Newest NVidia PASCAL Titan-X solves Triple-Screen Woes

[rsm]

After struggling to find a solution to enable distortion-corrected triple HD monitors in P3D v. 3.3.5, I was lucky to have a friend point me towards a fix that combines NV Surround PLUS 2 other software products to do the math, and create the necessary XML files for proper VIEW MANAGEMENT in P3D. NOTE: IMPORTANT! Follow the step by step instructions from FLY ELISE exactly, especially when EXPORTING settings. You must NOT export directly to the APP DATA/ROAMING/LOCKHEED MARTIN/PREPARE 3D v3 folder. Create a temp folder to export to, then copy the needed XML file to the APP DATA folder mentioned. Then using Immersive Calibration Pro, import the cameras group file to finalize the views within P3D. When Starting P3d, start in FULL SCREEN View in NVidia surround, your views will all be correct. DO NOT select view management. DO NOT click on the new View Management File. That will show a wrong (improper) view. Sounds confusing, but it isn't. Here is my full post from EVGA forum:

Prepar3D v 3.2 is a bit of compromise... and is VERY sensitive to sliders settings. I have a similar system to the OP i7 2600k OC to only 4.0 ghz, with the latest NVidia Titan X purchased direct from Nvidia. Running triple 1080 monitors in NVidia surround 6100 x 1080, I see frames rates a high of 120 and a low of say 40, depending on where I fly, and my settings are NOWHERE NEAR max! Add on scenery and add-on realtime weather are two major culprits. I run almost EVERY Orbx product, my true love is Orbx SoCal (Southern California), NorCal, and all of the other stuff they offer for the USA, along with FTX Global, Mesh and Vector. For weather, I run the brand-new Hi-Fi Technologies Active Sky 2016, but with cloud textures from REX. When conditions are completely overcast, frames are the worst. I think this is caused by the cloud textures being redrawn several times per frame, and 'averaged'.

I am NOT running 4000 line monitors, I think that would CRUSH frames, why? SO MANY MORE PIXELS! Even with my triple display 1920x1080 HD monitors x 3 that is STILL a lot of pixels to render (Over 6 MILLION pixels per frame compared with around 2 MILLION for SINGLE monitor per frame) , and then you add in the MSAA anti-aliasing, which oft times is rendering a given frames 4 times (or more) then 'averaging' them to reduce the jaggies and sharpen object edges. Even Nvidia recommends SLI for surround view on 4K monitors! That's $2400 USD (plus applicable tax) for a pair of Titan X cards (plus $40 more for new high-bandwidth sli bridge connector, and no guarantee of increased frame rates! BASIC NVidia surround view (all by itself) is NOT ideal for the 'best' field of view. Xplane can easily drive 3 monitors (1080) on 3 PCs with 180-degree field-of-view. In P3D you don't get that sweet offset on the left and right windows at 60 degrees each. What this means is you cannot see properly when trying to turn base or turn final. Some folks use Infra Red Camera on their head (TRACK IR) to see 'around the corner', but it may cause motion sickness issues for you. UPDATE: Two new pieces of FREE software solved the camera distortion problem using NVidia Surround! LCD Designer Pro by Fly Elise, combined with their Immersive Display Pro product will create and export the needed setup files for distortion-corrected side views within P3D v. 3.3.5! Step-by-Step instructions are INCLUDED! You STILL USE NVidia Surround or Matrox Triple-Head-to-go to create ONE "virtual" super-wide display (6100x1080 in my case).

The frames hit for this solution was minimal, say 0 to maybe 10 frames depending on location, but flying WITHOUT distorted views across triple monitors at 45-degree offsets (you can choose higher or lower offsets) is PRICELESS! I am still getting 120 fps 'most of the time' with my (newest model) Titan Pascal card on an older i7 2600k system (NO HYPERTHREADING).

