Extended desktop using dummy plugs, now how do I mirror the displays??

S

swoody

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 27, 2008
Messages
352
Ok, well I have 2 9800GX2's folding 24/7 on my main rig. I used dummy plugs to be able to extend the desktop onto each new 'monitor'. The only problem I'm having is that since each display is put next to each-other, that I lose my mouse cursor whenever I go to the far side of the monitor. I want to set these up as 'mirrored' to avoid losing the mouse, but I can't seem to find the option anywhere! I checked in Vista's Control Panel, and under Display settings, but don't see an option for it. I also looked under nVidia's control panel, but again, I can't find this option anywhere. How did you guys do it? Is there some magical trick I'm missing out on? Is there something else I have to do? Any advice is greatly appreciated!

Thanks for looking!
Woody
 
you can do it in nvidia's control panel.. set it to clone mode but it wouldnt be an extended desktop.. so it may or may not work..
 
Do you know what menu this is under? I can't find anything that sounds like it would mirror the monitors??
 
In the nVidia control panel, pick the "Set up multiple displays" heading under the Display section on the left side, and just pick the Clone option.
 
It's not in there for me :( The only things I can change are "Select the displays you want to use" and if I remove all the others, and just select my actual monitor, it's just like going into 'Display Options' and unselecting 'Extend desktop to this monitor.' Then I don't lose my mouse, but I can't fold on all the cores, either :(

Side question: Should I disable PhysX if I'm just going to be folding on the cards? Is there any benefit either way to having it enabled or disabled??
 
I did find an option where I'm supposed to right-click on the icon of the different monitors, and be able to clone them, but when I right-click on them, I only get 'Primary' and 'Identify' neither of which does anything useful to me :(

Edit: Oh wait, it says specifically "This area shows the physical arrangement of your active displays. Right-click on an icon to change the primary display, identify a display, or clone 2 displays on the same GPU."

So that means I can only clone them if they're all running on the same GPU??
 
swoody said:
It's not in there for me :( The only things I can change are "Select the displays you want to use" and if I remove all the others, and just select my actual monitor, it's just like going into 'Display Options' and unselecting 'Extend desktop to this monitor.' Then I don't lose my mouse, but I can't fold on all the cores, either :(
Click to expand...
That's weird then. I guess you can't really do anything about it. I don't know of another way to mirror your desktop (you might have to find some third-party software if it exists).
swoody said:
Side question: Should I disable PhysX if I'm just going to be folding on the cards? Is there any benefit either way to having it enabled or disabled??
Click to expand...
It shouldn't make a difference either way.
 
Well that stinks :( Would there be any way to at least 'lock' the mouse to a single monitor? So that it doesn't go over to the 2nd screen just by moving to the far side of the screen?
 
swoody said:
Well that stinks :( Would there be any way to at least 'lock' the mouse to a single monitor? So that it doesn't go over to the 2nd screen just by moving to the far side of the screen?
Click to expand...

I hope someone knows an answer, I'd love to lock my mouse to a monitor.

For playing World of Warcraft I have been using CursorLock to keep my mouse on the screen when WoW is open, but I would rather have something that isn't an external program.
 
Brak710 said:
I would rather have something that isn't an external program.
Click to expand...

+1 on that. This isn't *that* big of an issue for me to want to download and install a program just for it, but it'll be great if there's a way to do it inside Vista, or nVidia Control Panel.
 
another trick you can do is set your display to the primary monitor which it should be.. then move that display all the way to the far left or far right.. this can all be done within the windows display options.. then you can only lose the mouse in one direction.. so its pretty easy to find it :p
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
another trick you can do is set your display to the primary monitor which it should be.. then move that display all the way to the far left or far right.. this can all be done within the windows display options.. then you can only lose the mouse in one direction.. so its pretty easy to find it :p
Click to expand...

