Dual monitors help

[Loki]

My question is simple: I want to run dual monitors on my computer but I would like to know how this would affect gameing or if it would even affect my gameing in any way. Part of what I would like to know is would the game immage be split to both monitors or would It play normally?

Thanks in advance,

Loki

[VaKo]

Whats your graphics card like? I've only got a Nvidia 6200 256mb agp card, but it appears to be enough to drive gaming on both a monitor and a TV at the same time. This was on X-Plane, I had an external chase view and a cockpit at around 30fps on both, at 1047 by 768.

[Loki]

I don't have the card yet because I was wondering how it would affect my gameing such as would the image be displayed on bot monitors or would it be displayed normally. I just wanted a little information before I go buying anything.

[Darren Kitchen]

I run dual monitors off my dev/game pc using a radeon x850xt plat. and it doesnt inpact game performance. games start in the primary monitor and get great frames. i play most of my games in a window with irc in the secondary monitor so that i can quickly switch back and forth. good stuff.

oh, and if you're going to go dual you might want to google for the program "ultramon", it's really nice.

[VaKo]

The nvidia drivers allow you to have a single stretched virtual monitor on both screens, 2 individual monitors or cloned displays.

[Darren Kitchen]

yeah i just use the built in windows stuff, extended desktop. works nice. ive played with the nvidia stuff before too.

once a long time ago i got really bored and setup a machine with 3 video cards (one agp, two pci) and ran unreal tournament across all 3 in software rendering mode.

it ran pretty bad but looked awesome

[Loki]

Thanks for the help, really cleared things up for me.

well it looks like im going shopping tomorrow. This sucks i just got paid and im going to be broke before tuesday oh well its worth it 8)

thanks again, Loki

Edit: I will be ordering the radeon x850xt from newegg tomorrow I should have it in about 3 or 4 days i can't wait.

[mpt]

I know this is slightly off topic, but I just went to a dual monitor set up, and it is great. Take a look at Ultramon or Multi-mon. I've been using ultramon (free for ~30 days) and it provides a lot of multi-monitor support that is missing from XP.

[Loki]

Ive changed the card I was getting so now i have a new question, If I install the dual monitor card is there any way that I can use both the Dual monitor card and my onboard graphics so that I can have a total of 3 monitors?

[Sparda]

Yes, windows should be able to do this no problem (thats the advantage of windows, it's easy to configure... relativly).

[Atari6502]

One problem.

Most on board video uses the agp bus and is inactivated when you plug something into the agp slot. If it's a pci-e I would imagine it works the same.

What model motherboard is it?

[Darren Kitchen]

For a turnkey solution you might want to look into Matrox cards

[DeGrijze]

All do i do'nt play game i can tell you that working with dubbel (or more) monitors on a windows box is sweet.

On my workingstation i have 2 monitors on a some what older matrox G400 dual monitor (AGP) card.

Gerard

[Loki]

The card is PCI express I don't know the exact model at the moment right now, Im away from my home computer at the moment so when I get home I will post my system specs

[Loki]

Okay, now that Im back in front of my PC:

My onboard video is an intigrated ATI RADEON XPRESS 200

the dual monitor card I want to buy is:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16814150189

[Atari6502]

Looks like a nice card. Fanless, quiet, nice.

It looks tall though. Hope you have room in yer case.