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Graphics Software Displays

Triple Headed Desktop Display for Fast 3D Apps? 59

Posted by Cliff from the thee-heads-are-better-than-two dept.
Once Was SGI Customer asks: "My group was once a big SGI user. We run a Powerwall display center with 3 large screens, currently driven by an SGI Onyx Infinite Reality (IR) to provide a single desktop with 3D acceleration across all screens. The Onyx is now old and very slow compared to our Nvidia cards, that do a great job at TwinView display, but not 'TripleView'. I'd like to know if there are any PC manufacturers who make a card that can do what the IR can do (in terms of a single desktop across 3D displays with fast 3D acceleration), but for Windows and Red Hat (now Fedora Core) Linux?"
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Triple Headed Desktop Display for Fast 3D Apps? More

Triple Headed Desktop Display for Fast 3D Apps?

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  • The quick cheap way (Score:2, Informative)

    by RingDev ( 879105 )
    Get a machine with Graphics on the motherboard. Add in a top of the line ATI car for dual monitor support and blammo! 3 monitors ready to go. Works in windows, not sure about *nix though. -Rick
    • A lot of motherboards disable on-board video when you're using an AGP card. My home system is like this- after upgrading, I got an onboard card, and figured it would be an easy way to get dual monitor (along with my existing AGP card). I don't know why it disables the onboard, but it does.. and I don't see any BIOS options or jumpers to change that.

      (I eventually found a pci card, but never actually got around to installing it)

      • Re:The quick cheap way (Score:3, Informative)

        by deicide ( 195 )
        The reason on-board video is disabled is because it is using the same AGP bus which can only support one device. Think of it as an AGP video card soldered into your motherboard, with an option of being turned off when something is inserted into AGP slot.
    • ATI cards have two modes in Linux: 2D mode and crash mode.

      OK, ATI's Linux drivers aren't quite that bad. But all sorts of random things (like the Composite extension) are broken; performance is absymal compared to the Windows drivers -- and, in the case of 2D, often worse than the open-source driver that ships with X.org; and it seems like every other kernel patch breaks the kernel module. If you're doing something serious enough to warrant three monitors and you need something the open-source drivers d

      • I found the example xorg.conf file supplied by nvidia to be more than enough to get twinview working. I had triple monitors at one stage, too, by virtue of a PCI geforce mx200 or somesuch, but I suspect that is not fast enough for what the OP asked for.
    • ATI cards don't work very well under linux, my understanding is that the new SLI NVIDIA cards can support something like 3-4 monitors. You'd probably need to setup Xorg/XFree86 to something like: Option "ConnectedMonitor" "CRT-0, CRT-1, CRT-2" The drivers just got Xinerama support but my guess is that it'd still work.

  • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

    by kerbawya ( 628098 )
    http://www.matrox.com/mga/products/qid/home.cfm [matrox.com] am i wrong or does this satisfy what you are looking for...

  • Twin video cards (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Stone Rhino ( 532581 ) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [ekrapm]> on Friday June 10, 2005 @05:58PM (#12784754) Homepage Journal
    Now that motherboards are supporting multiple video cards, wouldn't it just make more sense to put in two good dualhead cards, instead of struggling to find a single triple head card?

    Just get a good PCI Express-based machine, and fit it with twin dualheads. You can even add a fourth monitor if you want it.

  • Widescreen monitors (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DavidYaw ( 447706 ) on Friday June 10, 2005 @05:58PM (#12784759) Homepage
    Two widescreen monitors would provide the same amount of screen real estate as three normal monitors.

  • Easy fix (Score:3, Informative)

    by XeresRazor ( 142207 ) <shinohara.gmail@com> on Friday June 10, 2005 @05:59PM (#12784767) Homepage
    Simple, get one of the newer motherboards that supports SLI Nvidia cards and plop in a pair of AGP GeForce 6600's or 6800's, instant support for up to 4 monitors if you run in non-SLI mode.

  • Maybe I'm missing something... (Score:4, Informative)

    by malakai ( 136531 ) * on Friday June 10, 2005 @06:01PM (#12784803) Journal
    but just add another graphics card.

    You can put in as many NVIDIA 6600 PCI cards as you have slots. Each of those can drive two panels. I've got clients with 6 panel desktops.

    You can mix AGP and PCI, but depending on BIOS/MB you may have issues. I've seen mix mode work and not work. Seemed to work fine on Dells.

    Often time, the built in MB GPU can not be enabled if you're also using an AGP card (because the mboard on-board GPU is using the AGP bus). So be mindfull of that if you go down that path.

    • You are confusing PCI and PCI Express. NVIDIA 6600 does not come in "PCI" form factor. None of video cards made in last handful of years do.

      There is no way to have multiple AGP slots, but there are indeed boards with two PCI Express slots - for example, the infamous Asus A8N-SLI [hardwareanalysis.com].

      • > NVIDIA 6600 does not come in "PCI" form factor. None of video cards made in last handful of years do.

