Is this technically feasible?

[Havelcek]

I'm in the middle of building a new gaming rig and have run into some confusion regarding configuration of video cards that will best suit my purposes.

I basically play World of Warcraft, 5 accounts at the same time...currently on two computers. I want to do this on one computer in the future, using two LCD monitors. One monitor will have my main, and the other will have my 4 alts tiled.

Now people are basically doing this with 8800GTX's pretty successfully but since money isn't a big issue I'm wondering if I can somehow use a second card in this setup to get more bang. Can you put two cards in a machine and run a landscaped Windows desktop across the two monitors without using SLI? (WoW doesn't support SLI).

Any thoughts?

 

[drebo]

SLI does not currently support multiple monitors in 3D mode...so, no, you can't do that.

 

[Fieryphoenix]

You should be able to have one card drive its own monitor for desktop display, but I suspect the 2nd card could not do 3D acceleration for its monitor, so, no. I think it's something that is possible in the sense that code could be written to make it work, but it's not possible as something you, not having access to recode Windows and the NVidia driver, could do.

To actually use SLI with a setup like that would be possible, though you mention WoW does not support it. It would require an external adapter like the Matrox TripleHead2Go. The way that works is that the TripleHead controls the monitors, and your PC sees the TripleHead as if it were its own monitor, which will report itself as being the same height but double the width of your monitors' resolution.

 

[v8envy]

Remember that SLI simply performs the same work twice, once per card. Now, having two video cards *NOT* set up for SLI -- if you have each monitor on different cards then in theory this should work great.

As far as multimonitor + SLI -- there are several hardware solutions which present multiple LCDs as one really wide or/or tall monitor with one input to the graphics card. You could try and run 5x windowed clients there with SLI enabled. Not sure that'd work.

As someone who sometimes runs 4x MMO clients at once, I've found the biggest blocker to be the amount of video ram. Looks like each instance gets its own copy of textures &c. Forget about SLI, it's the wrong tech for this problem.

Also, as I hear WoW is a CPU pig. With 5 clients your CPU (and RAM bandwidth) may be a bigger issue than not having enough video firepower.

 

[Seggybop]

When you use two different pci-e cards, Windows will assign one card as primary and all the rendering will be handled by it. The secondary card won't actually do the rendering for the monitors attached to it unless the game's settings allow you to specifically assign the renderer, and even then having multiple instances of the same program with different settings would probably cause problems.

If you want extra performance from multiple cards, I think the best way to do it is to get ATI cards in Crossfire. They support multi monitor fine and they will of course share the rendering load.

 

[nitromullet]

I basically play World of Warcraft, 5 accounts at the same time...

I think the question you should be is asking is not "can I?", but "should I?"...

 

[Jax Omen]

So he pays Blizzard $75/month for the pleasure of cheating in an MMO?

Wow.

 

[v8envy]

Well, he could be financing his gameplay with in-game lewt and services. The makers of Eve Online (CCP) sanction this -- you can trade in-game currency for time codes with in-game support. That's how they try and keep the offshore farmers away. They know people with jobs would rather pay an extra few $ than grind, and they're rather the income go to them instead of offshore MMO farms. It's a mildly successful strategy.

With Eve having > 1 account is a pretty big boost in earning power. With 3-4 accounts I haven't had to pay for a subscription since late 2006. I could really go overboard and run 10+ accounts to truly kick earnings into high gear, but then I'd feel like I'm working a second job at a one-man sweatshop rather than playing a game.