stingerhs Posted April 17, 2005 Share Posted April 17, 2005 if you can't tell by the title, i'm trying out running two monitors on my computer to see how things work out. anyways, i was curious if anyone else has a setup like this and, more particularly, what your thoughts are about the setup. anyways, here's a couple of sample questions that i wouldn't mind hearing some answers to. 1. does it affect your computer's performance, and how so? 2. how well does this setup work in a gaming environment (running a full screen game)? i realize that this probably won't be a very popular thread, but i'm just kinda curious. to the mods: i posted it here because this has very little to do with TSL, so it doesn't really classify as Workbench material. edit: and if you don't have a duel monitor setup, but you still feel inclined to post, then by all means post (just don't spam). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bimmerman Posted April 17, 2005 Share Posted April 17, 2005 1) I have a dual monitor setup- 2 17inch monitors on a Radeon 9800 Pro 128mb card, and I have not noticed any performance issues. 2) It does not affect full-screen playing(on my card at least) but does not allow you to play games on both monitors simultaneously or one game over both. I have heard NVidia cards and Matrox allow you to do this, but I have no experience in the matter. Hope this helps Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ChAiNz.2da Posted April 17, 2005 Share Posted April 17, 2005 I have dual monitor setups on my MAC, my PC and my work MAC Ever since then, I don't know what I would do without them to be honest... The extra desktop "real estate" especially comes in handy for multiple programs, or progs such as Photoshop, modeling, editing, etc.... where you can place your palettes on the opposite screen away from your working area... or in your case (I've seen your Ruling Kingdom in the Workbench section ), multiple windows for debugging, testing, benchmarking and such... I haven't seen any processor lag on my end, though my lowest machine has 2gb of RAM. Add a highend, high video Ram card and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised FYI, for those wanting dual monitor setups, the relatively inexpensive nVidia FX5200 can handle "dualies" quite easily..(my old card) though I'm unfamiliar with the ATI family of cards... For gaming, I use one monitor for the game itself, and "strategically" place cheat sheets, codes... or whatever "aid" on the other monitor. Most games (but not all) will only support 1 monitor setups (standard monitor resolutions), but there are a few out there that will allow for the 'panoramic' style setup... mostly simulators and such... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tupac Amaru Posted April 17, 2005 Share Posted April 17, 2005 I have been using two monitors for five years and would never go back to one. Doubling the desktop space is too good. I didn't notice any performance lags. Don't know about ATI, but Nvidia uses different GPUs for each monitor. There is only one minor issue with same games like Kotor. If I move my mouse all the way to the left, it will move out of the game and land on my second monitor. No problem with mousejail, though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ChAiNz.2da Posted April 17, 2005 Share Posted April 17, 2005 Originally posted by Tupac Amaru There is only one minor issue with same games like Kotor. If I move my mouse all the way to the left, it will move out of the game and land on my second monitor. No problem with mousejail, though. Same here... I've found myself to get pretty proficient with the WASD keys Though I haven't heard about 'mousejail'... I may have to look into that. Thanks for the tip! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rogue15 Posted April 17, 2005 Share Posted April 17, 2005 I had a setup like that a while back with my old computer. It was so awesome that I cried when my video card stopped working and i had to go back to just 1 monitor. I'm used to single-monitor right now, and don't feel like setting up dual display.....though it is SO DAMN GOOD. I remember i'd have the net browser on one monitor, and IM or mIRC on the other....that was so fun! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tupac Amaru Posted April 17, 2005 Share Posted April 17, 2005 Originally posted by ChAiNz.2da Same here... I've found myself to get pretty proficient with the WASD keys Though I haven't heard about 'mousejail'... I may have to look into that. Thanks for the tip! You can get it here: MouseJail. Very useful. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ChAiNz.2da Posted April 17, 2005 Share Posted April 17, 2005 Originally posted by Tupac Amaru You can get it here: MouseJail. Very useful. Thanks! Some of the other tools on the site will come in handy too @stingerhs How's everything coming along? Have you set up your dual-ies and played around yet? One thing I should mention, though there may be a simple fix I haven't found yet.. is that when you do a screen capture via PrtScn (print screen)... both monitor displays are captured... so you may have to do some cropping. Though I'm sure there's a setting that will allow you to capture a particular screen somewhere... However for games (ie TSL), the print screen will only capture the actual gaming screen... whew... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stingerhs Posted April 17, 2005 Author Share Posted April 17, 2005 thanx for the replies folks. and i'll admit that after messing with the options for a while, i really prefer duel monitors over a single. the extra workspace is just incredible. and i did some quick bechmarks on Half-Life 2, Far Cry, and Kotor 2. so far, performance loss is negligable at the most. there really was no difference between the games except Far Cry where i had a 2 fps loss (as i said, negligable). and a big thank you to Tupac for the link to MouseJail. i ran into a weird mouse problem with Kotor 2 that was quickly overcome with that program. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ChAiNz.2da Posted April 17, 2005 Share Posted April 17, 2005 Originally posted by stingerhs and i did some quick bechmarks on Half-Life 2, Far Cry, and Kotor 2. so far, performance loss is negligable at the most. there really was no difference between the games except Far Cry where i had a 2 fps loss (as i said, negligable). One thing I found to reduce the FPS loss.. (the long way around "fix").. is that if you plan on just "soley" playing the game for fun... setup a profile that disables the secondary monitor, run msconfig.exe and go into the "Startup" tab... there you can click the checkboxes for programs running in your background that you know for a fact won't be utilized during the game... (just make sure you reset those values after playing)... When I want to play a hardcore gaming session, I'll usually disable my antivirus, put my modem on standby, disable the secondary monitor (via profile)... then reboot the system into the "gaming setup".. my FPS jump when I do this... For a simple TSL FPS fix... if you don't want to go through all the above mentioned hassle.. startup a game, then ALT+Enter to run in windowed mode, then ALT+Enter again to return to Full Screen. This manages to refresh your system's video rates and the game runs smooth as silk... For the Windowed mode option, you'll need to add this line in your swkotor2.ini under the [Graphics Options] header: AllowWindowedMode=1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stingerhs Posted April 17, 2005 Author Share Posted April 17, 2005 ^^^^ heh, i've known about the msconfig thing for a very long time (i used to use it all the time on my old machine to get a much needed fps boost). and it is a bit of a hassle to mess around with that, although i do have a seperate 'gaming' username for that kind of thing. and, in all honesty, i didn't know about the alt-enter thing for TSL. thanx for the info (and i'll check back in later to check my TSL fps average). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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