Triple Screen for Sim Racing [Triple Monitor Setup Guide]

[Music] hello fellow sim racers today's video is all about setting up triple screens for sim racing after nearly a year of exclusive VR use and recently modified by sim racing rig to support triple screens as well so this video is partly an instructional guide about how to set up triple monitors but it's also a collection of all the things I've learned along the way mostly by making mistakes [Music] broadly speaking sim racers have three options when it comes to displays one single monitor triple screens or some kind of virtual or augmented reality headset each of these has its advantages and disadvantages but that's not really something I'm going to get into in too much detail here but the important takeaway is the triple screen and headset based systems help increase a sim racers immersion and their awareness of their surroundings by increasing the size of the visual field around them however that increased immersion always comes at the cost of performance so to demonstrate this is approximately the correct field of view for a single 27-inch monitor on my sim racing rig it's drivable but racing in close quarters is a bit awkward to say the least now if you add in two extra monitors everything looks a bit more natural you can see the rear view and side mirrors and generally have a better sense of what's around you in the car setting up triple monitors for your simracing Rick isn't all that complicated and it doesn't require too many parts but getting the right parts is pretty much crucial first of all you're going to need three monitors and ideally these should be identical it is sometimes possible to use different models but you will likely run into issues with color and refresh rate matching across your screens you may find that correcting for mismatched bezels is difficult and honestly it's more trouble than it's worth in my opinion aside from the normal things that people look at with computer monitors like refresh rate and contrast ratio you need to think about resolution and size a little more critically if you're setting up triple monitors on a sim racing rig the larger your screens are the further away you'll need to place them which takes up more space but if your screens are too small you won't get the benefits of immersion the prevailing wisdom is that achieving a roughly 180 degree field of view is optimum essentially this means that the far edges of your monitor should be in line with your eyes and I can attest that this works very well for me I've tried a few triple screen setups and much prefer those where the screens wrap around the sides over those with larger TVs placed further away the next consideration is resolution 1080p is still the default when it comes to triple screen setups but Q HD and 4k screens are becoming a lot more commonplace and you may be tempted to look at those options but you need to be aware that small increases in screen resolution multiplied to create really quite large increases in total number of pixels that your video card needs to render take a look at ripple 1080p setup has roughly 6 million total pixels while 3q HD monitors weigh in at nearly twice as much and three 4k monitors have over two times the number of pixels of q HD setup has now the relationship between frame rate and the number of pixels isn't linear but you can make some educated guesses if your rig managers say 80 FPS on a single 1080p monitor then it's definitely going to struggle to render 12 times the amount of pixels on a triple 4k setup now I appreciate that's a lot of numbers but I can tell you from firsthand experience that an NVIDIA GTX 1080 could manage 3q HD monitors or 60fps in most racing Sims but only just and I had to turn down a few settings to make sure everything ran smoothly now with my 1080 TI it's less of an issue but there still isn't much GPU overhead so the takeaway here is that you're gonna need a fairly high-end video card if you want to go beyond 1080p speaking of video cards you going to need one that provides enough ports to drive three monitors to take my video card as an example I use the three display ports to drive each of my main screens this leaves an HDMI port I have my oculus rift plugged into and a DVI port that I used to drive the little dash display that you may have seen in the video earlier now if you don't have a dash display or a VR headset you'll only need three ports and in my experience you can mix and match these so for example on some lower end cards you may have a single display port a single HDMI and a single DVI port as long as you have the correct cables there shouldn't be any issues there the next consideration is how you're going to mount your monitors if you race at a desk this is likely something you won't need to think about too much but if like me you have a standalone rig you can't need some kind of monitor stand these come in several shapes and sizes but in general they're designed to stand over your rig and allow you to adjust the height spacing and angle of your monitors I went with a GT Omega stand mainly because I needed to be able to hinge my right hand monitor out of the way when I'm not driving otherwise I may have gone with one of the more industrial looking options for increased rigidity not that I've had any issues with the GTO mega stand of course honestly this is an area that's going to vary a lot depending on your individual requirements and it's definitely something that I would put a reasonable amount of time into during the planning stages that just about wraps things up for hardware there are a few other sundries you'll need like monitor cables and power but you're adults you can work that stuff out [Music] thankfully the software side of things is pretty straightforward the first step is instructing your video card to treat your three individual monitors as one giant display for NVIDIA users this is called surround and for those in the ATI ecosystem it's Eyefinity I've got an Nvidia card so I'm