Kepler technology for 3D surround on single Nvidia graphic card

Till now everybody were using three different graphic cards for controlling 3 different monitors to get a single picture. This would provide a 3D surround experience while gaming as the three monitors could be arranged to form a surroundings. The only major problem of this setup was that the graphic cards needed to checked almost every day and had to be maintained regularly. Any problem in single graphic card would create problem for other graphic cars and create improper display for the games. I think that Nvidia must develop a graphic card which can handle the Kepler technology for 3D surround effect singlehandedly. Does anyone else think this should be done? Maybe the developers can provide three DVI-I, DSub or SVGA connections for generating output.

It is possible but the problem will come when one wants to use only one monitor out of three. Graphic card like this will be able to produce high refresh rate. The display rate of this graphic card will be minimum of 60 fps. So usually the refresh rate will be much higher than this. The monitors that are currently used by most of the users has refresh rate of 60 Hz, so this the refresh rate of the graphic card will be very high as compared to that of monitor. This can create problem of incompatibility. Again the VSync rate provided by this graphic card will be very high, so if the monitor will not be able to handle it, there might be certain complications between working of monitor and graphic card.

If monitor wants to handle such high rate of framerate then the frequency of the monitors refresh rate should be minimum of 120 Hz. Monitors of such high rate are not manufactured by most of the manufacturers and they are only used for commercial purposes only. They are also expensive, so I don’t think many users will have it or be able to afford it. This type of graphic card which can handle 3D surround alone can be developed in future as other hardware supporting it will also be well developed and easily available.

Another problem that will rise is that of resolution settings. Suppose if such graphic card is used in a PC then the default resolution will be 5760 x 1080. So if only one monitor is required to use then again the resolution of one monitor will be set to 5760 x 1080 which will become too high to handle and crash the graphic drivers. One will need to manually set it to resolution of single monitor every time.

In another case, then graphic card will continue displaying the image on other monitors even though they are switched off giving user a broken picture. Manually setting the resolution can become difficult due to broken display. Graphic card doesn’t recognize if the monitor is powered on or switched off. It continues displaying picture ignoring this fact. To use such graphic cards, a technique which can detect the status of monitor will be needed to be devised by the developers. To implement this technique enough to make it reach to most of users, it will take many years to come.

Nvidia tried using this technology GeForce GTX 680 graphic card. But many users couldn’t find other peripherals like monitor, motherboard much compatible to it. Many users complained that th3 D Vision Kit did not work properly or as expected with 3D surround in their systems.

ATI Radeon HD 7970 graphic card provides function close to what you are asking. It provides graphics with resolution as high as 5760x1200 which can be utilized to be displayed on three different monitors instead of large monitors. Many people tried making use of it for three monitor setup, but it didn’t prove much useful. Not every game has implied this technique in their games. So if you try to set a game that is not meant for such high resolution, then it will look bad on such big display. It will look like stretched out of place.

Current games run well on framerate of 60 fps graphic cards. There is no game developed that will require framerate more than this, so the features of graphic cards most of the functionality that it provides will be wasted. So at present such graphic card is not of much use.

The main problem that this kind of graphic cards pose is the requirement for power supply. Power supply needed to keep the Kepler technology for 3D surround effect running in graphic card efficiently is very high. With such requirement one will need to have a PSU unit which provides power of more than 1200 watts. If the PSU fails to do this, the system might crash as other peripherals might fail to get desired level of power. PSUs which provide such high level of power are expensive and have not reached to use of any people. So such graphic cards are not useful in current times.