Crossfire isn't out yet, probably wont be out for 7234872384772years
Seriously, an sli setup will work for up to 4 monitors (10 actually, but we wont get into that) , either with a traditional 2 card setup or one of gigabyte's gd1 cards (2 cards on one card for sli)
Are you sure sli gives extra monitor support, the reading of done on vendor sites suggests that if u have two dual head cards in sli mode u loose the dual head functionality
at work i could use 3 monitors
1 for the game i'm devolping
1 for the code itself
1 for the debug information ( var watches, memories and reg view, etc ).
I know tomshardware site well have been visiting it for years :P that articale doesnt clearly state that they are testing dx9 3d graphic screens (such as an lfs window) stretched across several monitors.. infact in the Benchmark and Settings section of the article you link to it is just mentioning normal resolutions you would expect on a single monitor.
When i do a search at the nvidia site about this it says,
Question
Will NVIDIA SLI™ support surround gaming with 3 or more monitors?
Answer
NVIDIA SLI™ based products can only support a single display within SLI mode. Up to four displays are supported when SLI software mode is disabled.
From this info though im still not convinced that surround gaming can be achieved on three monitors (except the matrox Parhelia), on two yes but three or more its still unclear.. anyway I plan to write some emails to graphic card vendors in the next day or two so will see if i can get a response back from them
LFS supports multi screen using a single "surface" as excellently provided by Matrox Parhelia graphcs cards.
It does not support multi-screen with multiple video cards. This is hard to program, and is a bad idea for every single game manufacturer to have to do this individually, when a video card manufacturer can do this in its drivers and hardware, so solving it for all games at once.
The video card manufacturers don't make any more triple head cards because they believe that you won't buy them. This is the problem, you need to tell them that you want it - or else they will just carry on making dual head cards as they do now - totally useless for gaming.
So please write to NVidia and ATI - and let them know you would like a fast, modern, triple head card. Also write to Matrox and ask if they will make an updated, fast Matrox Parhelia.
You see, I've just bought a dual screen card, and i also have another computer, so I could use the descrption said in the other page(Vain's example). Is this possible with this setup?
I'm not sure about that... because the bar would be in the middle which makes it pointless. But i think someone has use a fixed turn angle before, so they got more view angle in one direction.
About multiple screens by using multiple computers connected, i think that is an easier option than supporting multiple video cards in a single computer. But although it's a nice thing to support, it's a bit low priority compared with several other things. I don't know if it will be supported by LFS in future, or if Direct X or video card manufacturers will make it easy to support multiple screens, before we reach that time.
The driver support for hardware-accelerated multi-GFX-board surfaces will propably be a good year or more away. If I had the LFS sourcecode on my HDD I'd head for the LFS-built-in support for multiple cards. Except of course when the structure of LFS doesn't support that for-god's-sake.
Though... my experience is restricted to OpenGL. I've got no clue wether you'd have to sacrifice a virgin to MS to get DirectX to draw across multiple GFX-boards.
People buy 100$ expensive wheels for LFS. They (including me) will surely also buy 2 additional monitors and a secondary GFX-board for LFS.
Direct3D implementation of multimonitor support sucks, since you have to create all textures, vertex buffers, etc. to each device separately which is a real mess, not to mention how much it wastes memory from the card. And you have to do it all in one single application, you cannot have multiple applications running at the same time that would use a fullscreen device (So for example running two instances of LFS would not work, except windowed). There doesn't even seem to be any way to transfer surfaces from one device to another even if the devices are on the same card, so you cannot render everything on one device and just move the finished frame to the other device to be displayed (An attempt to do this caused a BSOD in the nvidia driver for me :smash3d: ).
I havent personally tried using multiple monitors with OpenGL, but I would assume all you need to do is change the render target to the other full screen window? Does it work right even if you have two video cards installed, with OpenGL handling all the texture transfers etc. transparently?
How about doing multimonitor the same way that Gran Turismo handles it? In other words, use a second PC and a second monitor and have that machine display the driver's view, but turned a few degrees to one side.
There are some drawbacks to this, of course. You'll need a second (and maybe third) PC, as well as the extra monitors. Also, doing this online would mean using at least one additional spectator slot in addition to the normal slot you would normally occupy.
Not the best solution, but it might work for those of you who REALLY want the wider view but don't want to use the Parhelia. Of course, this method could also be used for rear view, status view, etc. which you can't do with the Parhelia.
I tried dual monitor setup with LFS (2560x1024) on NV6800GT, max details, 60FPS (vsync on) with 2x TFT monitors, it runs very fine, but the line in the middle is really disturbing, and changing the view manually does not allow you to fix it sufficiently.
I tried other games too,
Doom3: no go
UT2003: only when in Windowed mode
FarCry: flawless integration (like LFS)
rFactor: flawless integration (allows changing view in cockpit a bit better, letting you view the track on monitor1 and right side+stats on left screen)
Serious Sam has a special multi monitor mode, it automatically displays stats on the right screen and the in-game image on the left.. very much like the peeps here want for LFS.
i don't understand, if i buy a dual head graphic card, can i put the left view on the second monitor while having the front view on the primary?
is it possible to use some lfs add-on (lfs-spectator?) to achieve this result? i explain better:
- 3 pc over a LAN
- the main pc connected to an internet server and running lfs-spectator
- the 2 other pc connected to the master pc trough lfs-spectator and viewing me with left and right view respectively
is it possible?
thanks!
EDIT:
sorry, i completely misunderstood what lfs-spectator does, but the question now is: how much effort will require to implement such feature into lfs (ie allowing a client to relay packets to another 2 clients)?
jmkz:
What about turning a custom cockpit-view 45° or whatever to the left? The front part would appear on the right monitor, the left part on the left monitor. You'd need to fiddle around with the custom view a lot, but it should work.