I think NVidia did a bad thing not allowing the aftermarket vendors (such as EVGA) access to the newest Pascal-chip Titan X. Also they confused people by retaining the same ending name "Titan X" as their prior product GTX Titan X. Their new model is 11 Terraflop, 12GB DDRX5 VRAM, 7 billion transistors, over 3000 cuda cores (oddly, cuda cores are great for physics and certain other apps, but NOT of any help that I can see in Direct X. Translation: a marketing ploy, unless you do Folding@Home, or HD video rendering such as Sony Vegas 13).

For what they charge for the card, it is NOT for the faint of heart! 120 fps is more than decent, but when you get into a lot of clouds and a high-density area such as Orbx SoCal LAX terminal at dusk or at nightfall, frames can plunge, and performance can begin to suffer. That said, the newest Titan-X (Pascal) is a true graphics BEAST of a card!

Lockheed has not been in any hurry to migrate to 64-bits (although unofficial rumors abound), but that aside, P3D is light years prettier (IMHO) than XPlane 10, sad to say. Orbx Palm Springs, Telluride, and Monterey (to name a few) airports are drop-dead gorgeous. Add-on planes (think "PMDG") add more overhead to the experience, I beat that by running Sim-Avionics on a separate PC to handle the aircraft instruments. Thus I do not add a 'virtual cockpit' overhead to my sim, and the avionics on a different (networked) PC helps boost frames considerably.

One of the huge problems is that P3D v3 is still not optimized for the latest versions of Direct X (Direct X 12), and does not allocate workload to extra threads. In plain language, the coding is at best, still fairly primitive, as contrasted with full-on video games such as Fallout 4, GT Auto, and so on. Trying to make a simulation backwards-compatible with primitive hardware is a huge part of the problem. In fact, LM has recently re-introduced "Networking" (called "Multi-Channel") to Prepar3D (only in their highest-cost license level "PROFESSIONAL PLUS", in which they require GPUS with frame lock (think $6k Quadro Video Cards with BNC connectors) so all displays will wait until the other monitors and their accompanying PCs are ready to render the next frame). In plain language, non-ideal, and difficult to implement, plus COSTLY as heck. Early word on this setup: NOT GOOD. Fortunately, the new products I mentioned earlier in this post have finally solved the huge problem of getting HD images across triple monitors!

My rendering settings: (NOTE my slider settings are NOWHERE NEAR MAXIMUM, even with the most powerful GPU currently on market)

Display: NVIDIA TITAN X (Pascal) 6100x1080x32
black out desktop Y Auto-fill main view Y

FXAA: OFF MSAA: 4 Samples < This is a biggie, higher settings slay frames
Texture Filtering : Anisotropic 8x < NOT 16! Texture resolution HIGH 2048x2048

FRAME RATE CONTROLS: Vsync ON Triple Buffering Y Target Frame Rate UNLIMITED

HARDWARE TESSELATION: Y
View and Panel Settings Wide-View Aspect Ratio (Wider field of view for triple monitors) Y
Mipmap VC Panels N (I don't use VC panels at all)

Terrain Level of Detail Radius High
Tessellation factor: High
Mesh Resolution 19m
Texture resolution 1m
Land Detail Textures Y

SCENERY OBJECTS
Scenery Complexity DENSE
Autogen Vegatation Density DENSE
Autogen building density DENSE

WATER AND BATHYMETRY
Water Detail MEDIUM
Bathymetry N
Reflections Clouds Y User Vehicle Y all others NO

Special Effects Details MEDIUM
Special Effects Distance MEDIUM

LIGHTING
HDR Lighting Y
Brightness 0.80
Bloom 0.99
Saturation 0.80

Dynamic Reflections OFF
Landing Lights Illuminate Ground Y
Lens Flare Y

Shadows
Shadow Quality MEDIUM
Enable Terrain to Receive Shadows Y

Terrain Shadow Cast Distance 0
Cloud Shadow Cast Distance 0
Object Shadow Cast Distance 6,000 m

Object Type Internal Vehicle Cast Y Receive Y
External Vehicle Cast Y Receive Y
Buildings Cast Y Receive N
all others in this section N N

VISUAL SETTINGS
Cloud Draw Distance 90 m
Cloud Coverage density Maximum * Try lowering this will help frames!

