Mike Walston 2002-05-04 17:00
Hi, new guy here, nice board :)
For the last couple months i've been running a geforce2mx agp and a matrox mystique 220 pci to power 2 15" monitors. I had always assumed that since my mystique was old it didn't have any d3d or ogl support, so I didn't really make anything of it when I saw that it didn't have those things in dxdiag, just ddraw. However today I went out an bought a hercules prophet 4000xt (a kyro) pci, a card which I know has d3d and ogl support, as it's there inside the display options. However running dxdiag tells me that it only has directdraw support and nothing else. I've come to the conclusion that this is simply because it is the secondary monitor, as when I disabled the gf2mx, all the d3d and opengl acceleration for the kyro worked just fine. Now i'm wondering, is this a kyro driver issue, or a directx issue (i've dx 8.1). Because I saw on a couple websites that 98 and 2k didn't have support for dx (beyond ddraw) on secondary devices, is this something that has been fixed in xp? or do I simply need to find something else to do with this video card as I won't get everything out of it that I expected?
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Nite 2002-05-04 17:56
It's a DirectX issue. There's practically nothing you can do. (short of buying an all-nVIDIA setup and using nView)
Hopefully it'll be fixed in DX9 later this year.
\Nite - "can't rain all the time"
Multi-Monitor Gaming Web
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RodM 2002-05-06 17:21
well i can confirm that it DOES work in XP at least on my setup,I do have two nvidia cards,but i don't use nview...in fact i couldn't get any hardware D3D on my secondary using the newer drivers that nview comes with!i had a real battle with my system to get it all working,basically in my case it was a matter of using the right drivers and learning how to just get them installed properly in XP.
based on my experience i would have thought things would be easier with two disimilar cards...but then i haven't tried that,you might want to make sure you have "write combining" unchecked in the troublshooting tab of the display props tho...i can't speak for others but that option will kill the secondary d3d on my setup
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brain 2002-05-07 11:47
can't be a dx issue, becuase i got ddraw and d3d on my secondary voodoo banshee under win2000/dx8. (tested with dxdiag also) primary is a tnt2ultra, ogl off course only works on the primary.
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Nite 2002-05-07 17:33
brain, did the directX work on the TNT also? And you might not have noticed it, but DirectX "works" on secodary displays, but in reality it is the primary card that renders the image which is then "copied" to the secondary card. This is how DX 7/8 works.
Don't have tried it on W2k, but W9x and XP work that way.
\Nite - "can't rain all the time"
Multi-Monitor Gaming Web
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brain 2002-05-08 07:58
i don't know what is happing under the "hood" but
dxdiag tells me that both primary and seconday
have d3d enabled (test d3d works on both).
screenshot of the moire screensaver from the dx sdk.
http://www.newbraindead.com/moire.jpg
screenshot of fs2002
http://www.newbraindead.com/fs2002.jpg
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brain 2002-05-08 09:11
and a dxdiag shot after running the d3d test
http://www.newbraindead.com/dxdiag.jpg
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Christian Studer 2002-05-08 09:30
I can confirm what brain has said, full hardware acceleration on secondary displays is possible with DirectX, but the application needs to be specially programmed to take advantage of it.
The Moire screen saver is a good example, and can be downloaded from this site: Moire.zip.
Christian Studer - www.realtimesoft.com
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Nite 2002-05-08 17:50
Really? Thanks brain & Christian. Everyday one learns something new... :)
Most games that use hardware-acceleration in multi-screen mode (windowed) use the afore mentioned technif of using the primary card for all rendering and then just send the final image to the secondary cards video memory.
It's very good to hear that it is possible with DirectX to use different adapters.. can either of you say from which version DirectX has been able to do this, and is it limited in some OSes, eg. does it work well in both Win9x and 2k/XP?
\Nite - "can't rain all the time"
Multi-Monitor Gaming Web
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Christian Studer 2002-05-09 01:25
Some background information:
if an application wants to draw graphics using DirectX, it creates a device object for the display it wants to use. By default a device object for the primary display is created. As long as the application draws to the primary display, everything is fully hardware-accelerated. If it draws to any other display using the same device object, the primary display adapter will still do the drawing, but copy the output to the secondary display, which decreases performance.
A multi-monitor aware application would create a device object for each display it wants to use, and then use the correct device object to do drawing on each monitor. This way drawing on each monitor will be fully hardware-accelerated.
Fullscreen mode has been hardware-accelerated on secondary monitors for a long time, windowed mode since DirectX 8.
I'm not aware of any platform differences, but haven't done testing on Win9x, only Win2000/XP.
Christian Studer - www.realtimesoft.com
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Nite 2002-05-09 04:40
I was aware of the fullscreen-secondary HW acceleration feature, but didn't know about the windowed. Good to hear that MS is doing something about that.
Now, to get developers to notice people with multiple monitors... :)
\Nite - "can't rain all the time"
Multi-Monitor Gaming Web
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