Triple head / Surround Screen / Super-Widescreen are all terms synonomous with using three monitors to widen the peripheral Field of View (FOV) to extend the side views while gaming.
The idea was first introduced by Matrox TripleHead2Go (TH2G) as a hardware peripheral that extended the image to 3 screens. Note that this is ENTIRELY different than simply using Windows in multiple desktop mode. In order to run games and other 3D applications across 3 screens, special software or hardware is required to "trick" Direct-X into splitting the video buffer and distributing seperate frames to be rendered on 3 seperate displays. There are some inherant problems with TH2G. First, all screens must have the exact same resolution. Second, the max resolution of all 3 screens is low by todays standards. For me, these two limitations were entirely un-acceptable and besides that, the monitors I owned were not identical so I had to search for alternate means of enabling surround video.
What I found was a tiny little program called SoftTH. Short for "Software Triple Head" SoftTH allows gamers to enable triplehead without the use of expensive hardware accessories. All the work is done by the primary video card and the side buffers are sent to secondary and tertiary video ports on either one video card, or two depending on your hardware. There are some compatibility issues with certain game engines but for the most part, many games can be spanned using SoftTH. A few years after I started using SoftTH, the two major video card manufacturers implemented surround gaming into their respective drivers opening the world of triplehead gaming to the major market. ATI uses "Eyefinity" and nVidia uses "nVidia Surround" but both of these options are limited in their implemtation. With SoftTH I am able to render games in any possible monitor configuration and this is a major benifit to any other surround option.
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