Volumetric Fog Y
DETAILED CLOUDS Y

Simulation Settings
Disable turbulence and thermal effects on aircraft N
(handled by Active Sky 2016)

Rate at which weather changes over time NO CHANGE
(handled by Active Sky 2016)

TRAFFIC Other than clouds, traffic is a MAJOR frames killer!
Airline traffic density 0
General Aviation traffic 0
Airport vehicle density MINIMUM

Vehicle labels
Show vehicle labels N

Land and Sea Traffic
Road Vehicles 0
Ships and Ferries 0
Leisure Boats 0

Credit for some of the foregoing settings to Rob Ainscough.

[NatCrea]

A bit misleading I have to say...
The Titan-X hasn't "solved" triple-screen distortion other then the fact,
it improves performance when running multiple views (created by the LCD Designer, or manually)
A fine line I know, but not a "distortion fix" many users may be mislead into believing...

Nat

PS. Nothing against LCD Designer, its a great tool for multi-monitor users btw.

[rsm]

Actually the LCD Designer Pro support staff had me disable NVidia Surround. I am still working on it to see if the frame rates are 'acceptable', or if I need to 'live with the strechies' of NV Surround 'as is'.

LCD Designer pro and the accompanying Immersive Calibration Pro are a quick way to set up view group frustrums (cameras) for use in P3D. You simply enter all the metric measurements for your displays (they should be the same size and make/model for best results) into LCD Designer, export a single XML file which you copy to your APPDATA/Roaming/Lockheed Martin/Prepar3D v3 directory (replacing the stock ViewGroups.XML). Then you import a data file you exported using LCD Designer Pro into Immersion Calibration Pro, and "SAVE" it using that tool. Upon starting P3D, your cameras will be all set up and synced.

Pretty cool.

That said, the FRAMES seem to suffer, not from the GPU (video) card, but more likely from the CPU trying to keep up. I think the new Pascal is so powerful it outdistances the CPU. CPU doing a lot of work rending autogen, I think.

[Kosta]

This is nothing new.

It has been quite a while since GPUs have outdistanced the CPUs. The only thing is that P3D has more GPU-intensive-features, that simply use more GPU. But if you take these aside, things looks differently. Just put more AI, or cars, boats etc, and you are very heavily CPU-bound.
Same goes for multiple screens. Since I know about flightsim (and that is a long time), multiple screens were always using more CPU, simply due to the fact that the screen needs to draw more of the aforementioned. There is no problem about the resolution or driving multiple screens, GPUs are very well capable of that. The only problem comes from CPU-intensive functions, which in P3D unfortunately still prevail, just like FSX.

[rsm]

This is nothing new.

It has been quite a while since GPUs have outdistanced the CPUs. The only thing is that P3D has more GPU-intensive-features, that simply use more GPU. But if you take these aside, things looks differently. Just put more AI, or cars, boats etc, and you are very heavily CPU-bound.
Same goes for multiple screens. Since I know about flightsim (and that is a long time), multiple screens were always using more CPU, simply due to the fact that the screen needs to draw more of the aforementioned. There is no problem about the resolution or driving multiple screens, GPUs are very well capable of that. The only problem comes from CPU-intensive functions, which in P3D unfortunately still prevail, just like FSX.

Hi Kosta,
You are 100% correct as usual. This 'experiment' proved your wisdom and the accuracy of your statements. Frame rates using the two Fly Elise products (LCDDesigner Pro and Immersive Display Pro) were spectacular to say the least, but performance taking off from Orbx Palm Springs was HORRIBLE (unacceptable is the more accurate word). I blew a ton of hours trying to make this work, only to be forced to return to NVSurround. My other choice would be single monitor, I will NOT go there. So while I had huge hopes that the Pascal card would allow my sim to finally be all that it could be, I had to face up to the fact that the distortion-free wing views that are NOT AN ISSUE in the alternative product from Laminar Research when NETWORKED off individual PCs is as yet the unreachable seemingly impossible dream. I am not a computer engineer, but I play one on television. I guess what we need is better optimization of multi-core cpus, though I am clueless how that could work. Another thought would be to use those spectacular CUDA cores on the gpu to do the physics calcs and unload the CPU bottleneck. I am sure that LM does not want to 'go there' as backwards-compatibility is always an anchor to progress.

