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Multi-Display Graphics Suites Compared
Bender writes "There's an interesting comparison at TR between the major graphics players' multi-desktop software/hardware suites, like NVIDIA's nView and Matrox DualHead. These suites provide monitor positioning, application-level window memory, multiple virtual desktops, and the like. This is necessarily a Windows-centric comparison, but it's interesting to consider how Linux, X, and various desktop managers would match up with these solutions in terms of features and abilities."
Two 19" screens on a Matrox G400. Yum! I didn't have any problems getting everything working, and Matrox has decent Linux support, although I wish they'd put out driver updates more than once a year. Kicker dies a lot after I moved to X 4.2, and quite a few people are having similar problems. New drivers are promised Real Soon Now, so we'll see what happens.
I dread having to use computers with just one screen now; I don't think I could ever go back. I'm thinking about hooking up a third monitor, actually. Need a reinforced desk and a small nuclear generator to power all this crap though.
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
No.
What about Quartz acceleration, is it on both displays simultaneously, or just one at the time?
Both displays at once, given sufficient (64MB) VRAM.
Do the popups show up in the middle of one screen or split between the displays like on the Matrox/PC.
Dialog boxes and other messages are typically centered on the display containing the menu bar.
Apple did multiple screens first, and it shows up in the more elegant handling of interface elements across displays and the general flexibility of those multi-monitor options compared to the "divided" dialog boxes and hardware constraints of Windows.
This is part of the RandR extension, wait for XFree86 4.3. This was mentioned some time ago.
Apple did multiple screens first, and it shows up in the more elegant handling of interface elements across displays and the general flexibility of those multi-monitor options compared to the "divided" dialog boxes and hardware constraints of Windows.
This is just completely untrue. Apple did do multi-display first, but Windows is every bit as good at handling multiple displays. If you put two ore more video cards in a box (which is what I've done since Win'98 originally came out), Windows handles multimon beautifully. Dialog boxes centered on active display, windows maximized to single display, etc.
The problem is that most dual-head video card makers, up until recently, have provided drivers that tell Windows "Hey, this is one big, wide display!", and Windows has no way of knowing that it's centering a dialog box across 2 monitors. Matrox has fixed this (finally) in their drivers, and ATI has as well with the drivers for the 9000 and 9700 -- the 8500 and earlier still haven't been fixed. (I don't know about nVidia, tho').
Get a real multimon solution for Windows and you won't be disappointed. I'm running a 3 19" displays at work -- 4800x1200 resolution is great.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
NOTE: With nView, the two displays have to be beside each other under X.
This caused me to look at using multiple cards instead of multiple headed cards.
I have one 21" and two 17" monitors, and I wanted the primary display (21", middle, AGP) to be able to be upgraded seperately from the secondaries (PCI, one on either side of the primary), as I have no interest in spanning 3D games across screens. Granted, I could have done three with the Matrox card, but then I'd always have to upgrade to another 3-monitor card. The solution I went with was to have one nVidia AGP card for the primary (currently a TNT2 Ultra, to be upgraded later) and two GForce 2 PCI cards for the secondaries. The GF2s are plenty fast for 2D, and fast enough to run small 3D accelerated toys/apps/screensavers too. The only downsides are the use of more expansion slots than using a dual-headed card and that 3D acceleration won't span. The upsides are that each one is running full speed, they're completely independant so multiple resolutions/frequencies is less of a problem, and the primary display can be upgraded seperately from the secondaries. I believe I could also run seperate X servers on each card if that ever became useful.
So if you want spanning 3D acceleration or are low on expansion slots, go with a multihead card. Otherwise, think about doing it this way.
OK, so there isn't a lot of real content in this post, but I thought I'd share a setup success story. When doing multi-card multi-head systems I'd *highly* recommend sticking with the same chip line/maker, and I'd just as highly recommend it be nVidia. Getting these three cards working together couldn't have been simpler...
nVidia's nView software should do it; Make sure nView extensions are enabled, then select "Send Application to Monitor 1". That should move the parent as well as all its child windows
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IMHO my monitor support w/ XF4 is better then windows. Not only do you have xinerama that lets you spread your desktop accross multiple displays like windows does. But you can also have it, so that you can use the displays (almost*) as if you had two seperate computers, even have different WM on each
(*still shares mouse and keyboard, ie which ever screen you got the (core) mouse on has focus)
an advantage to windows is that you dont loose HW acceleration when ur spreading desktop. While w/ xinerama you do. but not with the multi WM setup. (which is what I use)
And setting up either aint that difficult, I remember when I was still using mdk (2 years ago) that the CD installer could even do it (I think it was 8.0)
But You haven't tried a Matrox, have you...
You wouldn't go back. The powercolor had OK NT drivers, but they were pretty unfriendly and limited cards compared to the Matrox cards.
And no, I don't work for Matrox.
When they were discussing the GF4 they said that no amount of work would get that series to work with independant mutlimonitor (different res, refresh, etc).
WRONG!
There is a simple registry tweak that will enable a checkbox to "Treat multiple outputs on an nView-capable board as seperate display devices". All that has to be done is disable nView in its control panel and apply this to the registry:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\NVIDIA Corporation\Global\NVTweak]
"NvCplExposeWin2kDualView"=dword:00000001
Reset the system and find the checkbox, I have it under advanced> Desktop utilites.
I run dual 17" monitors (GF4 MX and a GF2 MX) on Windows 2000 Professional and I don't even bother with NVidia's NView app. Haven't found a single use for it other than it being unreasonably slow for features I don't need. For everything Windows 2000 doesn't do out of the box, I just use UltraMon.
UltraMon still leaves a bit of a memory footprint but it's not nearly as bad or as slow as NView. It's this unobtrusive (and persistent) little system tray icon that gives me all kinds of settings that NView seems to offer as well, except faster. Some of the features I appreciate in particular are:
Shortcut keys to swap programs between monitors (proportionally or to fit - INCREDIBLY useful if you run different resolutions)
Shell extensions for switching monitors or maximizing.
A simple double-click on the systray icon (or a definable keyboard shortcut) to turn off the secondary monitor on demand, such as if you want to run an OpenGL game without the second monitor looking all weird.
Individual desktop wallpaper settings.
The program itself creates shortcuts that set a program to start on a certain monitor.
Saving window sizes and positions.
You can enable two separate taskbars if you want, and either have each taskbar show all the tasks or have each separate taskbar show the tasks running on that specific monitor.
That's the bulk of its features. Great little program. Unfortunately, yes, it is $40 to register, and there are discounts for multiple licenses, but for me personally it was well worth the cost for the extreme ease of use it provides me with my monitors.
I have tried NView, but it kind of seems like it's trying too hard to be useful, where UltraMon just works, and works great. I'd definitely recommend it for anyone with dual monitors.
Actually, that's entirely untrue. There are a couple tricks you have to do to, but it's OpenGL that does not (by default) support multi-monitor configurations seamlessly, not the other way around.
It was an important discussion around here before we moved some of our drawing code into OpenGL. Once we solved that little problem though, and wrote a class to get it all initialized properly, all was good, and writing dual-monitor friendly OpenGL apps is easy.
Don't ask "Well then, explain how?" because I'm not obliged or willing to say. The code is not GPL. But it can be done.
As for your comment about debugging software using two monitors, I wholeheartedly agree, and couldn't live without it anymore.
Random and weird software I've written.