Video Card: Matrox Parhelia Review :: Triple Monitor Magic

I have worked with dual monitors before. It was great searching for something on the net on one monitor while working on the other. I have configured PC's before for financial analysts, with Reuters on one monitor and Metastock on the other. I have configured PC's before for medical purposes, with Retinal surface on one monitor and patients records on another. There are many uses of multiple monitors. You cannot understand how convenient it is until you see it yourself.

But three monitors on one PC is something totally different. We see these kinds of things in movies. A hero surrounded by monitors, saving the world. I found three monitors to test with which were not identical. First I adjusted the monitors for surround gaming. It was like bread and butter. It set the resolution 3840x1024 which was evenly distributed over the three monitors. I had to configure Quake III for surround gaming which was not easy at all. There are over 35 games currently supporting surround gaming. Some of the new ones have native support. For some of them you have to configure it. You may find the games which supports surround gaming and how to configure them here.

Actually you can play Quake 3 2400x600 (3x800x600) I just wanted to test and see it but I found my self playing the game all over again. You could walk and see angles like in normal life. I called everybody nearby to come over and look at it. It was amazing.

Then I used our good old utility "GrabClipSave" to capture some scenes from the game to show you how it looks. I saw the scenes spread over three monitors but when I used the frame grabber, they came up as whole 2400x600 scenes. I grabbed about 20 frames but I choose six of them to show here.