[Saldo]

Just use ViewGroups or make 2 extra views connected to the main to have 3 views connected.
Costs nothing and looks great...

[Kosta]

Were the sim really well performing on multiple screens, I'd be the first to get 3x27inch IPS screens, just like the one I have now... however, like you don't want to go back to one screen, I don't want to move from one screen, just because of the great performance. I even changed to Dash Q400 almost exclusively because of a) great performance b) great aircraft. With one screen my system copes with 60fps, almost through all phases of the flight. Rather have 60fps on one screen than 25fps on 3 screens.

[rsm]

Just use ViewGroups or make 2 extra views connected to the main to have 3 views connected.
Costs nothing and looks great...

It costs nothing is not exactly true. It costs performance, no?

[rsm]

Were the sim really well performing on multiple screens, I'd be the first to get 3x27inch IPS screens, just like the one I have now... however, like you don't want to go back to one screen, I don't want to move from one screen, just because of the great performance. I even changed to Dash Q400 almost exclusively because of a) great performance b) great aircraft. With one screen my system copes with 60fps, almost through all phases of the flight. Rather have 60fps on one screen than 25fps on 3 screens.

I certainly can agree. 60 fps to me is 'bare minimum' nowadays. The trouble with 25 is that if it suddenly dips you wind up with stutters and/or a slide show.

I am going to dumb down my setup and turn off all the orbx stuff and see what happens with three screens with corrected views. I will post a video on my youtube channel (rsm2000e) and include the relevant fps numbers for those who are interested. You can see the 120 fps that I get now with NVSurround. If you can live with the distortion, it is very very smooth and nice-looking.

[rsm]

NEWS FLASH!

I have got positive confirmation that two software products by Fly Elise-ng LCD Display Pro and Immersive Display Pro combined with the newest Nvidia Titan-X (Pascal Card) have at long last permitted PERFECT and EASY TO SET UP geometrically corrected (warped) views across 3 1080HD LCD monitors in P3dv3.3.5 using View Groups.

Unlike the old clunky way of calculating the frustrums (camera angles), you simply enter all the metric measurements of your displays in meters (use Google to convert Imperial measurements if you don't have a metric tape measure). You also would enter all the bezel dimensions as well, and then you choose your offset angles (I chose 60 degrees on each of the wing displays).

The LCD Display pro calculates your dimensions and EXPORTS a View Groups XML file which you cut and copy over to your USERNAME/AppData/Roaming/Lockheed Martin/Prepar3d v 3 folder (replacing the existing XML file).

Then you start up Immersive Display Pro and IMPORT the individual views for each of your three monitors and then click SAVE. Make sure IDM is running, then start up P3D. P3D will start in single screen, you do NOT use NVidia Surround!! VERY important! You set up your system with three monitors, choose "extend desktop" for the 2nd and 3rd monitors.

Once P3D is running, you click on VIEW GROUPS (right click your mouse on your P3d display screen) then choose Immersive Display Pro.

Bob's your uncle. Enjoy PERFECTLY synchronised views right down to the taxi lines and horizons in full-screen P3D mode. The new Titan can handle this with aplomb, saving you the co$t of maintaining and setting up a (slow) Network system!

I will soon post actual video comparisons on YouTube between the old way (NVidia Surround with the stretchie side windows) and the NEW way with Fly Elise warping software.

For me, a dream come true. Yes, in extremely dense scenery there can be some stutters, but excluding the airport at KPSP (an Orbx payware airport), once I got out into Orbx SoCal, the plane flew smoothly at very high frames. I will prove this on YouTube (my channel is rsm200e) - but I only have the NV Surround view posted, I have to film the same flight with Fly Elise for comparative purposes. This software will run FREE for 30 days, but an annoying "Unregistered Copy" watermark will appear on each of your displays until you purchase it. You only need to buy Immersive Display Pro, the LCD Display pro piece of software is FREE. Support is excellent by Fly Elise.

