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

DS

[tepples]

Do you think that the games you normally play will be significantly enhanced by the use of multiple monitors, or is one enough?

Just ask any Nintendo DS fanboy ;-)

games list

[uzusan]

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

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

Female gamers.

[Onan]

So have this vague memory of a study done a few years ago. (Far too vague to be able to cite, sorry.) It was examining the "spacial" navigation skills of people in a rendered 3D environment, ala FPS games.

One of the surprising results was that women tested had much more difficulty learning the layout of complex spaces, and avoiding getting lost--when using a 4:3 display. But when a wider aspect ratio display was used (giving more gestalt context, one assumes), not only did testees of both genders do better, but this disparity disappeared.

Previous studies have shown that men and women tend to handle navigation differently, so this is not totally implausible. (And no, I'm not referring to men-asking-for-directions jokes. It seems that men tend to rely more on distance and direction, and women tend to rely more on landmarks.)

So this seems to suggest that not only is a three-across setup a great win for all gamers, but that it might be an interesting tool for narrowing the gender gap.

Re:Female gamers.

[Anonymous Coward]

The study that parent is referring to:

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

Desktop for the other monitor

[Spazmania]

Hell, I'd settle for a game that lets me keep a desktop live on the other monitor so I can use IM and other apps at the same time without needing a second PC.

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.

Problems with games on a dual head system

[jafuser]

Over the past year or so, I've had a few minor problems playing games on my dual-head setup. My main objective was to have my main monitor be for games, while the second would be for IRC (or occasionally, the Web).

The problems I can clearly recall encountering are:

• Fullscreen task switching: For some reason, nearly every game I've tried always minimizes when it loses focus while in fullscreen mode. This is very annoying since I just want to hop over to my IRC window, type something quick, and hop right back to the game. Or maybe I want the game to keep running while I'm chatting, while I wait for something to happen (see next item). Also, usually the minimize/restore process can take a lot of time and doesn't always go smoothly (sometimes the audio volume level is bumped around)
• Automatic pause on defocus: Some games pause when the game loses focus (ie X3). I guess the idea is that if the game isn't the curretly focused application, then you probably want it auto-paused since you might miss something. With two monitors though, i've still got the game filling one whole screen so this is not always true.
• Windowed mode problems: Since fullscreen causes a lot of problems, it seems like the best idea is to try to run things in a maximized window if the game allows it. The problem is that some games won't maximize in windowed mode. For example, EVE Online gives me a list of standard resolutions which I can set the window to, but it can't be resized or maximized. And trying to move the window around is a game in itself since the program likes to grab the mouse pointer when i'm trying to move the window to the top to get it to cover most the screen without cutting off anywhere.
• Glitches on secondary screen: I've often seen games and programs which run fullscreen on my primary monitor will affect the secondary monitor's "bounding box" region for where application windows can be moved to. Usually it causes the left half of the screen to be unusable while the fullscreen game/program is up and running.
• Slowness: I had one game which gave me a really low framerate unless I first disabled my secondary monitor when I started the game; but once the game was running, i could re-enable the second monitor and my framerate was fine.
• The Seam: I haven't really had this problem yet, since I always play games on my primary monitor only; but any even-number of monitors is going to wind up with the problem that the center of your game's action is going to be on the seam between the monitors (unless the game explicitly notices this and compensates). It's too bad there aren't any ATI or nVidia cards which support triple-head monitors so people could do a nice setup with the game action centered on the center monitor.

Generally, I just try to only pick games which will run in windowed mode, and put up with the odd quirks that come up from task switching. I have yet to find a 3D game that runs in windowed mode, properly maximizes, and allows me to task-switch out and back into it without any annoying quirks; or a game which runs fullscreen and doesn't minimize when I task-switch out of it. I just hope as multi-monitor setups become more common, that they will be more thorougly QA-tested in this environment =)

Re:In the old days...

[meringuoid]

(which newbies might call downwards, relatively, since you're upside down, but any proper Descent3 pilot always knows the real up from down).

Easy. The enemy's gate is down.