NVISION’s slogan was “The World of Visual Computing”  but could be just as easily titled “All the cool stuff of NVIDIA partners”, because ATI and Matrox was nowhere to be seen.  But don’t get me wrong,it is a top notch event, and I plan on paying my way to attend next year so I can experience everything.

HIPerWall is the first thing you see entering the convention center.

The event truly covered all corners of visual computing, from hardware vendors, cutting edge technologies, famous speakers, to the largest LAN party I have set eyes on.  Any geek will find lots to love here.

GeForce LAN. “The Guinness World Record for the longest continuous LAN party with over 100 participants was set today at NVISION 08. 203 hardcore gamers kept going for 36 straight hours!” – NVISION Highlights

k|ngp|n attempting to break world records right on the showroom floor at the EVGA booth.

Wallace Santos, President & CEO of MAINGEAR, checking out the friendly competition over at the SIM Factory booth.

I met with some of the best case modders in the world including fellow [H]ardForum member craigbru who completed Project: Rogue (on right) which was featured on the HardOCP.com homepage.

Later this week when I return from my trip you can expect full writups from the booths that were MultiMonitor related.

NVIDIA enabled PhysX with their GeForce v177.83 graphics driver, Geforce 8 and higher only, sorry.  This driver package will also install v8.08.01 PhysX System Software.  The PhysX control panel can be accessed through the Windows Start Menu under ‘NVIDIA Corporation’.  In proper celibration they released a ton of free apps, demos, and a full game through The Force Within Site.

The “free” PhysX support plus apps are a pleasant surprise in a world where companies give me the impression that they dont care who they screw to make a buck.

Available for free from this first GeForce Power Pack includes:

• Warmonger — Full free game! Destroy walls, floors, and whole buildings to open up new paths or close existing ones. Destructive power is more than eye candy here-it’s a tactical weapon in this ground-breaking action game.

• Unreal Tournament 3 PhysX Mod Pack-includes three maps with amazing effects that fundamentally change the gameplay (requires full version of Unreal Tournament 3)

• A sneak peek at the upcoming Nurien social networking service, based on the Unreal Engine 3 (with built-in benchmark).

• A sneak peek at the upcoming game Metal Knight Zero (with built-in benchmark).

• All new NVIDIA “The Great Kulu” tech demo that showcases the use of PhysX soft bodies in a real game play environment.

• All new NVIDIA “Fluid” tech demo-a simulation of realistic fluid effects with a variety of liquids.

• Badaboom Media Converter: Beta  -  formats video and audio files for a variety of devices using a process called transcoding. By utilizing a NVIDIA® GeForce® GPU, badaboomâ„¢ enables users to painlessly convert video in multiple formats and view them on their portable media devices – all in a convenient, intuitive application.

• New WHQL-certified drivers that enable PhysX acceleration for all GeForce 8, 9, and GTX 200 Series GPUs. This new driver also adds support for PhysX-accelerated features in the commercially available Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 game.

Upcoming PC titles that incorporate PhysX technology include Cryostasis, Backbreaker, Aliens: Colonial Marines, with close to 20 more PC titles expected before the year-end holiday seasons.

The Official Press Release.

The newest version of Surround Gaming Utility (SGU) by Matrox for the TripleHead2Go just got a little better by adding 2 new resalutions, triple 1440×900 and triple 1680×1050. Not very common sizes, Im sure someone out there is happy they did.

So hurry on over and grab the download, and try not to be offended by the giant nipple background while you are doing so.

Oblivion was not difficult to use SoftTH v1.07b to span 3 screens, no configuration changes were needed, although I prefer changing the side monitors to run in 32bit rather than 16bit. This can be done with the following setting  secondaryFormat=RGB32

Bonus: Triple Screen Ending (Spoilers)

* 1.08beta (rc2)
- Fixed performance with RGB16D mode
- Fixed possible crash with D3D9 GetDepthStencilSurface
- Window rect scaling
- Various minor compatibility fixes

* 1.08beta (rc1)
- Improved Autosquash detection
- Removed cylindrical correction setting
- Added lens correction postprocessing effect
- Depthstencil created by SoftTH now uses discard flag
if application originally requested it
- Pixel shader dithering in RGB16 mode for cards that
do not support dithering (ie. GeForce 80000 series)
- Reduced video memory use and improved compatibility
for antialiasing
- Changed to global mouse hook for better compatiblity
- Automatic screenmode & sideExtraWidth detection
- New faster, simplier, multithread safe win32 api hooks

You can grab it here.

Click more for complete step by step instructions.

Before starting your work on hacking the game it is recommended you edit the intro trailers so you don’t have to sit through them each and every time you try to change a setting and reload the game. This can be don’t by adding a tilde before anything with trailer in its name in the (Program Files)\Electronic Arts\Crytek\Crysis\Game\Localized\Video\ directory. Also to skip the ESRB message you need to go into the language sub-folder and edit the Trailer_rating.sfg file.