License can be a software key or you can purchase a USB Dongle (key) which you can use on ANY pc, ideal for system builders or those who frequently upgrade or are thinking of building a newer high power system at a later time.

Part of this success is attributable to the NEWEST Titan X (Pascal), which is a BEAST of a gpu card. The proof is in the flying, and I can personally testify, the flying is insane!

[rsm]

UPDATE: I have posted a video on YouTube showing P3D driving 3 monitors on just ONE PC without using NVidia Surround.
Here is a post I shared with some of my tech buddies here on P3D:

Hi All,

Well, I finally discovered a GREAT solution to give me the long-awaited triple-views with 60-degree offsets on the wing monitors and NO DISTORTION using P3dv3.3.5 and a pair of VERY FINE products by Fly Elise-nl.net The two products are listed in my video description on YouTube (this video is free of advertising). You can also see the identical flight using NVSurround (the "old" way of doing things). In both videos, the brand new NVidia Titan-X "Pascal" video card (available ONLY from Nvidia.com online store) proves it is truly a beast of a card.

I am running Orbx KPSP (Palm Springs) and Orbx SoCal, along with Active Sky 2016. I think you will be pretty impressed by the sync of the monitors (flawless!) using the warping software, and the fact that an i7 2600K cpu (mildly overclocked to just 4.0 ghz) is able to drive this setup.

While I don't think the new Pascal could drive 3 4K UHD displays properly (even Nvidia says you would need 2 of their beast cards in SLI just to run in NVSurround (NV Surround NOT needed using the warping software), for the many many pilots who are struggling with triple monitor goals, the solution I bumped into is HUGE. It was a very long wait.

On the bright side the Fly Elise products are straightforward and do not require a rocket scientist to set up or run. Their LCD Designer Pro will calculate the asynchronous frustrums (camera views) requiring nothing more than precise metric dimensions of the display screen area, plus precise measurements of the bezels (upper, lower, left and right). There is an export button, and a new View Groups.XML is exported along with the three individual camera cfg files to a temp folder. User then copies the XML file over to USERNAME\APPDATA\Lockheed Martin\Prepar3D folder (overwriting the one that is there already). Then USER starts up Fly Elise Immersive Display Pro and setups the three displays, and imports each individual display camera cfg file, then click SAVE in the program to write those views to P3D.

Upon starting up P3D, user sees just 1 display showing P3D. Right click on desktop, choose View Groups, and select LCD Designer Pro. Bingo, all 3 monitors light up, perfectly synched and I mean PERFECTLY. Frames are insane, even with the system rendering the sim in 3 (frameless) warped windows. You can see my demo video on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32Gkt6P9W0o.

I hope you will consider sharing this info with those who have struggled mightily for so long. Best of all, only ONE PC needed for the visuals. On my system I have a second PC driving Sim Avionics software to drive my hardware instruments, and a third all-in-one PC to do the glass cockpit shown below my external view monitors. All systems are Windows 10.

My long-awaited dream finally came true, without having to use multi-channel (networked) views. Obviously 4K displays would likely need the multi-channel approach still under development. Mine are 1080P displays.

[Norshuttle]

These views are looking good and seems to be lined up almost perfect, but it really isnt any different from what we get from manually adding 2 undocked views, or follow the tutorial on view group found in this forum.
I guess it's the automated process that is the big win here, but the view does not differ from what is easily made manually.
You can also spot that details is accellerated/sucked out of one screen before showing up on the next. This is casued by the way our sim calculates the view, and would not be present in a perfect view.
Also, your view looks perfect only from one position. The camera is not placed where your eyes are positioned, so the perfect alaining you experience when flying, is not showed in the video.
Looking good, but I do not see that there is anything new introduced here.

