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Brian K 2004-05-17 05:20
OK, I need some clarification.
There seems to be an ongoing battle twix Nvidia and Ati on who handles "true" multi monitor support.
I'd like to know if anybody is having success playing FPS games like Unreal on ATI cards with 2 (or more) monitors.
I'm looking at the ATI AIW radeon 9600xt, it comes with native support for dual VGA monitors, and the hardware functionality for Video editing.
I'm also looking to add another ATI 9600 series card to bring my monitor count to 3.
SO... If I set up three monitors in control panel on XP, will I be able to play "Some" games (perhaps with funky settings or Patches) across all three monitors.
Any advice would be appreciated.
Brian K
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Tony 2004-05-18 05:29
I've been trying to do exactly what you're planning for months now. The most I've successfully been able to do is play a game across two monitors on the primary video card in a windowed mode. That plays decent enough, however, there's that middle of the screen issue that having a third monitor would solve. Unfortunately, you can only have 1 AGP card in a motherboard and adding a PCI card only slows it down tremendously when stretched across all three.
Currently, my machine has an ATI Radeon 9800XT (256mb) and an ATI Radeon 9200 SE (128mb).
I've finally splurged for a Matrox Parhelia 256mb AGP 8x card to do this. It's on it's way from www.newegg.com. I'll fill you in on how that goes when I finally get it setup.
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Tony 2004-05-20 01:47
My Parhelia came in today, but I'm at work right now. I should know something by this weekend.
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Tony 2004-05-26 00:26
My current machine specs:
Asus P4C800-E Deluxe
Pentium 4 3.4c w/ 2gb DDR400
Matrox Parhelia 256mb AGP8x
3 Sony SDMHX73 Monitors
2 Western Digital Caviar 250gb Drives w/ 8mb Buffers
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS
Sony DRU110 DVD+-RW
Despite it's a slower card, it does play most of my games with most if not all features turned on. I wish Midnight Club II and Unreal Tournament 2004 would play a little faster in surround modes, but I can always drop it to just one monitor and they'll play fine.
Most games actually play great in surround mode like Nascar 2003, Max Payne 2, and Quake III Team Arena. Unreal Tournament 2004 plays ok in surround mode if all settings are set to "high" with shadows and decals turned off and resolution set to 2400x600.
Jedi Academy seems to work only in Single Player mode, none of the maps in multiplayer can make it without dropping me to the desktop. Jedi Outcast has similar results, however, in multiplayer certain maps will come up and work, but not all.
For the most part, it's a great card. I like working with better than the usual clone mode desktops since I do work from home alot. I also love the surround gaming feature. Even if it didn't work for a specific game, at least you can still get it to run on one monitor without rebooting and tweaking out too much.
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