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?

Comments

games list

[uzusan]

matrox has a list of games that support mutliple monitor modes:

http://www.matrox.com/mga/3d_gaming/surrgame.cfm

Re:games list

[FlamingLaird]

This is support for multiple monitors via the Matrox Parhelia card. The interesting thing about the Matrox is that it treats multiple monitors as one large monitor. Say you had three 1024x786 native panels plugged into it... the operating system (and games) thought it was one large monitor with 3072x768 resolution. This meant that all a game had to do to support multiple monitors was offer support for large weird resolutions, which is fairly easy to do in a totally 3d game. Unfortunatly the Parhelia is several years old, and an order of magnitude behind Nvidia and ATI in terms of fill rate.

When you plug multiple monitors into a new Nvidia or ATI card (or cards in SLI or Crossfire), they actually show up to the OS as additional monitors. This is actually the perfered behaviour because it lets you use monitors with different resolutions and sizes together and in non-traditional arangements. Unfortunatly, it means that actual multiple monitor support has to be specifically coded into games.

As far as actual support afaik the only game that offers REAL multiple monitor support is MS FlightSim '98 and above. I'm sure there are others out there either natively or through mods, and I'd be interested to hear about them.

Re:Desktop for the other monitor

[jbarlow]

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.

Re:Female gamers.

[Anonymous Coward]

The study that parent is referring to:

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn3628

Re:Desktop for the other monitor

[Kesch]

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.