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Does X800 support Dual Head Gaming?

S

Splat1

n00b
Joined
Mar 8, 2004
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In the past as I understand it all of the ATI cards would not do true multihead DX9 or opengl. Is this still the case with the x800? My feeling is yes but I wanted to see if anybody had any infoz regarding the state of dual head gaming with this generation of video cards. I know the 6800 and previous nvidia cards would do true dual head DX9 or OGL but last I checked the ATI cards would not. These cards push the fillrate required atleast to run this generation of games on two monitors.

http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20040216/dual_displya-03.html

I have a x800 PE coming next week but I might ebay it if this holds true.
 
Probably not. In my experience with ATi cards, any 3D be it OpenGL or Direct 3D displayed on the second monitor with artifacts and or with image quality degredation.

I don't know about games, but 3D Max and even 3D Mark 2001SE would do it in a display clone mode. The secondary display corrupted the image badly. Although I haven't tried that with the X800Pro I've got.

I've always found Nvidia's multimonitor support to be about the best second only to Matrox. However Matrox cards lack the muscle to run the latest games at the FPS and IQ the demanding gamer requires.
 
Actually Ive done dual monitor in clone mode for games without a problem. What I am talking about is horizontal spanning. Where it treats both monitors as one display. Youll notice this when trying to get a dvd or video to span both monitors with a ATI card. It just wont do it. But my guess is that next gen games will support dual head setups but thats only if the hardware is there to support it.
 
Splat1 said:
Actually Ive done dual monitor in clone mode for games without a problem. What I am talking about is horizontal spanning. Where it treats both monitors as one display. Youll notice this when trying to get a dvd or video to span both monitors with a ATI card. It just wont do it. But my guess is that next gen games will support dual head setups but thats only if the hardware is there to support it.
Click to expand...


Most of the time Splat, I believe the technology has to be made available by the programmers of the game you are playing. There are a few titles out there that can take advantage of multi-display setups.... I know Quake 3 had it, and there are a bunch of simulators for racing and flying....

However, first-person shooters would be real difficult to keep an eye out for bad guys across three screens with two big separations between each monitor.... I think...
 
It would be usefull in first person shooters for other things like other views or the game map in bf1942 for instance. In my case I only have 1 inch between the two monitor screens which wouldnt be too bad for the crosshairs. But if Ati's hardware wont do real horizontal spanning than I probably wont put one in my machine.
 
Actually any game that supports running with a custom res will work across two displays if the card supports it.


I will never forget playing Unreal 2003 across three Samsung 240T 24" LCDs. It was actually a Parhellia, and although I couldn't run the best res it was still sweet as hell. It was a system we built for the goverment....your tax dollars at work. :D
 
I run ProEngineer (big 3D CAD program that runs in openGL) really well across 2 monitors on the 9600pro . . . its really useful being able to have 2 separate part files open at the same time while youre modelling. This i using the extended desktop mode in windows xp, and having 2 separate ProEngineer windows open. I havent had any problems with display quality, and it will handle two nice big component files perfectly. This is running in 1280x960 on both displays. Not sure about gaming, but it works fine in teh windows environment.
 
ATI cards do not do horizontal spanning in games, I tried with "X2: The Threat" and got nowhere fast, Nvidia cards do and Matrox cards do. I searched everywhere and so have a few other users but the only thing I found pointed to ATI not doing horizontal spanning. That's my experience with it, I could be wrong and overlooked something so take it with a grain of salt, I'm no expert.
 
Thanks for all the infoz... Looks like I'll be canning my x800 xt pe CDW order that I placed over a month ago and attempt to locate a 6800 ultra as the PE doesnt seem to fit the bill for any sort of dual head gaming. Thanks again guys.

5p14T..
 
Horizontal spanning does not work for the overlay on ATi, which means you can't run DVD on both screens at the same time. A good number of 3D games seem to run ok, albeit slowly.

I've run Age of empires sucessfully on two screens before on an old Radeon 8500, the game must support being run in a window for any chance of it working at all... However, dual display gaming is extremely excruciatingly slow on both Nvidia and ATI when run on dual screens at nearly any resolution above 800x600 as neither are designed that way.

ATi does better at running 1280x720 and 1440 or 1920 x1080 than Nvidia does on one widescreen though.
 
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