Widescreen Gaming Forum

PS. GeneralAdmission tested the SDK and it shows that the Eyefinity support does nothing for TH users. Does the SDK interfere with the surround support which normally would work on both TH and Eyefinity?

I'll inquire. Unless there was some technical reason that required it, any interference would be unintentional.

Greetings everyone,

I have been following this forum for quite a while now and I just joined this forum just to say what is on my mind on this matter.
(Thanks to Paddy the Wak for bringing the subject to everyone's attention.)

I am a proud owner of an ATI HD4870 card. I have been following Eyefinity and Triplehead 2 Go for information, because I have been think of upgrading to 3 screens.
I am not so proud of my ATI after reading this thread.
I am not happy that ATI’s SDK does not help The Multimonitor Gaming Industry. But instead is divides it. From what I have gathered, Matrox have never done this.
And I don’t understand why ATI is avoiding giving answers.

Also Mr. SunSp*t shouldn’t bash the moderators. They did not bash ATI. They just need answers for the good of all.
Mr. SunSp*t also bashed another company. This is not very professional. He is the "Community Rep" of ATI.
I don’t understand why this forum allows this. Is this because that ATI sponsors this forum?

Thanks for this great forum. It has helped me with widescreen solutions in the past :twothumb

PS. GeneralAdmission tested the SDK and it shows that the Eyefinity support does nothing for TH users. Does the SDK interfere with the surround support which normally would work on both TH and Eyefinity?

I'll inquire. Unless there was some technical reason that required it, any interference would be unintentional.

The problem appears to be in how Ubisoft coded the game, and how they are implementing the SDK. They hard-coded the game to fit a 16:9 aspect ratio. You play in 4:3 or 16:10, and you get black bars at the top and bottom. You play in multi-monitor, you get huge black "columns" on the sides (e.g., the whole left and right screens). At the WSGF, we call this behavior Anamorphic. This used to be very rare, but it becoming more of an issue for games created as cross-platform titles between the PC, Xbox360 and PS3. With the Xbox360 and PS3 being hard coded for 16:9 aspect and an HDTV, we see more developers sticking to 16:9 across all platforms.

You can see some examples here:
The original Assassin's Creed, and then the Racer_S Fix.
Mirror's Edge, with Racer_S Fix in that post.
F.E.A.R. 2 was originally like this, until Monolith came in with an update.

The problem with Ubisoft and Splinter Cell: Conviction is that their baseline coding is for Anamorphic, rather than Hor+. They are only implementing Hor+ support if they can identify an Eyefinity group. They should have made the game Hor+ as a baseline, then used the Eyefinity SDK to add the bells and whistles such as bezel detection and improved HUD item placement for Eyefinity users.

This type of implementation would have ensured that all multi-monitor users were able to enjoy the game properly, and Eyefinity users would have been able to enjoy the added benefits of the hard work ATI put into the SDK. Who knows, maybe Ubisoft could have taken the learnings from using the SDK and then set proper placement of HUD items and such for all multi-monitor users. The dev team behind Assassin's Creed II got it perfect after a horrible Anamorphic implementation on the original title.

These links put a lot of this information in one place and could provide useful to folks within ATI and with developers - WSGF FAQ & WSGF Certification Requirements.

And I don’t understand why ATI is avoiding giving answers.

We aren't, we've commented a lot in this thread and elsewhere, as far as we can.

Remember this i not our application - how this is enabled and why it is enabled this way has to be discussed with the developer and then we have to talk to the publisher to see if they want to comment. Thats not necessarily a quick process.

I know I started this thread about this particular game but this issue is much more than this one game.

It seems (as shown by GeneralAdmission) that if you enable Eyefinity by utilizing ATI's SDK then you will have to also implement other different solutions to get other forms of TripleHead to work.
(and this is not necessarily down to whether a game has anamorphic behavior or not)

Games have been fixed by developers for multi-monitors many many times in the past and it was never gpu specific until ATI's SDK got involved.

