Widescreen Gaming Forum

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

DH2Go, TH2Go, Digital DH2Go

DH2Go, TH2Go, Digital DH2Go

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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