[rsm]

I think you are correct in there are other ways to achieve this, but as you correctly said, the automated process is indeed a HUGE win. For a person who wants a great looking triple view and does not want to invest a lot of time in trial and error view setups, this was manna from heaven. I am that guy. I tried doing it manually, and failed miserably. Also, back when I was trying to configure the cameras manually, I found the view would break apart during turns. Now that may well not have been the simulator's fault, it might have been my generation 1 Titan card wasn't powerful enough to draw 6 million pixels (the total for 3 x 1920/1080 displays) as fast as the newest model can (and no doubt that was a big issue). Regardless, I am only hoping to show those who are unhappy with the elongated stretched out views of NVidia Surround that there IS a (relatively simple) good-looking alternative. You are also right that any 'warped' view is dependent on the eyepoint of the person viewing the displays, and yes, my camera was considerably further back behind me than where I sit when flying. The few dollars it cost me for the aftermarket Fly Elise Immersive Display Pro (around $160 USD) were priceless in terms of time spent. A buddy did his triple projector configuration and spent 4 hours on alignment. Those who want to experiment with a different set of view angles (say 45, 60, 70, or something else) will hugely benefit as well as they need only enter the new angles, move and align their displays with a digital protractor, feed in the new angles, and get the new correctly aligned views for the Fly Elise software. Larger entities, those who build or maintain big multi-screen simulations would benefit greatly from this approach in my opinion.

[Saldo]

The FlyElise way still uses 3 seperate views and has no better performance than with ViewGroups.
It is both the same, but the FlyElise way is a little easier to setup.
About half a year ago I dig into it , got a lot of help from Nikola, but the eindresult was the same...

[rsm]

The FlyElise way still uses 3 seperate views and has no better performance than with ViewGroups.
It is both the same, but the FlyElise way is a little easier to setup.
About half a year ago I dig into it , got a lot of help from Nikola, but the eindresult was the same...

I would say the FlyElise way is a LOT easier to set up. The ViewGroups way was so complicated I gave up on it, I could NEVER get the views to align correctly AT ALL, I mean it was beyond difficult and I'm very much a tech guy. So I made a point of mentioning it here (and elsewhere) in hopes of sparing others the frustration of trying to set up the camera views for the view groups. Yes, I know they work the same because FlyElise is in essence an automated way of creating the view groups for you. Because View Groups are rendering 3 separate Window Views (even in full screen mode, in P3D the displays are simply "borderless" windows - which DOES carry a PERFORMANCE HIT as opposed to the NV Surround method, which instead carries a horrid DISTORTION ("Stretchy") hit. View Groups needs the most powerful GPU you can afford, remember that the Titan X (Pascal) is 40% faster than 1080. When you are in dense scenery with heavy weather, that 40% improvement over 1080 can mean the difference between still-acceptable and slide-show rendering. And STILL you can NOT max sliders using ViewGroups and three monitors, and STILL you cannot drive 3 x 4K UHD displays. I'm running 3 x 1920x1080 HP LCD monitors. No way could I drive 3x 4k. Even Nvidia admits this. Their recommended solution for 4K UHD is a PAIR of the new Titan-X Pascals in SLI and that's strictly for NV Surround, NOT for ViewGroups.

You download 2 programs from Fly Elise website (these are free trials) LCD Designer Pro (NO CHARGE) and Immersive Display Pro (About $169 USD)

See the updated and edited video I just posted which demonstrates the view alignment on my YouTube channel. There is still a little distortion because the cam-corder was sitting far behind me, NOT at where my eyepoint was set up within LCD Designer Pro.

I was finally able to edit out the rolling horizontal stripes caused by a mismatch between my camcorder (cell phone) and the monitor refresh rates using Adobe Premiere Pro and a Digital Anarchy plug-in called "Flicker-Free". My newest video shows the sim as you see it in real life. Prior videos all have the annoying rolling horizontal bars I mention here.

Final bonus of the new Titan-X (Pascal), its massive CUDA cores are ideal for rendering video using Adobe Premiere Pro CC which is optimized for CUDA (you change the default render engine from CPU-only to CUDA). A 6+ hour render became 58 minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KoUfuZyVxE