If developers have to implement different solutions for different types of multi-monitor situations gamers are going to get screwed.
ATI are not obliged to do anything about this but it is not a good precedence to set.

@ Underx01 ... Thanks for sticking up for fairness ... and all multi-monitor gamers.

The problem with Ubisoft and Splinter Cell: Conviction is that their baseline coding is for Anamorphic, rather than Hor+. They are only implementing Hor+ support if they can identify an Eyefinity group. They should have made the game Hor+ as a baseline, then used the Eyefinity SDK to add the bells and whistles such as bezel detection and improved HUD item placement for Eyefinity users.

I just wanted to quote this because even though it's in red I still think everyone needs to read it because it's a very good assessment.

The Eyefinity SDK doesn't vendor lock TH, it just provides information to the game about your monitor layout. TH itself is rather simple, you just render out the full resolution reported by the 'monitor' instead of arbitrarily stopping at 16:9 (1080p). The Eyefinity SDK is only useful for GUI enhancement by dodging bezels during GUI placement.

The problem is entirely because Ubisoft did a feature check instead of a capability/resolution check to determine if it should render out Hor+, a check it still has to do once it's determined if you have Eyefinity or not they just did it in the wrong order.

[quote]And I don’t understand why ATI is avoiding giving answers.

We aren't, we've commented a lot in this thread and elsewhere, as far as we can.
I don't think you commented very much on the subject. Passing the blame and skirting the issue by bashing others isn't really commenting on the subject and its not really a sign of innocence. More common sense and straight forward talking has come from everyone BUT you ATI guys.

I am beginning to think of you (using a SunSp*t inspired phrase) as the EVIL red company and I don't want to think of ATI that way. :(

Back to real topic.
Ibrin, Paddy the Wak and noquarter ... thanks for the clear explanations, I understand what you all are saying and I understand that ATI does not have obligation.
Maybe this game will be fixed for all multimonitor users. But future games will have similar problems and that raises the question: what can be done about it?

Actually, I've been at the brunt of most of the bashing here - despite the fact that not all of the facts our at everyones disposal, especially not ours. Again, how can we comment when the application is not ours and the fact that it exhibits this behaviour is as much a surpise to us as it is to you?

Actually, I've been at the brunt of most of the bashing here - despite the fact that not all of the facts our at everyone's disposal, especially not ours. Again, how can we comment when the application is not ours and the fact that it exhibits this behavior is as much a surprise to us as it is to you?

Its the first time the SDK have been implemented in a game, so it can be expected that there is some initial problems. The important thing, is that the problem got detected and if I interpret you correctly, its not a wanted behavior that ATI supports. This means we have a chance to avoid this in the future. :)

I'm sure you can relate to people reacting, when its advertised Eyefinity support and this doesn't mean there is general multi-mon support. Normally, when a game has support for multi-mon, it works for all hardware that supports multi-mon.

If a game supports Eyefinity with SDK, it means that the developer is willing to implement support for multi-mon. However, if it turns out that it only supports Eyefinity and not multi-mon, people will react, since its vendor support and not general support. The SDK will then work against general multi-mon support in a sense and thats not a good solution towards consumers.

As ibrin wrote:

The problem with Ubisoft and Splinter Cell: Conviction is that their baseline coding is for Anamorphic, rather than Hor+. They are only implementing Hor+ support if they can identify an Eyefinity group. They should have made the game Hor+ as a baseline, then used the Eyefinity SDK to add the bells and whistles such as bezel detection and improved HUD item placement for Eyefinity users.

Perhaps if this can solve the issues (provided that it turns out that this caused the issue), that ATI could use hor+ as a baseline in their recommendation with the usage of your SDK?

I also want to point out that what those of us with no actual responsibility or involvement have been posting is just conjecture whereas the ATI reps here are much more limited in having to use facts so.. don't be so quick to lay blame and give people time to ask questions.