Multiple Monitor Support?

#1 I run Win2k with 2 monitors, GeForce2 & TNT2-Ultra and it works here. Latest drivers right? If you trap it in the debugger let me know what's up.

--Rick

#2 The nVidia reference drivers up to version 6.3 or so had some real flakiness with multiple monitor support so make sure you have the latest drivers...I've had some real success with 11.01 and higher.

#3 It seems to me that when i run this on a computer with 2 nVidia cards (aka OGL compliant cards) it works fine. THe problem you could be having is if one of the cards is not OGL compliant. I don't know WHY, but that is what it seems like here. I have a gf3 and an old tnt2 PCI and it works great here...

#4 This is just an FYI

I have an AGP GeForce2 and an old PCI S3 card running XP. Trides2 and torque (HEAD) would crash because my system was treating my old PCI card as the primary display and engine could not init openGL.create() or D3D.create(). This is an extremely rare case but it is solvable because Microsoft games could find the card that would work. Everything works fine with just the GF2 card.

#5 Radion 8500 both monitors running off the same card worked for me.

#6 Everything works with my GeForce4 MX (its just two GF2s in one package) machine with dual monitors as well.

#7 As far as I know there are two different kinds of multimonitor support under Windows.

The first is "Vintage" multimon, which is true multimonitor. This means an AGP + one or more PCI video cards.

Then there's "dual head", which is basically multiple video outs off the same video card. Matrox G4xx, G5xx, the various NVidia GF dual head cards, etc. are examples of this. They provide functionality through the driver and emulate a single large virtual desktop to Windows. If you enumerate monitors I believe only a single one is shown.

Most games will just magically work on the dual head cards. Multimon is a bit trickier, since you have to enumerate the displays.

The problem is that Microsoft's rather weak implementation of OpenGL doesn't allow for this, so you're at the mercy of the operating system as to which display you'll get when you start doing OpenGL operations.

#8 Hey Brian -- long time, no see. Interesting to see you here.

I have to disagree on this point. It is more than just microsoft -- the driver developers have some control. Matrox obviously has a single-card, multimon implementation that works great (just shipped Nascar 2003 with triplehead support, and it's a blast!). ATI's latest drivers have improved dualmon GL support.

I haven't really played with NV or Matrox cards in multimon to see how they do accelerating the 'other' monitor. 'Older' drivers typically instantiated them as if they were physically separate devices, rather than one device with large real estate.

Your mileage will vary. But the Matrox card is pretty cool -- I'm guessing that with the right settings, Torque 'might just work' on a Parhelia, but I'll have to swap boards at some point to try that out. Just need to change the resolution (the triplehead ones might be filtered out) manually and set the FOV properly. I can always rewrite the support code if it doesn't work... ;)

d

#9 David,

That's pretty much what I was saying. The Matrox and ATI dual-head boards are driver level and present a single display to the application. Even if they don't, since they're accelerated across the board (no pun intended) there won't be the "OpenGL doesn't accelerate anything but the primary display" problems.

The specific problem I'm talking about is when you have multiple cards installed (a.k.a. vintage multimon) and OpenGL. In that instance, I'm fairly confident you're screwed if you're unlucky, because OpenGL/wgl will only accelerate on the primary display. And if your primary is that S3 PCI card...

D3D doesn't suffer from this, since it provides (via DDraw) an API to enumerate the actual video adapters in your system.

#10 Yeah, agreed.. the multi-card stuff isn't easily available to GL.

Luckily, with multimon cards and drivers, it's getting easier and easier. ;)

d