Surround Gaming
As mentioned before, Parhelia's flexible multi-monitor support allows for a feature dubbed 'Surround Gaming'. Surround Gaming is basically allowing a game to operate over three display devices giving more view to your peripheral vision and giving a more immersive feel to the game.
We've run a few benchmarks in Surround Gaming to see what the performance is like and we'll compare them with a few normal resolutions as well. The graphs below are ordered by the number of displayable pixels in that resolution.
As we can see, these Surround Gaming titles appear to be averaging to reasonably playable frame rates, with both titles above 50 FPS at 2400x600.
One thing that you may notice is that under RtCW, despite there being a relatively small number of pixels difference between 1280x1024 and 2400x600, we can see that the Surround Gaming mode incurs a much higher performance penalty than the difference in pixel fill-rate would suggest, as the difference in pixels between 2400x600 and 1600x1200 is much larger and yet the performance difference is smaller. The most likely reason for this is extra geometry load. Under normal resolution rendering the geometry would be clipped at a 4:3 ratio, yet the geometry with Surround Gaming is clipped with a 4:1 (12:3) ratio, resulting in a greater quantity of geometry processing. Because RtCW is predominantly using the host CPU for geometry calculation Surround Gaming is putting an extra burden on the CPU because more geometry needs to be calculated.
Below are some sample outputs from Parhelia's Surround Gaming mode.
