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nVidia Triple-head Display

What with the price of older-but-decent video cards and monitors being very reasonable, I decided to move from the dual-head display I have been using in various forms for the past 15 years to triple-head. I was currently running dual-head using a single vNidia 9800GT card and two monitors. I added a second vNidia 9800GT and a third Samsung SyncMaster 930b 17" monitor which was attached to the new video card.

After some aggravation, I got it working, except that the Google-Chrome browser goes wonky in the display, but Firefox and other apps seem to be unaffected. If you want to see the wonky behavior, a video is available. As it was, it was mostly unusable for daily work and completely useless for games.

After much tweaking and swearing, I chose the path of least resistance and purchased a newer video card that would work out-of-the-box with three monitors, a 4GB nVidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti.

There's a lot of help with this setup when using MS Windows as well as special external hardware that accomplishes it. For Linux, it was necessary to get a single head working with the nVidia driver, then use nvidia-settings to configure all three heads. Also. many of these multi-monitor setups used for gaming are used with wide-screen displays. That seems a little excessive to me, but that may be in my future if I have the extra cash.

As a result, the display performs flawlessly across three heads, but I need to learn the widescreen tweaks for my older video games. I can do that with information from the PC Gaming Wiki, an excellent site for the underlying details of PC games.

UPDATE - Nov. 26, 2017

I just acquired an Ultra-Wide-Screen monitor, an LG 20UM57-P. Resolution is 2560x1080 @60-Hz. It's different than viewing three separate monitors and may take some getting used to.

UPDATE - Feb. 8, 2018

I have been using the LG 20UM57-P flanked by the two Samsung SyncMaster 930bs. The LG is 2560x1080 and the 930bs are 1280x1024. I have X configured as a single X-server of 5120x1080. The small difference between the SyncMasters and the LG are not very noticeable.

My xorg.conf is:

# File generated by XFdrake (rev 262502)

# **********************************************************************
# Refer to the xorg.conf man page for details about the format of
# this file.
# **********************************************************************

Section "ServerFlags"
    AllowMouseOpenFail # allows the server to start up even if the mouse does not work
    Option "DontZap" "False" # disable <Ctrl><Alt><BS> (server abort)
    #DontZoom # disable <Ctrl><Alt><KP_+>/<KP_-> (resolution switching)
EndSection

Section "Module"
    Load "v4l" # Video for Linux
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier "monitor1"
    VendorName "Plug'n Play"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier "device1"
    VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
    BoardName "NVIDIA GeForce 635 series and later"
    Driver "nvidia"
    Option "DynamicTwinView" "false"
    
    # Option "DPMS"
    Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier "screen1"
    Device "device1"
    Monitor "monitor1"
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier "layout1"
    Screen "screen1"
EndSection

It seems that the nVidia driver has gotten smart enough to figure most of this stuff out.

I need to use nvidia-settings to establish the relationship of each monitor to the other. The left SyncMaster 930b is "LeftOf" the UltraWide 25UM58. The UltraWide 25UM58 is "absolute" and the right SyncMaster 930b is "RightOf" the UltraWide 25UM58. 

I have been able to make the game suse the UltraWide 25UM58 and have created an alias in .bashrc to do it by making the UltraWide 25UM58 the primary display. Otherwise, it uses the leftmost SyncMaster 930b which is the display used when booting the machine.
alias center="/usr/bin/xrandr --output HDMI-0 --primary"

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