Multi-Display Graphics Suites Compared

Bender writes "There's an interesting comparison at TR between the major graphics players' multi-desktop software/hardware suites, like NVIDIA's nView and Matrox DualHead. These suites provide monitor positioning, application-level window memory, multiple virtual desktops, and the like. This is necessarily a Windows-centric comparison, but it's interesting to consider how Linux, X, and various desktop managers would match up with these solutions in terms of features and abilities."

No

[gowen]

And the more tasks you have going on at once, the more constrained you'll be by the limited desktop area provided by even a screen capable of resolutions as high as 1600x1200. The next logical step is adding a second monitor, or perhaps a third

No. The next logical step is virtual desktops. One monitor, many desktops. You need lots of windows, but no-one is smart enough to want to look at them all at the same time. And Alt-F1/Alt-F2/Alt-F3 is much less likely to give you a serious crick in your neck.

desktop enhancement

[SexyKellyOsbourne]

It's good that all these fancy graphics cards are going to better use than trying to achieve a "constant 60 (fps)" in Doom III. No more will people be able to claim that they achieve optimal desktop usage with a 1MB Cirrus Logic 7440 graphics card.

There's a lot more that could be done for Linux desktops and especially Windows XP, though MacOS leads the way. Everything is like a pdf file, rendered quickly and seamlessly through OpenGL.

It's a shame, however, that third parties have to hack in extended desktop support externally for Windows, as its GUI integration was a truly pitiful idea. With Linux, the source can be modified, but unfortunately companies have little reason to do so.

Going back to one display might suck...

[Sodakar]

...not because of the desktop space that you lose, but because applications will still remember your desktop space as being double, and will leave some of your apps stranded off-screen. Maybe I was just unlucky, but neither software package fixed this for me.

Of course, you can still move main windows via keyboard shortcuts, but certain detachable, child windows of applications (eg, Winamp's Playlist) could not be accessed via keyboard shortcut to move, and were stuck off-screen. The only fix was to re-attach the second display, or uninstall/reinstall Winamp so that it would forget all of its screen positions.

I'm sure there's another way to fix window position memory configs (via registry and what-not), but really -- shouldn't the software take care of this for me? Neither software did much to help me once the second display was removed, and the screen resolution adjusted down to one display. Somewhat thoughtless, IMHO.

Too much real estate?...

[dubious9]

Needless to say a lot of people here will complain that nobody will use more than a monitor of screen space, or that two would be over kill.

<rant>Seriously though, developers will take as much space as you can throw at them, and they will be more productive. Really, when will managers and procurement people realize that programmers need bigger screens and faster/better boxen? I'm tired of watching our department clerk get the newest machine simply because she's been here 20 years.</rant>

"Cranky Old Guy" and the Mac

[nweaver]

Hell, I remember running a dual head/dual monitor setup back on an old, dusty Mac II with 2 video cards.

Why has it taken >15 years for the Windows world to finally catch up?

Re:Multi-monitor in Linux...

[cs668]

X will do this without any extra drivers.

The Xinerama extention ships with every current distribution that I know of. You just need to configure it.

Dual-display cards suck. Use TWO cards

[Brother52]

I'm writing this from a machine with two displays and TWO cards: Matrox G400 AGP and Matrox Millenium II PCI. This is what I came to after a long quest for a dualhead setup.

Just a few points:

1. There're still very few dualhead cards on the marked, thus much less chance to find one with the features you need.
2. They're generally overpriced, probably because they're percieved as a high-end product.
3. If you go for one, READ THE FINE PRINT. For example, the dualhead Matrox G450 has a DEGRADED DAC, compared to G400, which isn't noted anywhere but in the raw specs (and NOT in pretty side-by-side comparisons on the Matrox's site)

And while with the dual card setup one card has to be PCI, you can still build a way more powerful combination, compared to any dualhead card.

No really?

[Nexus7]

You mean the Linux program detects your graphics cards and configures them for multimonitor (same as Xinerama?) use, like, automatically? Even if you don't have a multihead card? Wow, I think there's just one Windows version (95, I think) that can do that. I mean, aren't things supposed to be hard to do in Linux? That's what the Windows and Mac people are saying on /.

Can you do multimonitor with multiple graphics cards on Macs?

Do the Linux and XFree people realize they're not supposed to make things easy and powerful?

*Back to serious mode*
All this hokey-pokey's been done by X, years ago. Multimonitor, portable sessions, remote clients, graphical sessions over slow links, you name it. People should give the X Consortium a lot more credit than M$oft or Apple. I didn't have the xfreecfg but it took me only some Googling (Dejanews, back then) and a couple of tries correcting typos to get dual head on cheapo ATI cards from EBay. And that was about 3 years ago, when XFree86 was released.