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Dave 2004-07-23 22:45
I've managed to cobble together old parts giving me a system running XP Pro and:
Primary: AGP nVidia GeForce2 (GTS or Pro?) 32Mb
(driver vers: 5.6.6.4)
Secondary: PCI ATI 3D Rage Pro 8Mb
(driver vers: 5.1.2001.0 - the newer driver turned 1600x1200 into a scrolling 1280x1024 so I rolled back!)
Both monitors run 1600x1200 (P/S: 72Hz/70Hz). Note that my BIOS POST monitor is the ATI card. On an older BX chipset hardware init precluded me using the ATI as a secondary. I'm now using a VIA chipset on an old MSI Apollo Pro motherboard.
My problem: XP doesn't maintain proper hardware acceleration when I use an extended (two monitor) desktop.
I used FreshDiagnose to get a draw benchmark.
With the nVidia card as primary and the ATI as secondary (in windows), the draw benchmarks are:
nVidia: 2,320 KPixels/s
ATI: 3,174 KP/s
If I unset "Extend my Windows desktop..." on the ATI, the nVidia benchmark goes to: 28,808 KP/s!
If I choose the ATI as my primary monitor, and don't extend the desktop to the nVidia card, the ATI draw benchmark is: 21,947 KPixels/s.
All dxdiag.exe DirectDraw and Direct3D tests pass on both cards, there are no reported hardware conflicts. Whilst the above benchmark might be a bit off, I can _see_ the difference too (e.g. I now know each of Opera's windows get repainted top down on restore from minimise!).
Does anyone have any ideas how to fix this situation? At least I have lots of desktop pixels now (even if they are very slow!).
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Dave 2004-07-26 09:37
I think I'll reply to myself. I've grown to suspect my problem might not have anything to do with XP's support of different types of hardware acceleration using multiple monitors per se, but rather that I'm using a Cornerstone ImageAccel 4 PCI for my secondary (BIOS primary) screen as if it's an ATI Rage Pro Turbo PCI. Cornerstone evidently modified ATI's equivalent boards - max resolution is 1800x1440 instead of 1600x1200. This might perhaps be leading to some timing problems due to failing assumptions relating to the Cornerstone board architecture?
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