        That's not true. nVidia 6200 is available in PCI form factor, and so are ATI 9200 variants. Check out ebuyer.com.
    • I've been running multiple video cards in Windows and Linux for several years now. My experience has been the following:

      1) 3D across video cards does not work well. I assume this is because DirectX has to map to a virtual framebuffer before rendering to the screen. Dragging 3D apps across screens (on different video cards) causes slowdown.
      2) Some apps have to be specially programmed to use 3D across multiple cards. Particularly true with games or anything that is going to change screen resolutions on you.
      3
      • I hope MURPHY doesn't read /. posts or this will buy me the farm for sure I've had no real problems at all running two ATI cards to give three monitors. A 7000VE 64meg DDR in the AGP slot takes care of two and an ALL-IN-WONDER VE in the number 0 PCI slot provides the third monitor, TV capture and/or feed. HYDRAVISION takes care of managing the whole setup just fine with very few major hiccups.Parent post is certainly inline with the general experiance regarding ATI drivers, and when they don't want to co-

  • Matrox Parahelia (Score:5, Informative)

    by VargrX ( 104404 ) on Friday June 10, 2005 @06:05PM (#12784834) Journal
    you may want to look at the Parahelia [matrox.com] line from Matrox

    They do triple-head out of the box, nice cards.

  • Nvidia, OpenGL and Xinerama (Score:3, Informative)

    by Ford Prefect ( 8777 ) on Friday June 10, 2005 @06:12PM (#12784905) Homepage
    I note that the latest Nvidia drivers for Linux have added 'initial support for Xinerama + OpenGL' - in other words, I gather you can have a single OpenGL context spanned over multiple graphics cards.

    See Appendix V in the drivers README [nvidia.com] - I haven't tried it, but it sounds like you'll be able to expand to three or more heads, so long as the resulting window is less than 4096 pixels across.

    Any use? I've only got experience with OpenGL on a single, dual-head graphics card thanks to Twinview, but I have to admit that works brilliantly for me. Who knows what this new thing is like. :-)
    • If you want an OpenGL window with more than 4096 pixels across, then you'll have to go distributed for now. Chromium [sf.net] is used by many visualization clusters in combination with Distributed Multihead X [sf.net] (DMX). Chromium distributes OpenGL and DMX provides the unified desktop.

      I've recently heard of a commercial product, VGP [modviz.com], but I don't know how well it works yet.

  • SLI in non-SLI mode (Score:3, Informative)

    by RzUpAnmsCwrds ( 262647 ) on Friday June 10, 2005 @06:32PM (#12785113)
    Get an NForce4 SLI board and run two GeForce PCIe graphics cards (or two ATI PCIe graphics cards). You will be able to support up to four monitors.

    The Matrox Parhelia is slow, as are PCI (not PCIe) cards.

  • Beware of transitioning away from SGI machines. (Score:3, Informative)

    by CyricZ ( 887944 ) on Friday June 10, 2005 @06:48PM (#12785248)
    SGI machines are built to last. They are built to perform. Even if they aren't the fastest or most powerful computers out there, they are amongst the most reliable and industructable systems built. You might get minor performance boosts from an nVidia-based PC, but don't be surprised if that PC overheats and dies within a year. SGI has military-grade strength and quality. PC hardware does not.
    • Most Silicon Graphics systems are indeed built with military-grade strength and quality, especially the big old black Onyx beast and other Challenge L and XL machines from that era.

      But iron like that is old. Really, really Old. The host system architecture dates back to 1993 and the original InfiniteReality 1 graphics date back to about 1995. In those days a wicked cool PC had, at best, a 166 MHz Pentium and a 8 MB Matrox PCI card. Most people were still using Windows 3.1 in VGA resolution on their 486's i
    • You might get minor performance boosts from an nVidia-based PC, but don't be surprised if that PC overheats and dies within a year. SGI has military-grade strength and quality. PC hardware does not.

      A better comment might have been you get what you pay for. Buy a cheapo machine, odds are you will have problems. Buy quality kit, and your expectations of what a workstation should be will remain solid. I suspect I paid more for my power supply and cooling equipment than some complete machines at Wal-Mart..

  • Haw about DMX? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hawkstone ( 233083 ) on Friday June 10, 2005 @07:46PM (#12785662)
    I don't know how well the multi-GPU support works with NVIDIA cards under Linux -- I can only testify that dual monitors from a single card works flawlessly. Others in this thread have indicated it should work well if you can get a new motherboard with dual PCI-E and slap a couple 6800s in it, but I haven't seen it in person.

    What I do know is that you can go to a multi-node system and run DMX [sourceforge.net] (Distributed Multiheaded X11), which was designed to run powerwall displays. You're in the unfortunate position of having a three-headed wall, as going to a multi box system feels like overkill for you. That said, three PCs with a gig-E interconnect is going to cost far less than one Onyx IR pipe, DMX scales well, and we've got much larger walls than that (I forget the number -- maybe 2x4) running beautifully on a cluster. It's stood up to demos to VIPs without crashing, and I believe that's the most failure-inducing state for any setup.

