Effect series. The plug-ins themselves are in LUA script, so if you know what you’re doing, you can edit these directly either to alter the options presented or (if you’re a bit of programmer and a new game version is released) to change the address at which the fixes are injected.
While Flawless Widescreen makes it easy to adjust the FOV for Nvidia Surround and AMD Eyefinity displays, it also supports SoftTH and again, it’s rather helpful even if you use a single display. See the example Mass Effect 3 shots at right for an example.
It’s hard to overstate how important a correct FOV is to gaming: some people get headaches or eye strain from incorrect FOV, largely because many developers still use 4:3 as a screen ratio rather than the now-standard 16:9 — many games tend to set a FOV at 70°, but 90° is the ideal for a widescreen monitor. It’s hard to explain the difference correct FOV has on gameplay: the first time you load the game after altering the FOV and running around feels like a breath of fresh air. It’s hard to accurately describe, but opening up the FOV opens your spatial awareness and it feels so much better.
Flawless Widescreen has actually been around in one form or another for many years, initially starting out as a small project for users on the WideScreen Gaming Forums. However, the author, HaYDeN, has since set up a dedicated web site and continues to develop it.
If you have a game that does support changing FOV and you’re on a widescreen monitor, try increasing it to see. For games that don’t support this, Flawless Widescreen is there to save you.

Widescreen Fixer

Website: www.widescreenfixer.org
Widescreen Fixer aims to fulfil the same role as Flawless Widescreen and also uses an injection method for altering the FOV and implementing other widescreen fixes like the positioning of the HUD. The interface isn’t quite as nice — nor as intuitive — as Flawless Widescreen and it also requires manual activation once a game has loaded by hitting the (*) key on your keypad. However, its plug-in modules are more up-to-date, so if you find a game or game version unsupported in Flawless Widescreen, Widescreen Fixer may suffice.
Like Flawless Widescreen, Widescreen Fixer can be used to properly set the FOV in a game and toggle other fixes by using hotkeys that can be set in a plug-in’s configuration; for example, centring models in a character select screen or repositioning menu text.

Widescreen Fixer isn’t as pretty as Flawless Widescreen, but it’s more up-to-date with the latest titles.

By default, most plug-ins will try to auto-detect your monitor configuration, but you can also manually force how many monitors you have and in what resolution they span. This is useful if you’re running a single display and just want to take advantage of the FOV alteration — simply deselect the ‘auto-detect’ option and then manually input a single monitor and the resolution to match. That said, not every game’s plug-in supports changing the FOV — many seem geared towards providing a proper aspect ratio and HUD placement for multi-monitor configurations.
Also working slightly against it is that all plug-ins come as DLL files, which means you’re reliant on the author to update and provide new compiled DLL modules.
However, as it supports a wider range of games than Flawless Widescreen and plug-ins for these are more up-to-date with the latest versions of games, if Flawless Widescreen doesn’t help, give Widescreen Fixer a go.

Even for single-screen gaming, the FOV fixes Flawless Widescreen and Widescreen Fixer allow for a more comfortable view. Here, the expanded FOV (2nd screenshot) allows us to see more of Shepard from Mass Effect 3, as well as the environment around her.