Multi-Monitor Gaming

frenchie16 · 2013-08-10 04:41:33

I've been playing Strike Suit Zero, a game with quite good multi-monitor support, across three monitors in Windows.

With the release of the game for Linux, I have been trying to get a similar setup to work in Arch. However, I've had no luck so far. It seems like until very recently every game would have problems where it would run across all monitors under Linux, and only recently did most games fix this. Now it's fixed in most games... and I actually WANT a game to run across all my monitors!

Has anyone had any success with getting Strike Suit Zero (or any other Linux game) to run fullscreen across more than one monitor? I feel like there ought to be a way to get this to work using xrandr, but if there is I can't find it. The closest I could get was using the --fb option to make the actual rendered area three times as wide as my three monitors combined, which tricks my window manager into thinking that each monitor is the size of all three together, but this is a ridiculous hack and falls apart if you move the mouse to the edge of the screen (it 'helpfully' pans into the other oversized screens).

Basically, what I think I need is a way to tell my window manager (Gnome 3) or xrandr to 'fake' having a single larger monitor, or to ignore multiple 'monitors' and just use X11 screens instead... Any ideas?

cellisten · 2013-08-10 13:42:09

What graphics card are you using?

xpander · 2013-08-10 16:32:56

i dont have 3 screen setup but 2 screens work fine for me with nvidia twinview
source games, unity games and couple more work just fine.. i think the games with SDL2 support do support multimonitor well.
SDL1 games tend to switch off the second one when running fullscreen

there is no special config needed. i guess it just depends what game is using what.
i dont own strike suit zero, so i cant really talk about this one

Last edited by xpander (2013-08-10 16:33:49)

frenchie16 · 2013-08-10 17:16:21

cellisten wrote:

What graphics card are you using?

A GTX 770 (with the proprietary drivers).

xpander wrote:

i dont have 3 screen setup but 2 screens work fine for me with nvidia twinview
source games, unity games and couple more work just fine.. i think the games with SDL2 support do support multimonitor well.
SDL1 games tend to switch off the second one when running fullscreen

I think you misunderstand me slightly. I just tested with Half Life 2 and it does not do what I want. What it (and Strike Suit Zero, and many games these days) do is take up one screen, and leave the others usable for other programs. This is definitely an improvement over disabling the other displays or spanning across them all by default. However, in this case I actually want the game to span across all the displays. In other words I want it to fill the entire "screen" rather than just one "monitor" (by 'screen' and 'monitor' i mean in the X11 sense. I am using twinview, so I have one 'screen' composed of three 'monitors'.)

xpander · 2013-08-10 18:56:30

you just change your resolution accordingly in the game options

i do have 1920x1080 + 1280x1024 monitor and when i change to 3200x1080 from game it shows on both screens.
i dont see the issue here.

edit: ohh you are right..tested with half life 2 also and it doesnt work there. i was assuming it works there as well.
worked fine with Euro Truck Simulator 2 though.

Last edited by xpander (2013-08-10 19:14:21)

cellisten · 2013-08-10 21:08:17

From http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/L … er-13.html:

Can I play full screen games across both display devices?
Yes. While the details of configuration will vary from game to game, the basic idea is that a MetaMode presents X with a mode whose resolution is the bounding box of the viewports for that MetaMode. For example, the following:
Option "MetaModes" "1024x768,1024x768; 800x600,800x600"
Option "TwinViewOrientation" "RightOf"
produce two modes: one whose resolution is 2048x768, and another whose resolution is 1600x600. Games such as Quake 3 Arena use the VidMode extension to discover the resolutions of the modes currently available. To configure Quake 3 Arena to use the above MetaMode string, add the following to your q3config.cfg file:
seta r_customaspect "1"
seta r_customheight "600"
seta r_customwidth "1600"
seta r_fullscreen "1"
seta r_mode "-1"
Note that, given the above configuration, there is no mode with a resolution of 800x600 (remember that the MetaMode "800x600, 800x600" has a resolution of 1600x600"), so if you change Quake 3 Arena to use a resolution of 800x600, it will display in the lower left corner of your screen, with the rest of the screen grayed out. To have single head modes available as well, an appropriate MetaMode string might be something like:
"800x600,800x600; 1024x768,NULL; 800x600,NULL; 640x480,NULL"
More precise configuration information for specific games is beyond the scope of this document, but the above examples coupled with numerous online sources should be enough to point you in the right direction.

Should be helpful...

frenchie16 · 2013-08-11 01:59:52

cellisten wrote:

Should be helpful...

That sounds like exactly what I need. Unfortunately I just dismantled my three-monitor setup and won't have it set up again for about a week, but I'll be sure to try that out and post my results here.

However, I'm not convinced this will actually work. The page you linked seems quite old, and I think it may no longer be accurate. Until recently what that page claims seemed to be true, and this was in fact a pain because the only way to get games to run fullscreen on a single monitor was to disable other monitors. Newer games (including Strike Suit Zero) seem to run as a borderless, fullscreened window, rather than actually taking over from the window manager and running full screen (or whatever it was they did previously). (This includes Source, Unity, etc. games- perhaps this is due to SDL2 as some have suggested). The upside of this is that the window manager just treats the game as a window, which allows you to do other things on other monitors or even minimize the game without much trouble. The downside seems to be that because of this, games can't take up more than one monitor.

xpander wrote:

you just change your resolution accordingly in the game options

As you noted, those options are not available in every game. Specifically Unity, Source, etc. (which others suggest all use SDL2, so i'm guessing the problem is that SDL2 doesn't support this).

In the Windows world the way this works is that you set up 'surround' in NVidia Control Panel, which creates extra resolutions which span all the monitors. These are then advertised to games. (Simply picking one in a game doesn't seem to be enough, but strangely telling Windows to use 'second monitor only' in the Windows+P menu causes it to switch into 'surround' mode, after which launching a game and setting the higher resolution works.) Evidently Nvidia's Linux drivers do not support this, but I feel something similar ought to be possible through xrandr or something. I can't figure out how, though.

Last edited by frenchie16 (2013-08-11 02:16:02)

cellisten · 2013-08-11 09:08:51

Frenchie16, I thought the same at first. However, the same article speaks of the support for the extension to tell about the fact that the virtual display is two monitors.
It's worth a try I guess...

Arch Linux

#1 2013-08-10 04:41:33

Multi-Monitor Gaming

#2 2013-08-10 13:42:09

Re: Multi-Monitor Gaming

#3 2013-08-10 16:32:56

Re: Multi-Monitor Gaming

#4 2013-08-10 17:16:21

Re: Multi-Monitor Gaming

#5 2013-08-10 18:56:30

Re: Multi-Monitor Gaming

#6 2013-08-10 21:08:17

Re: Multi-Monitor Gaming

#7 2013-08-11 01:59:52

Re: Multi-Monitor Gaming

#8 2013-08-11 09:08:51

Re: Multi-Monitor Gaming

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