going to show you the setup steps in the Nvidia control panel to start with navigate to the set up multiple displays tab and make sure your monitors are all recognized and are all in the correct orientation you can drag these around to rearrange them if they're in the wrong order next up navigate to the configure surround and physics tab and click the configure button the final step is pretty straightforward and often the default settings that appear on this screen will be very close to correct for you first of all select your screen topology this should be set to 1 by 3 if you're running a conventional triple screen setup next make sure the correct screens are selected in the resolution drop-down make sure the combined resolution of your screens is selected in my case I'm running 3 2560 by 1440 screens which adds up to a total resolution of 76 80 by 1440 pixels you'll need to instruct the video card what refresh rate to run these monitors at this is where you may run into trouble if you have three different monitors finally you can enable bezel correction this instructs the software to leave a gap in the picture where your monitor bezels are so the picture lines up perfectly across all of your monitors when you start adjusting this the Nvidia software places a picture with diagonal lines across the edge of the screen and you can simply adjust it until it looks right honestly it's more complicated to explain this than it is to just do it just press the arrow until everything looks like it lines up and that's everything click apply and your video card will create a custom resolution option that takes your bezel correction into account and it's this resolution you should select in all of your driving games now before you load up your first sim you're going to need to take some measurements so it's time to get out your tape measure and a protractor if you're not currently studying GCSE maths you may not have a protractor but like most things there's an app for it no really in order for a racing sim to correctly render your field of view across three monitors without distortion it needs to know the size and layout of your screens so to start with you should take measurements of the width and height of your screens as well as the size of the bezel now whatever measurement system you usually use abandon it and use millimeters as some sims force the use of metric you also need to measure the distance between the centre of the middle screen and your eyes finally take measurement of the angle between your screens in degrees if you set up everything properly both sides should be the same in addition some Sims like to know if there's an offset between the height of your eyes and the center of the screen and why you've got the tape measure out now's as good a time as any to collect that [Music] I'm going to take a quick look at three popular sim racing titles and how to set up triple monitor support in each of them in general the process involves enabling triple monitor supporting the options and selecting the custom resolution you created earlier using your surround or Eyefinity setup but each of the games handles inputting the specific screen measurements and layout slightly differently let's start out with our racing in the in-game graphics options tab it's simply a case of inputting the measurements into the display portion of the menu confusingly iRacing measures your screen angle the opposite way to all the other sims so you'll need to subtract your measurement from 180 my monitors were set to 50 degrees so I've entered 130 in the dialog box next up is assetto corsa and as you can see triple screen options are available as an in-game app once you've enabled triple monitors support in the main graphics menu simply input the measurements you've previously taken close the app and you're good to go finally I'll demonstrate how to set up triple screen support in race room because well it's a bit of an outlier race room haven't updated their UI to include triple monitor or VR support so if you want to use either of these you need to set out beforehand in Steam right click on the title in your Steam library and select properties click set launch options and a dialog box will appear you're now going to have to type in those measurements you took in a specific order I'm not going to read it all out to you here because it will get confusing but I put a link in the video description to a guide that sector 3 have created to help you along the way so that's how you set up triple screens for simracing it's not particularly complex but there are a few potential pitfalls and for me the most important aspect is selecting the right monitors and video card for the job another aspect people don't often discuss is the rat's nest of wiring you're left behind your rig this is made worse if you're a youtuber and you have webcams and lights in play as well so managing all those cables is a nice rainy day job for me in the near future I think I've just about reached my yearly quota for the use of the word triple so let's call it a day there I hope you enjoyed the video if you did then it would be great if you could hit the like button subscribe to my channel and if you think the video will be helpful for others then please consider sharing it as always thank you for donating your precious free time by watching it is very much appreciated so all that's left to say is goodbye thank you for watching and enjoy the rest of your day

Channel: Chris Haye

Views: 544,328

Keywords: triple screen, sim racing, triple screen sim racing, displays, triple monitor, guide, triple screen setup, sim racing setup, how to, how to setup triple monitors, sim racing with triple screens, racing sim, 3 monitors, 3 screens, bezel correction, triple QHD screens, assetto corsa, triple monitor setup, triple monitor gaming, triple monitor setup guide, driving game, sim, simulator, gameplay, sim racer

Id: lft_MXnrSkw

Length: 11min 10sec (670 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 03 2018