Widescreen Gaming Forum

As I am not running Vista, nor do I want to right now, I was wondering if anyone tried out the multiple monitor SLI functions of the new 180+ Nvidia drivers?

Is their a performance difference?
Can someone do like a benchmark comparison of the two setups?
Can you even run 3 monitors and SLI or is it limited to two monitors?

im not running SLI as my Dell doesnt have two PCIex16 slots, but I have an 8800GTS 512mb card and im using the 180 driver...when I launch any game, for the first 5 minutes, im getting 6-9 FPS. then it seems like it kicks on and starts working...I went back to the 178 or 179 driver

As I am not running Vista, nor do I want to right now, I was wondering if anyone tried out the multiple monitor SLI functions of the new 180+ Nvidia drivers?

Is their a performance difference?
Can someone do like a benchmark comparison of the two setups?
Can you even run 3 monitors and SLI or is it limited to two monitors?

You can only run 2 monitors with the 180.48 release in SLI mode. Also note that Nvidia adds Vista as system req for this.

Enables NVIDIA SLI Multi-monitor support, giving you the ability to use two monitors with your GeForce graphics cards in SLI mode. Now you can easily switch between multi-monitor desktop mode and full screen 3D gaming mode.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x64_180.48_whql.html

You can also see more info on set ups and what they can do here :
http://www.slizone.com/object/sli_multi_monitor.html

Adding more monitors (or increasing resolution) is always going to be a performance hit. Just how much is the question. And it will vary from game to game. Not all games bottleneck @ the video card.

Not many games that I've run into support native multimonitors. Supreme Commander, World in Conflict, Flight Simulator X all do. Matrox TH2Go works around this issues by making games think its just 1 large screen. I've run Supreme Commander in Multi monitor mode and it was ok. I dont have any benchmark results to show you however. Lack luster multimonitor support leaves you wanting more. Im happier with the TH2Go set up I have.

I knew the vista only thing. What I was wondering though is if it takes up too many resources for the cards to decipher which monitor gets what part of the picture or if having the TH2G uses less resources and is therefore better if you are willing to spend the money.