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Is there any advantage?

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d34dly

2[H]4U
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Aug 3, 2003
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Is there any advantage to using two seperate vid cards. rather than my 9800 pro dual outputs?

I have an Nvidia GF4 MX420 PCI... Could I use it for the second monitor?

I ask all this because I seem to have lost a little performance when I hooked up the second monitor. Once a game is started the performance is great. But my desktop performance is lagging a little now... Any ideas?
 
2d performance is done via Processor, not vid card IIRC. So in theory, adding a card shouldn't resolve that, but I guess it's worth a shot.
 
Actually the vid card does make a difference in 2D performance. The catch is it hasn't really improved noticeably since maybe 1996. I'd probably have a hard time telling my old Matrox Millenium (original... gave it away last year) 4MB from a shiny new 5950u or 9800XT in 2D.
As far as 2 cards vs. 1, 2 cards frees up video mem if you leave the 2nd head up while gaming. Also, a lot of cards either don't support overlay on the 2nd head or only have one overlay for the two of them. In other words it's not really a huge difference.
 
The other thing you might be interested in is that most GPUs only do overlays (for video playback) on one head, so 2 cards would let you play video on either (or both) monitros.
 
Originally posted by Spinal
Is there any advantage to using two seperate vid cards. rather than my 9800 pro dual outputs?

I have an Nvidia GF4 MX420 PCI... Could I use it for the second monitor?

I ask all this because I seem to have lost a little performance when I hooked up the second monitor. Once a game is started the performance is great. But my desktop performance is lagging a little now... Any ideas?
Click to expand...

Voodoo 2 sli :D

There is also a flight sim video card that consists of 3 R300-cores and cost a lot of money too.
 
Originally posted by ameoba
The other thing you might be interested in is that most GPUs only do overlays (for video playback) on one head, so 2 cards would let you play video on either (or both) monitros.
Click to expand...

I've got an old Radeon VE and a Matrox Millenium in my setup and I just tested the playback of 3 videos, one on each screen and it was fine.
Res is set to 1600x1200 x2 on the Radeon and 1280x1024 on the Matrox,
triple_screens.jpg


screen shot I took when I had a 21" and 15" screens on the Radeon and nothing hooked to the Matrox,
triple.jpg
 
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