its nice that ATI brings it to the mainstream so that developer support will be better over time. With Matrox TH2Go it is lacking at best, which isn’t Matrox’s fault, just lazy devs who dont want to please a niche market.

I really hope Ati can get mixed resolutions to work right.
A 1920*1200 widescreen in the middle and 2 1600*1200 4:3 screens on the sides would be the optimum in deskplace saving immersion gaming for me ^_^

My only attempt at actual multi-monitor gaming was when I installed a copy of Vista purely to try out World in Conflict. They had a feature whereby you could do the action on one monitor, and the 3D overhead map on the other monitor, and therefore have both immediate control and situational awareness.

Unfortunately, going from XP to (single-monitor) Vista pretty much cut my framerate in half, and going to the dual-monitor setup cut it in half again. So what was already a slightly dodgy framerate became a slideshow. Obviously I was glad I had done this on a spare HDD and could just rearrange some wires and be back to XP, where I’ve stayed ever since.

That said, multiple monitors are far from useless. My main uses for them:

1: Actual legitimate stuff, like development or web browsing. In particular, web programming — browser on one monitor, text editors and SSH sessions on the other.

2: Playing a game on the middle one while I monitor other stuff on the side ones. That may include IRC, MUSHes, my Steam friends list, etc.

3: Multi-clienting in MMOs. I actually used both my computers for that, and I’ve been known to set up foot-pedal control for the helper character. (One pedal = heal, other pedal = follow.)

4: Playing other games while I play MMOs. For the boring bits, like travelling. (Of course, this was part of what made me realise I should stop playing MMOs. The “game” is so “fun” that I need to play other games at the same time? Oy.)

So yeah, multiple monitors are a big win for me, even if I’ve abolished uses #3 and #4 by telling MMOs to go fu play themselves.

One of the suits setup 2 screens in 2002 or so and was amazed at the productivity difference and thus made it company policy.

It’s very real, two screens makes life super productive for business stuff. Especially once you become ninja at shifting windows across screens etc.

For games, well I’ve used it a few times for laughs, but its’ kind of slow in some games and kind of useless in others. I can see the benefit for immersion in 3D games, as long as the PC/video card can keep up. Otherwise, Game on one screen, IM / email on the other for me.

For video then there’s a practical resolution limit as you say (although I suspect it’s still above 1080p), but I think Alec’s immersion idea might be more the point.

More complex games could also make use of peripheral screens to display additional content, although that’s been possible for a while now and very few games actually seem to enable it (SupCom being example that falls immediately to mind). The problem until now has been, as far as I can tell, that devs have been loath to “waste” dev time/rendering budget on supporting a second screen which comparatively people will have, and the use of which could cause a major fps drop. If these new cards have got sufficient headroom or capability that there’s no major cost to at least put map elements/status displays on an additional screen, then that might be a good start, particularly for palette-tastic interface games like WoW and sim-type games with dials and displays everywhere.

Old. Old!

No bezel problems for your crosshairs and lots of lovely peripheral vision.

What’s that? Yes, I am rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

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Well, it’s kinda like a helmet view :)

I’d wondered the other day why leaked photos of the new GPUs had 3 or 4 ports on them, and this is why, apparently. What I want to know is what happens if you put 2-4 of these things in Crossfire? 12-24 monitor support?

Up until this, I don’t think most games supported multiple monitors all that well. This makes it even more tempting to pick up some cheap 22in monitors on Black Friday to compliment my 24. I love coding on my 24, and it would be totally awesome to have even more screen real estate. The problem being, I won’t be upgrading my graphics card for another 2 years or so. Hmmm.