Yeah, that's how I have it setup now, and that's what I'm trying to avoid completely :)

Although I did get a tip from another forum, saying that you can offset your displays. So you can make all the rest of the displays diagonal from your main monitor, and then there's only the little corner you can lose your mouse on. I'm going to give this a shot, and see how it works out :)
 
swoody said:
Yeah, that's how I have it setup now, and that's what I'm trying to avoid completely :)

Although I did get a tip from another forum, saying that you can offset your displays. So you can make all the rest of the displays diagonal from your main monitor, and then there's only the little corner you can lose your mouse on. I'm going to give this a shot, and see how it works out :)
Click to expand...

Yea but if you lose it...... Good Luck on getting it back
 
Well it does work quite well :) I set it up so that the only spot that the mouse can go off is the top left corner of the monitor. Since there's nothing in the top left that I click a lot chances are I won't be losing it! And if I do, you just have to keep moving the mouse diagonally down/right and it comes back. Not hard at all :)
 
I've had this problem playing RTS games on my main rig, it has dual panels. The easiest thing to do is to stagger your monitors. Just got to screen resolution and drag the 'displays' so they sit like this:

|||||
....|||||
........|||||
............|||||

Instead of like this:

||||| ||||| ||||| |||||

Understand what I'm saying? It won't completely eliminate the problem, the cursor will still go to the next 'monitor' if you get it into the lower right-hand corner, but it helps tremendously.
 
swoody said:
Well it does work quite well :) I set it up so that the only spot that the mouse can go off is the top left corner of the monitor. Since there's nothing in the top left that I click a lot chances are I won't be losing it! And if I do, you just have to keep moving the mouse diagonally down/right and it comes back. Not hard at all :)
Click to expand...

this is what i do because it was pissing me off trying to find my mouse. :cool:

 
natermeister said:
like this:
|||||
....|||||
........|||||
............|||||

Instead of like this:
||||| ||||| ||||| |||||
Click to expand...

Yeah, that's how I have them setup now. Well it's more like...


||||| ||||| |||||
.................|||||

Where the last one on the right is my actual monitor. But it's basically the same concept. It does work out rather well like that :)
 
I'm using the latest beta driver with a GTX 295. 190.38
Using Vista 64bit...

For the first time, Boinc finds both CUDA devices and uses them.
I am not using any special plug.
I have not changed anything in the nVidia control panel to turn off PhysX or multi-GPU.

Has anyone tried this new driver to see if F@H finds two cuda devices with dual cards?

I don't recall this happening before, and I'm wondering if it was something I did...
I used 'windows mode' while playing Left4Dead to see what that looked like...
Then went back to full screen mode, played another game, got out, fired up Boinc and noticed two CUDA devices found and being used now.
I have not rebooted the computer to find out if the video card would reset itself.

You guys are the [H]ardest around so thought one of you could do some experiments to confirm my findings... :)
Or perhaps you already have.
 
IronBits, thanks for this post. I can confirm that enabling quad-SLI with the 190.38 drivers seems to allow CUDA to access all four GPUs in Vista. Actually I'm still debugging my triple GTX 295 system, and I was stuck with only 4 CUDA devices recognized, but by installing the beta drivers and enabling SLI, I can now use 5 CUDA devices. I'm going to try Windows 7 soon, because I could never get more than one GPU per card recognized in Win7.
 
Well I tried out the new driver, and it didn't seem to work so well for me. I couldn't even get both cores folding on one of my 9800GX2's, so I'm not sure if I setup something incorrectly, or if the drivers just won't work with my setup.
 
Thanks for that great post Razor! I'm going to have to give that a shot later today :)

Just out of curiosity, can you run more than two dual-gpu cards in SLI? Or are you limited to two, since they are basically in SLI by themselves?
 
Last edited:
swoody said:
Just out of curiosity, can you run more than two dual-gpu cards in SLI? Or are you limited to two, since they are basically in SLI by themselves?
Click to expand...

