How can i play games over 2 screens?

coslov · Post by **coslov** » 13 Feb 2007, 19:26

Hi,

This may sound like a silly question to you guys but i have been looking around the site for a while now and i am still confused.

I want to be able to play games such as half life 2 and age of empires 3 across 2 screens. My laptop has vga and hdmi outputs. I plugged the monitor into the vga and when i tried the games out there were no options for multiscreen or anything.
How do you guys do it?

any help will be much appreciated!

Thanks

bandito · Post by **bandito** » 14 Feb 2007, 02:05

DH2Go, TH2Go, Digital DH2Go

DaFox · Post by **DaFox** » 14 Feb 2007, 03:49

DH2Go, TH2Go, Digital DH2Go

DH and TH stand for Dual Head and Triple Head respectively.

JKeefe · Post by **JKeefe** » 14 Feb 2007, 20:05

After you plug in the second monitor, you have to tell Windows to "extend my desktop onto this monitor). You can then span your view across the two, making Windows think you have one very wide monitor. Doing this, you don't need a DualHead2Go or a TripleHead2Go.

However, that might look awfully weird since you'll have a terrible time matching up the two displays. If you decide that's the case, take a look at the "2Go" products from Matrox.

Tecno · Post by **Tecno** » 16 Feb 2007, 02:07

If you make the game window (if possible) you can usually stretch the window to fill both monitors.

Unfortunately, that makes the frame rates fall to absurdly low numbers (normal 60 fps, spanned 5-10). This is because with the separate monitor ports most cards (matrox excluded) are not designed to take part of the GPU and display half the image on on monitor and the other half on the second monitor.

The only real way the multi gaming is available is with the DualHead2go, DualHead2go DVI edition, or everyones favorite the TripleHead2go.

This box makes the computer think that there is ONE really large monitor, and the matrox box then takes that image and splits it among the two, or three smaller monitors. Thus overcoming the video card pipelining shortfall.

JKeefe · Post by **JKeefe** » 16 Feb 2007, 17:56

Tecno, I think that's misleading in this situation. The framerate drop you get when windowing a game over multiple monitors only applies when those monitors are driven by more than one graphics card. If you use a single dualhead graphics card to do it, there is no framerate drop.

Presumably a laptops's LCD and its VGA connection are driven by the same video card, so in this case it would not apply.

starfighter · Post by **starfighter** » 18 Feb 2007, 14:22

If you use a single dualhead graphics card to do it, there is no framerate drop.

Jkeefe means there is no stronger framerate drop than according to the higher resolution.
SO is you had 60 fps at double res. it will be theoretically 30fps.

JKeefe · Post by **JKeefe** » 20 Feb 2007, 22:00

Right - the only framerate drop is due to the resolution increase.

Expecting a linear and 1:1 relationship between pixle count is misleading as well, as rarely is that the case. If the game was totally dependent on pixel throughput this might be the case (and very well could be the case with onboard laptop video), but often a game's framerate is at least somewhat affected by the CPU and other system components.

starfighter · Post by **starfighter** » 21 Feb 2007, 00:34

but often a game's framerate is at least somewhat affected by the CPU and other system components.

Is you take the min. resolution with 1280 desktop and 1024 notebook a dubbled resolution is almost always not cpu limited excepted you got a unbalanced system like Geforce 7 AGP combined with Athlon 1000 Mhz.

Post by **BHawthorne** » 21 Feb 2007, 19:26

If your video is Geforce based, enable horizontal spanning mode.

Tecno · Post by **Tecno** » 25 Feb 2007, 14:50

JKeefe,

Actually my experiance was with a single dual head video card, it was a GeForce card, but I preferred to have the horizontal spanning disabled. That way, the second monitor would not go black when I had a game running, and could see messages typed to me in IM.

I never bothered trying to run a game across the two monitors using horizontal spanning, so my configuration was just probably bad.

starfighter · Post by **starfighter** » 25 Feb 2007, 21:05

JKeefe,

Actually my experiance was with a single dual head video card, it was a GeForce card, but I preferred to have the horizontal spanning disabled. That way, the second monitor would not go black when I had a game running, and could see messages typed to me in IM.

I never bothered trying to run a game across the two monitors using horizontal spanning, so my configuration was just probably bad.

I have no framerate drop with dual monitoring (Ati), but running the game only on dispay 1!

jeffc418 · Post by **jeffc418** » 24 Apr 2007, 01:03

I'm trying to do the same thing, but I'm running Vista. All I want is The Sims 2 to run across two monitors. I have a GeForce video card. Please help! Thanks.

diehardDanny · Post by **diehardDanny** » 24 Apr 2007, 09:06

I'm trying to do the same thing, but I'm running Vista. All I want is The Sims 2 to run across two monitors. I have a GeForce video card. Please help! Thanks.

If you're running Forceware-Drivers, right click on Desktop, select NVIDIA Control Panel, then Display and then in the lower part you should have an option like "Multi Display: Change Configuration"

jeffc418 · Post by **jeffc418** » 24 Apr 2007, 12:12

Thanks! But I'm running Vista and I don't get the Properties option when I right-click the desktop.

antihero · Post by **antihero** » 28 Apr 2007, 08:18

when you right click hit personalize instead it is the same thing :o

jeffc418 · Post by **jeffc418** » 28 Apr 2007, 14:54

Yes, but in Vista they got rid of the Horizontal Span mode.

starfighter · Post by **starfighter** » 28 Apr 2007, 19:52

Yes, but in Vista they got rid of the Horizontal Span mode.

If that is true it will be not possibly to play spanned games-

jeffc418 · Post by **jeffc418** » 28 Apr 2007, 22:46

What about with a DH2G?

Post by **Paddy the Wak** » 28 Apr 2007, 23:03

Yeah it should work with Vista ...
From the Matrox product page ...

Requirements
â€¢ Single VGA output connector, on a compatible system
â€¢ MicrosoftÂ® WindowsÂ® XP, Windows 2000, Windows XP x64bit, Windows Vistaâ„¢, or MacÂ® OS X v10.4 operating system
â€¢ Graphics hardware and display driver supporting a 2048 x 768 or 2560 x 1024 resolution

http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/cadgis/products/dh2go/dh2go.php

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