Tom's Hardware Reviews Multi-Display Gaming

MikShapi writes "Most gamers out there today own a dual-head graphics card (most of us completely neglecting the second port), and games such as X2 are offering support for this already (at least on nVidia cards, due to the "span" driver feature). Tom's Hardware did a nice rundown on the technology, complete with screenshots and benchmarks."

Comments

Yeah but,

[pheared]

You can't beat the "3-headed" Doom play if you had three networked machines. That was fun.

Touch screens

[vasqzr]

This would work great for a game if you had a touch screen on one of the monitors.

Think MMORPG

One screen is first person view

The other is your inventory and chat screen

It's too hard to actively use 2 screens with one mouse.

Second monitor becomes unusable

[fatwreckfan]

I've always hated how my second monitor becomes unusable during gameplay. I'd like nothing more than to be able to throw my TV app up on the second monitor so I could watch TV while waiting to respawn in Wolf: ET.

Desert Combat mock-up

[southpolesammy]

I like the idea he presents in the article, but I'd rather have FPS games have the action in a middle window and have auxilliary information on the sides. Of course, the problem there is that two screens would divide the picture and three screens get you head swiveling even more than the original layout.

Multi-display gaming will require a lot of these kinds of ergonomic decisions if they are to succeed.

Edges of screens

[Sentosus]

My biggest issues with this is that I need a monitor that allows me to place 2 more monitors on the left and right seemlessly. Such as, I want to extend the screen forward in the form of a lens and then slide the left and right monitors behind it hiding the plastic along the edge of the glass display. I can't have the 2 inches of break in my display when playing FPS games. Put it on both sides and it is twice as annoying. Remove the frame of the monitor and we have this working for games. Otherwise this is going to only slow me down. My desk has a 19 inch CRT, 14 Inch CRT, 17 inch CRT, and 2 laptops. Nothing new, but technology just isn't right.

Cool for some

[Gr8Apes]

Some games I think a dual monitor setup would be awesome. Think any RTS game where the play field is shrunk because of the "instrumentation" or the like, with dual monitors, a lot of this could go to the second monitor. I think it'd be even cooler if you could decide what components went over to the second screen, and only keep those items most important to you on the play field screen. Or, have both the current and a completely non-instrumented view in the second.

I don't think that just spanning the entire screen shot across 2 monitors would be helpful in any way though. Even with LCDs, the break caused by the frames would be somewhat irritating, to me at least. Then again, even the mesh lines on Trinitron monitors are annoying to me, so I may be just a bit more sensitive to those types of things.

As for dual monitors in general, initially I thought why have duals? Just get one bigger better monitor. Now having worked with duals for about 2 years, I love this setup, and would rather have 2 slightly less capable monitors instead of one slightly bigger monitor. Being able to see a full web page and do something else in another screen related to it is way more helpful than switching between two window frames. There are many other instances where dual monitors are useful as well, and I even span both sometimes, although the application I use when doing that is amenable to doing that (eclipse).