I think the SLI bridge that you need to attach will stop you running three dual gpu cards.
Where the bridge fits on all my single gpu cards is two connections wide but on my dual gpu cards it's only one wide, as the other is used internally to connect the two gpu's together.

My tri sli bridge is two connections wide and my dual sli bridge is only one connection wide.
So the tri sli bridge will fit three single gpu cards but it is too wide for the double gpu cards.
The dual sli bridge will fit double gpu cards but is a connector short for three cards.
And I'm not sure of cutting a tri sli bridge in half lenght ways would work.

Luck ........... :D
 
Razor_FX_II said:
No, that is not supported on the 9800GX2 and I don't think Windows would render 6 simultaneous frames.
Click to expand...

Tigerbiten said:
I think the SLI bridge that you need to attach will stop you running three dual gpu cards.
Where the bridge fits on all my single gpu cards is two connections wide but on my dual gpu cards it's only one wide, as the other is used internally to connect the two gpu's together.

My tri sli bridge is two connections wide and my dual sli bridge is only one connection wide.
So the tri sli bridge will fit three single gpu cards but it is too wide for the double gpu cards.
The dual sli bridge will fit double gpu cards but is a connector short for three cards.
And I'm not sure of cutting a tri sli bridge in half length ways would work.
Click to expand...

Ok, well thanks for clearing that up for me guys! I had always wondered as I had only heard about a pair of GX2's being run in SLI, but nothing concrete about 3 or 4. I guess I'll just stick with SLI disabled, and running dummy plugs :)
 
To follow up on my post yesterday, if you have two GTX 295s installed and enable quad-SLI in the NVIDIA control panel, BOINC can see all four GPUs as CUDA devices. This is with no dummy plugs installed, and no hardware bridge across the two GTX 295 cards. If you add a third GTX 295, only one GPU is detected (and you may need a dummy plug; in my case the third non-SLI card is the primary display card). The drivers will only enable SLI on two cards, no matter how many you have installed.

I'm somewhat hopeful that NVIDIA will sort out their driver issues to allow using all GPUs as CUDA devices in Vista. There's no reason the drivers can't support sex-SLI or oct-SLI, even though the hardware doesn't.
 
SazanEyes said:
To follow up on my post yesterday, if you have two GTX 295s installed and enable quad-SLI in the NVIDIA control panel, BOINC can see all four GPUs as CUDA devices. This is with no dummy plugs installed, and no hardware bridge across the two GTX 295 cards. If you add a third GTX 295, only one GPU is detected (and you may need a dummy plug; in my case the third non-SLI card is the primary display card). The drivers will only enable SLI on two cards, no matter how many you have installed.

I'm somewhat hopeful that NVIDIA will sort out their driver issues to allow using all GPUs as CUDA devices in Vista. There's no reason the drivers can't support sex-SLI or oct-SLI, even though the hardware doesn't.
Click to expand...


but its nvidia.. it took them 3 friggin years just to support multi display while in SLI which ATI had already supported from the beginning in crossfire.... it will take them another 10 years just to support octo-SLI for cuda app's..
 
I just confirmed that turning SLI on in Windows Server 2008 R2 makes four CUDA devices available, instead of just two. Since this is based on the same code as Windows 7, it should work there as well. This is with two GTX 295s, PhysX on, no dummy plugs, no hardware bridge across the two cards. Both the Windows control panel and NVIDIA control panel only show one monitor.
 
swoody said:
Would there be any way to at least 'lock' the mouse to a single monitor? So that it doesn't go over to the 2nd screen just by moving to the far side of the screen?
Click to expand...

I just took a few days and wrote an app for that:
http://ddmm.sourceforge.net/

swoody said:
+1 on that. This isn't *that* big of an issue for me to want to download and install a program just for it, but it'll be great if there's a way to do it inside Vista, or nVidia Control Panel.
Click to expand...

It's open source. I'd also love this feature to be included with the GPU driver, or maybe included with bigger programs like ultramon or displayfusion.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top