Next you will want to download  SoftTH, I am using v.106b at the time of this writing because after a couple hours of trying later versions, this was the one that worked best.  Edit: I got 1.07b working, details added below.

Following the instructions in quickstart.txt, it tells you to “place SoftTH files (d3d8.dll, d3d9.dll, SoftTH.cfg, etc.) to game executable directory. This is usually the directory the game is installed in, in some games the ‘real’ executable is located in a subdirectory (Such as ‘System’ or ‘bin’).”

(For v1.07b) The only edit I needed to make to SoftTH.cfg was changing useMultihead=0 .   Also if after testing, you find your PC can run tipple screens fairly fast, then you can improve the quality of the side images by setting secondaryFormat=RGB32 so the side monitors are not degraded to 16bit for speed. Should v1.07b not work for you, you can fall back to v1.06b…

(For v1.06b) The only edit I needed to make to SoftTH.cfg was changing the secondaryWidth to 1280, and secondaryHeight to 1024. Naturally this is dependent on your hardware and may need to be 1024×768, or 800×600. Also if after testing, you find your PC can run tipple screens fairly fast, then you can improve the quality of the side images by setting secondary16bpp=0 so the sides are not reduced to 16bit for speed.

Crysis is unique in that you need to create a new file in your %ProgramFiles%\Electronic Arts\Crytek\Crysis\ directory called system.cfg (Thanks “Tricky”!) and in that file place the following text based on what you used in the SoftTH.cfg file:

r_Height=1024

r_width=3840

Now you are ready to start the game.   I am using Vista(64bit) and have to ensure I am running the right version of the game because SoftTH does not yet support DX10 or 64bit games. So you may need to run the following file and switch at the end, you can do this by editing the shortcut for the game. “%ProgramFiles%\Electronic Arts\Crytek\Crysis\Bin32\Crysis.exe” -DX9

And lastly I changed my graphics settings all down to medium resolution. It will run with everything on high, but the frame rate takes a serious hit, setting everything to the medium preset made it playable. This is because og how SoftTH uses the primary card to render one really wide screen and then chops off the sides and sends them to the other card which merely displays the image it is given. If I got a 3^rd video card, I could run the first 2 is SLI and the 3^rd will display the side images.

The differences between high and medium settings can be viewed here. Keep in mind the Jpg compression makes it difficult to see the differences.

High Pic    Medium Pic

Benefits:

Being able to see a wider view not only allows you to be less likely to be blindsided, but there are many other benefits such as seeing what is near you while scoped in, a richer experience overall.

Enjoy!

-Grizz

Kegen “kegetys” kotisivu has just published the latest installment of SoftTH, that monitor spanning DX9 hack we all know and love.

* 1.07beta
- Autodetection for various settings such as secondary
resolution, device ID, etc. (default)
- Support for D3D9 swap chains (for Call of Duty 2,
Company of Heroes…)
- Persistent win32api hooks for more reliable hooking
- Uses debug access to write memory if regular access
fails (requires admin/debug privileges from user)
- Some default settings adjusted for better compatibility
- Improved device release detection & handling
- Mouse compatibility fixes
- Config file settings separated for OpenGL & Direct3D
- Global config file support in user home directory
- Autosquash option for automatic squashing when no 3D
elements drawn
- Forced multihead use (useMultihead=2) for games that
do not immediately initialize the device with the
triplehead resolution (Such as Test Drive Unlimited)
- Misc fixes & improvements

Thank you kegety’s, I cant wait to give CoD a shot!

You can download the application and find support here.

Running Crysis with SoftTH was a piece of cake. No special configuration, just past the files to the root of Crysis, set the resolution and go. While tweaking the setting I found one nVidia 8800GTS can run fairly smooth at medium quality and 1024×3840 resolution.

I purposefully did not focus on scripted scenes to minimize the spoilers.

Should you accidentally set Crysis to an unsupported resolution and can no longer enter the game to change it, you will need to follow the steps below to reset it.

Make an “autoexec.cfg” file in your Crysis root directory and put the following in it:
r_Width 1368
r_Height 780

And a extra special thanks to www.tweakguides.com for making Crysis rock out at “Very High” settings without needing Vista!

To sum it up it looks to be a multiple DLP display enclosed in a case. But it gets the job done, and so far looks to be the closest anyone has come to a consumer Multi-Projector display.

To see more shots, head on over to Engadget.

Don’t ask me how I missed this one, but it looks like the EA Crysis booth at some gaming convention used a 360 degree, multi-projector, screen to advertise their upcoming game. It looks really cool, for a canned looping video. I would be pritty sweet if it was life gameplay, but I guess thats asking for a bit much right now.

You can download the video from Crysis-online.com HERE.

Or at Stage6 below (Divx Codex Required)