Sinful7

I get to play on duals at my office. The right screen won't play videos, tho... Shitty vid cards.

banzaitoyota

My duals at work play vids on both screens, home duals don't

pengaru

some of those cards that have multiple outputs for monitors will have lower performance than otherwise, it really depends on the card but I remember when the newer matroxes came out that had multiple outs for multihead, they were slower when used with dual monitors because it was still only a single GPU being shared on both displays... at least with the multiple card route you have dedicated processors for each display. If only PC's came with multiple AGP slots :smirk:

Turbo II

u guys are so ******* smart

Srce

I know right. I have NO ******' IDEA what PANG said in his first post.



I'll ask again, bare with me. Why do you guys use more than one monitor, and how does it work?

pengaru

hahah



ok well, the 3 monitors can be used in one of two modes in the system I use...



One lets you use each one as a seperate display, so if you start a program on one display, it will always be displayed there, so if I start a web browser, terminal, or chat program on the left monitor, it will always be on that screen. This layout lets me run each monitor in a different configuration if I want, like different color depth for instance. The drawbacks of this setup is a window cannot be dragged from one screen to the other, or span multiple screens for the ultra **** experience. The other mode is called 'Xinerama' in linux land, and it treats all the screens as one. If I use Xinerama I have to run them all in the same configuration (same color depth..) but it lets me have windows span multiple screens, and it lets me drag a window from one screen to the other...



In both modes, the mouse pointer is free to cross screen boundaries, thats basically how I 'focus' which screen I'm using, just drag the mouse pointer to whatever screen I wish to use... and the keyboard will be focused on that one.



This setup is nice if you multitask alot, I will usually have my chatting and web browsing (nopistons) and other fun stuff on one screen, then the other I will have all work related terminals open, and maybe another web browser if I have to fix some web site or lookup information on google or whatever... If I really get deep into something involved, both screens get taken over with work stuff, like one screen will be debugging a program like looking at source, debugger running, etc.. and the other screen I will actually use the program I'm debugging.



Theres also the ability to do multiscreen consoles, in linux you don't necessarily have to be in the graphical environment with the mouse and clicking things etc, in some cases it is more desireable to be in the console environment, which is basically full screen text mode... It's fast, simple, and easy to read... I can run this setup on multiple screens also where it's basically a console per screen.



When I lived with my parents I would use one monitor dedicated to watching movies and such, I had a VCR plugged into a frame grabber card, and had a old voodoo PCI card plugged into a dedicated monitor. I slapped together a program to watch tv from the frame grabber displaying it onto the voodoo card, so the one monitor was just to watch movies (I was obsessed with some anime at the time) and it wouldnt interfere with my normal stuff becuase my 'work' display was free to do whatever.



The plain simple answer is adding more monitors, providing your operating system is flexible enough (most modern ones are), has the same effect as doubling your screen resolution. So you have more 'real estate' on your display for applications to be viewable in... Less requirement to have programs overlapping in graphical environments... and in non-graphical environments just the ability to have multiple simultaneously viewable consoles. (if the term console doesnt make sense, think DOS.. it's similar to that, now think being able to use two instances of DOS on two screens at once, with a really powerful command interface that renders graphical interfaces obsolete, that is, if you know how to use it. (this is a really simple view, you can do alot more))





srce94fd, since you're local, maybe sometime I can give you a tour of work and show you some pimp computing