> -----Original Message-----
> From: Scott Stewart [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Sent: Friday, October 26, 2007 8:51 AM
> To: CF-Community
> Subject: RE: Double monitors double your fun
>
> Lemme extend this...
>
> What does having dual monitors do to enhance/distract from the gaming
> experience?
Not much.
Few games truly support multi-monitors. Matrox got a bunch of companies to
support some cool stuff for a while ("triple head gaming") but their
"gaming" cards were more than a little disappointing. I had a (very
expensive) Parhelia for a long time but when I found it wouldn't be able to
do run Half-Life 2 I dumped it. Matrix is still absolutely the best in 2D
imaging... but they just can't push a polygon to save their lives.
Still, some games support this (usually with hacks) but it's rarely worth
it. For at least a few reasons:
1) With two monitors stretching the view means that your focal point (the
center of the screen) is actually spread across the bezel. Makes things
difficult to say the least. Three monitors solve this problem but introduce
others (namely that aside from the Parhelia no major player has released
any).
2) Today's cards are optimized for high resolution across a single monitor -
many won't even be able to do high-quality graphics across two monitors at
once forcing you to drop to software rendering (basically by passing your
video card and relying solely on the CPU). Even high end-SLI rigs are
optimized for shared scan line interleaving, not for stretching an image.
3) Although there some games that do support this they're pretty rare
(although some popular ones do: like most ID games for example). However I
don't know of any that truly, actually fully support this - there's always a
trade off. For example the play field may be stretched but the HUD will
also be stretched making it unusable/unreadable in some games. At other
times you might see weird display artifacts at the edges since the engine
never thought it had to render "over there". Some games produce a wider
image by actually rendering, internally, a larger "regular" image meaning
that you'll actually LOSE visibility when you stretch.
4) In many circles, for online gaming, multi-monitors are still considered
"cheating" since you gain twice (or three times) the peripheral vision.
It's a stupid argument to me (one of the basic facts of online gaming is
that it's NOT a level playing field due to differences in hardware).
All that said there are some benefits:
1) Usually, even when a game is maximized on the primary monitor, you'll
still see the desktop on the other. So you can pop your email program or
whatever over there and keep tabs on it (but you won't be able to actually
interact it without hosing the game display).
2) You can pretty easily set either monitor as "primary" and game on it.
This is really only important if you have unbalanced LCD (a big one and
small one) and your card can only push native res on the little one. LCDs
always look best running at their native resolution (one of the big things
limiting me from getting bigger monitors is that I can't afford the video
cards to push them at the native res).
3) It doesn't hurt. Any relatively new video card won't be hindered by dual
monitors when you game (although the second monitor isn't used). In the
past getting a good frame rate in a game often meant disabling dual monitor
functionality for the duration. Now it's seamless.
Here're some fun links:
http://www.realtimesoft.com/multimon/guide/gaming.asp
http://www.tomshardware.com/2004/02/16/dual_display_gaming_bigs_up/
http://mhg.planetquake.gamespy.com/
What you're going to see tho' is a lot of stuff from a few years back.
Things kind of bubbled up when Matrox started fooling around but then when
the cards just couldn't handle modern games everything petered out. There's
still some interesting stuff out there but it's rare.
Jim Davis
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