<quote who="Jamie Wilkinson">

> Since then I've gotten myself a Matrox G400Max card which has two video
> outs, and is supported well under Linux and XFree86 for both 3d acceleration
> and dualhead.  At work I use a Matrox G450 in dualhead mode.  The matrox
> drivers, however, do not support both hardware accelerated 3D and dualhead
> at the same time, I have a feeling that this is a restriction in the
> hardware.

Yeah, the second head is just a hack, basically using a chunk of memory to
fake a second output, which means you can't do anything funky with it. Works
well enough in most cases, though.

> I am also lead to believe that these new fangled DVI video cards are capable
> of driving two VGA plugs off of one DVI port; which means on a dual DVI card
> you can run 4 monitors!  I currently have nothing to back that up except for
> something I heard once, so I'd appreciate some more information about that.

It's not something you get automagically, the hardware has to support it.
The new Matrox Parhalia (or whatever) cards have one DVI and one VGA socket;
you can plug a special cable into the DVI to let you drive two VGAs [1].
That's probably what you heard once. ;-)

- Jeff

[1] Which they think is very cool for playing FPS games and "reading PDFs
and web pages, or large spreadsheets", which sounds like a hokey sales pitch
to get business users to upgrade. ;-) Oh, they also do hardware-accelerated
text anti-aliasing, which also sounds horrifically hokey. But I still have a
love for Matrox. ;-)

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