    By the way, DMX is transparent to your application -- it looks just like a single X server with a single OpenGL context. Thus, it can be used with any existing OpenGL apps.
  • You could use ModVis [modviz.com] to image a single data set across multiple monitors. They distribute the image across a cluster of hosts, each of which have a slightly different view. It might be overkill for just three screens, but works very well if you can't do it in hardware.
    • For anyone looking to do this with free software.. it has been around for YEARS. Infact, it was around before XFree86 supported Xinerama! Unfortunately, it does NOT do 3d acceleration; however, I'm providing this information for anyone else still interested.

      Take a look at GGI + XGGI. Run an X11 server on each host and run XGGI, targeting each.

      Take a look at the following screenshot:
      http://www.ggi-project.org/resources/images/doom. j pg [ggi-project.org]

      Now, imagine that each of those tiles was displayed on a separate
      • Another non-3d solution is to run a framebuffer-bound X server (no physical display) and launch multiple copies of region-bound VNC servers.

        The advantage of this over GGI is that one or more of the displays can be shutdown without whacking the entire system.

        There are a couple ways of looking at this. VNC might provide for faster video with more artifacts. GGI might be less robust, but might be better for video -- just be prepared to adjust the audio syncronization.

  • I can't help but think that this is a troll for people to astroturf Matrox's triple head cards. As a Montrealer I like Matrox but they dropped the 3D ball a few years ago.
    • It's not astroturf if you have one, like it and aren't being paid by Matrox. I have one, like it and I am not being paid by Matrox. That said, I don't think I'd recommend it for 3D stuff, though it might be faster for 3D than a top-of-the-line 3D card from two or three years ago.

      I just wish I could afford three big, identical flat-panel displays to really show it off.


      • Don't you think that 3 "big" (say, 19"+) screens would be a bit much for most practical purposes though? I'm thinking field-of-view and getting a sore neck.

        I suppose sitting farther away helps in this regard, but then you might find yourself needing larger text, which kind of defeats the purpose.
        • Well, most 19" LCD screens are poor value at the moment since they typically have the same res as a 17" panel. But otherwise, no, I don't think any sort of wrap-around display system is a bad thing. Currently I have four displays on my desk. Left to right: 1024x768LCD, 1280x1024CRT, 1400x1050LCD, 800x600LCD. I have had six screens all usable as the desktop of one PC before now. After the third monitor, productivity doesn't increase as fast as it costs for all that equipment, but during peak times as ma

  • Wildcat Multiview (Score:5, Informative)

    by miyako ( 632510 ) <miyako@g[ ]l.com ['mai' in gap]> on Saturday June 11, 2005 @01:33AM (#12787427) Homepage Journal
    If your currently using SGI, then I would assume that your not looking for a gaming card. If your doing 3D design work, then you might look into The Wildcat Multiview Card [3dlabs.com]. It only works in conjunction with the Wildcat Realizm [3dlabs.com] cards. Not cheap, at $825 for a midrange card, and nearly $3,000 for the top-of-the-line card and another $420 for the multiview card, but then they are professional cards, not intended for hobbiest or gaming machines.

  • Boring commodity graphics (Score:3, Informative)

    by prefect42 ( 141309 ) on Saturday June 11, 2005 @04:37AM (#12787922)
    Speaking as an SGI admin (Onyx3400 IR2 probably the closest to what you're using) I know where you're coming from.

    a) Don't buy a Prism. It's just got 1 generation old ATI cards in, and the performance is... disappointing.

    b) I reckon to not bother with a single card solution. We've used a Matrox Parhelia under windows, and mostly due to driver shoddiness it wasn't that great.

    c) I'd be tempted (and will be testing a cheaper varient of this out soon to run an IBM 3840x2400 screen) to try a twin Quadro FX 4400 on one of the Nvidia Pro based boards (Tyan seem to be the leader with this at the moment) with twin 16x PCI-E. Nvidia have recently changed their drivers to allow you to use Xinerama and OpenGL across multiple identical cards. Seeing as you've come from SGI, this should be easy to sell financially. The performance is cracking on the FX4400 too, blowing everything else we've got out of the water. You'd manage to put together a dual Xeon 3.6 4Gb machine for something under 8,000 UK pounds.
  • The very latest NV drivers let you do full OpenGL across multiple heads/cards with X+Xinerama. I'm using this now across three separate cards and it seems to work great (at least for funky screensavers). So you might want to give that a go.
  • There are many graphics cards with Twin simultaneous monitor outputs designed for running two monitors at once now. They are nvidia and ATI and relatively cheap - especially on ebay. If you get two - one PCI and one AGP they will BOTH work simultaneously and you can usually get three or even four monitors going at once.

  • I don't have a single desktop in this configuration, as in Xinerama-style single X screen, however I had at some point single kayboard and mouse, and the same computer running applications displayed on three physical screens, mapped to two or three X screens. This [denver.co.us] is how it looked (laptop's keyboard and trackpad work but aren't used), and this [livejournal.com] is how it was done. Two monitors are handled by a dual-monitor nvidia card, and can be configured either as two or a single screen spanning both.

    This configuration

  • While we are on the subject, are there any people who could recommend displays that are tiled in such a way tht the LCD panels are either directly next to each other or at the least have a very thin edge between them?

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