Matrox Triplehead2Go

To see if the Triplehead could live up to its potential, we fired up some games. Matrox claim that many games should natively support the extreme wide resolution, but we found that we needed to do some tweaking in some cases. We installed the Matrox Surround Gaming utility which adds the custom tweaking needed for some games.

You can add configurations manually if you need to. Matrox claims that over 150 games are compatible out of the box but some games need to be added to the utility manually and the configuration file edited. Matrox envisages that custom profiles will be created by users and then shared amongst the community via the Triplehead website, in the same vein as custom SLI profiles.

Counter-Strike

Counter-Strike was up first. Heading into the options, we were able to natively select 3840x1024 as a resolution. This resulted in a very, very wide display.

The interesting thing is that, playing the game, there really is a competitive advantage to having three monitors. Rather than having to look around with the mouse to see to the side of you, you can just glance across at your other monitor. Enemies to the side of you appear in your peripheral vision giving you a heads up where otherwise you would have no idea.


Unfortunately, the HUD doesn't quite work properly and you end up with no crosshair. However, Matrox is working with Valve to make a patch available for the game by the time you can buy the TripleHead in stores.

Elder Scrolls

Next we fired up Oblivion. This, being recent, had support for widescreen resolutions and supported 3840x1024 just by selecting it in the menu. Extreme widescreen gaming, minimal hassle! The high quality landscapes of Oblivion look awesome with a panoramic view.


Interestingly, the side monitors in first-person games create something of a fish-eye lens aspect due to the way the field of view is configured. This is not quite realistic, but isn't distracting. Top down games - such as Age of Empires 3 - don't suffer from this issue.