2 Monitors = TV + Full-screen Game?

[Midaro77]

If I have 2 monitors connected to a single video card (or two video cards for that matter) can I play a game in full-screen on one, and watch TV (via a TV tuner) on the other ...at the same time?

(At the moment I'm thinking 8800GT or HD3870/HD4850).

If not, is there some way of doing this?

 

[seithon]

Well so long as your system is powerfull enough to do this I could see no problem, i've run WOW and had movies running on a secondary screen

 

[Midaro77]

Excellent. Supplementary question:
Does SLI/Crossfire change this?

I thought I read somewhere that SLI only functions for one screen at a time (all others are blanked). True/untrue?

 

[turumbar]

You could still have two cards, one powering one screen, and one powering the other screen.

Excellent. Supplementary question:
Does SLI/Crossfire change this?

I thought I read somewhere that SLI only functions for one screen at a time (all others are blanked). True/untrue?

 

[spotpuff]

I've found ATI's drivers are better at this than Nvidia's; I used to run WOW with a TV tuner overlay on the same screen, but I could move it to a secondary.

With Nvidia, depending on how the game handles overlays, it seems to crash my computer.

 

[Flandry]

I'm late to the thread but can report on this. With the 3870 i briefly owned, i couldn't get this to work at all. It seems like the Catalyst drivers at that point were extremely flaky at dealing with overlays, and due to a plethora of problems i bailed out and bought a 9600. The 9600 is much more stable but can't handle a full screen game and TV overlay at the same time. I can do windowed gaming and TV, though. Pity. I imagine with two cards you could get both going full screen, but that's kinda silly.