Biff 2002-07-12 03:42
I've been trying to get hardware accelerated graphics in Flight Simulator 2002 on dual monitors for a while. I tried to use a GeForce 3 + PCI 2MX, and later a dual head GeForce 4 Ti 4400. Today I finally got it to work, thanks to some of the very helpful posts on this forum. I figured I'd add my experiences for the possible benefit of others.
First off, I cannot get it to work at all under either Windows 98SE or Windows XP. You specifically need to use Windows 2000. This is because Windows 2000 treats both displays on the GeForce 4 as a single large area, while the other versions of Windows are aware of the individual displays.
For many purposes, this Windows 2000 feature is annoying - note the threads on how to enable 'true multiple monitors' on Windows 2000. People lament being unable to set individual screen resolutions and refresh rates, that the taskbar runs across both screens, and that dialog boxes pop up right in the middle.
However, for Flight Simulator this is a benefit. In other versions of Windows, you have to select either one of the screens for hardware acceleration. Putting anything other than 2D graphs on the other display slows you down dramatically. In Windows 2000, you can have a spectacular big 2048 x 768 spot plane or virtual cockpit view running across both monitors without much slowdown.
For reference, I'm using Nvidia reference Detonator drivers version 29.42. Nview is enabled and set to horizontal spanning across both screens.
I'm interested to hear other people's experiences with this. I'm curious whether this goes for 4MX or even 2MX cards as well, and if anyone has been able to use hardware acceleration on dual screens in versions of Windows other than 2000.
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