In gaming, the challenge always seems to be bigger, bolder and badder when it comes to graphics, but why hasn’t anyone really tapped the PC market with full multi-panel display support? This question came to mind again today when I saw this amazing 43″ curved display. I can only imagine the satisfaction of playing a flight simulator or racing game with two of these bad boys side by side providing a true panoramic display.

Imagine if games truly supported multi-screen displays for their games. I’m talking about things like peripheral vision for FPS games or support for viewing multiple locations on the battlefield in an RTS. Of course, anyone who has ever played a simulator or racer can understand the value of being able to glance to the side and actually see out your windows. Considering the algorithms and technology involved with such views, I cannot fathom that the expense or difficulty would be extreme to do something like this. Yes, the hardware support may have to be boosted to keep the same resolution when the amount of rendering is immediately tripled, but how many games are fully pushing our hardware as it is?

Calculating the peripheral views in an FPS would literally be as simple as changing the angle of acceleration for the trigonometric movement algorithms. Otherwise, nothing new would really have to be added to the gaming engine itself. Yes, I understand that allowing for two additional panels – one each for left and right – would – at the least – triple the processing power and polygon count of a single render, but a couple 512MB video cards running in parallel would most likely tackle this issue for most games on the market today.

Well, maybe in the next few years, we will see more attention given to this issue, but in the meantime, I’ll try to be satisfied with those that support my standard widescreen display for the time being.