After many problems I managed to get Soft TH to work. My main problem was the video card that I was trying to use. Thinking that there might be some life left in the old nVidia Quadro 1500 I tried to use it as the second card to display computer graphics the third screen but it did nothing but call up the blue screen of death that told me to remove and recent hardware additions cos they were messing things up. A quick trip to town and a modest £29 later an ASUS nVidia GT610 was parked in the 2nd of the 3 PCIe ports that and the problematic third screen was finally illuminated with computer signals.
When rFactor is started up a couple of problems were experienced. The game crashed before the start and the alignment is a wee bit stepped. However, after talking to Ross, a racing enthusiast who uses it I found that it is like that with his system too and the crashing problems were solved by windowing the 4720 x 1200 pixel render that the nVidia GTX570 produced rather than letting rFactor load up the graphics in full screen. The long 4720 x 1200 graphic was interesting. It didn’t render patches of the image leaving black blocks either side under the two outer smaller screens. I’m sure this just does this to save GPU processing power. Why render scenes that you’ll never even see eh. The experience was extremely great, a vast improvement from it’s great a driver can get around corners much better because you can estimate your entry position better out the side view. Traffic is also much more visible. In an online simulator race having extra screens didn’t make me faster, I sucked and pissed off quite a few racing dudes with my Captain Slow speeds. But the extra screens definitely made me a more aware driver than I would have been with just one central screen which is what I’d used for practice before the race. Overall I think that I am very happy with this initial test of Soft TH. The software was free, it worked well, plus the hardware upgrade to make it work was cheap.
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