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State of Multi-Monitor Gaming?
xtal asks: "What's the current state of multi-monitor gaming? LCD panels are really dropping in price - I've seen a 17" panels for under $400cdn, bringing it into the ballpark where purchasing three of them for a much wider field of view becomes possible. The hardware to drive these displays in a LAN configuration (3 machines, 3 monitors) is also inexpensive, or at least attainable - so when I look around for the state of multi monitor simulation, I don't see much. The best candidates are flight sims, but my interest lies in racing. Are there any suggestions or sites I'm missing?" What games have you played that could have really benefited from a second (or even a third) monitor? Do you think that the games you normally play will be significantly enhanced by the use of multiple monitors, or is one enough?
matrox has a list of games that support mutliple monitor modes:
http://www.matrox.com/mga/3d_gaming/surrgame.cfm
Te audire no possum. Musa sapientum fixa est in aure.
Thats a common feature in flight simulators.
Hivemind harvest in progress..
City of Heroes/Villians does this great. I've got two 19" LCDs, and when in CoH/V, as long as I'm not mouse-looking, zipping over to the other screen for anything is super-easy. The graphics blip for a moment, but if you're paying attention to multiple apps anyway, that should be fine.
Also, IIRC, every Blizzard game I've played pulls off screen-switching just fine. The caveat is that they basically pause, but continue to use every free cycle while task-switched out.
Anyway. That's all for now.
The study that parent is referring to:
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn3628
The definitive source: http://www.realtimesoft.com/multimon/ There is tons of info there along with a database of proven configurations.
Personally, I recommend a Matrox Parhelia with three flat screens. UT2004 looks great and runs smoothly across all three screens.
Currently I use a two monitor setup with WoW on one screen and Slashdot on the other. It actually works great that you can set the game to be windowed and maximized so it looks the same as full screen, but you can move your mouse over to the second screen. Of course, I'm guessing you are using linux because I know that the second monitor on linux will black out when playing games like doom. I don't know how to fix that.
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Being a Nintendo fanboy myself (notice the name), I'll tell you that the DS's second screen/touch screen do jack to inherently improve gameplay, but the games that have been made for the DS have thusfar been superior to the alternatives in my perspective (the alternatives obviously being PSP games).
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You're right about Forza (it's a hidden option), but I think the price disparity is made up for by the fact that AFAIK Forza is the only Xbox game with that feature and it's very unlikely that there will be another since the Xbox is on its last legs. Oh yeah, and you also need to have three copies of Forza Motorsport in addition to the Xboxes and TVs.
Yes, think about it; no other non-flight/space sim really is 3d. They all deal with motion on a 2d plane. Now, that plane my have mulitple tiers, but they all pale when compared to the twisting convoluted tunnels. I don't nessisarily wish for a Descent 4, but I would like to see the idea carried on. SOMEthing to spare the PC from endless FPS/RTS/RPG's.
When you have SLI of Crossfire modes enabled on those cards you can only have one display active. This is actually one of my big pet peeves about SLI. I have two Dell 2405 LCDs and I have to constantly switch SLI off/on to get the second one to work when not gaming.