Multi-monitor, nView vs CCC

[lifeblood]

I use three monitors running off two nvidia card's with nView managing the multi-desktops. It's time to upgrade to new video cards, and I would like to be able to have a choice between Nvidia and ATI/AMD. Has ATI/AMD drivers reached the ease, reliability, and features of nView yet? The last time I tried running multi-monitor with ATI was when I had a Radeon 9600 and I did not like CCC at all. nView offered so much more as well as being easier to use. However, from reading these forums it seems ATI/AMD may have fixed that. Any opinions?

 

[lifeblood]

Surely someone has recently dealt with both nVidia and ATI cards attacehed to two or monitors recently? Does the ATI card allow you to display different desktops on each screen like nview does?

 

[najames]

I don't do Micro$oft stuff, but would recommend look up the known issues for each card your interested in. In Linux these are the know issues for current ATI drivers and quite frankly it sucks a humongous load of flickering elephant dung.


Known Issues (LINUX)

The following section provides a brief description of known issues associated with the latest version of ATI Catalyst? Linux software suite. These issues include:

· There is no support for video playback on the second head in dual head mode. Further details can be found in topic number 737-26985

· Desktop corruption may be noticed when dragging the overlay/video when using dual-display mode. Further details can be found in topic number 737-29578

· A black screen may be observed on some hardware when switching to the console or leaving the X window system when a Vesa framebuffer console driver is used. Further details can be found in topic number 737-30687

· Corruption may be noticed in the lower right corner of the display after the system is running for a long period of time

· Display flicker may be noticed when the gnome screen-saver starts

· Diagonal tearing may be noticed when playing a video file using a video player that utilizes the XVideo extension

· Video playback may look blocky when playing a video file using a video player that utilizes the XVideo extension

· Video Playback may display wrong colors and additional shadow images when cropping or expanding a video file using a video player that utilizes the XVideo extension

· Connecting a display device that supports 1680x1050 to a system running Linux may result in a maximum display resolution of 1280x1024 only being available

· Custom mode lines in xorg.conf may be ignored by the fglrx driver

· Building RPM packages for Mandriva may fail

 

[AmdInside]

For me, nView has a lot of more features than CCC. At home, have NVIDIA card in my PC but on my laptop, it has an ATI card and that is where I would do most of my multiple monitors work. The nview software only works under XP, not Vista.

 

[schneiderguy]

I recently switched from an nvidia card to an ATI card. I have found both of them to be pretty equal except a couple of things that I used with nView that are missing in CCC. There's an option in nView to have a window pop up on the screen you executed it from, however with an ATI card it always pops up on whatever display you last closed it in. Also missing from CCC that nvidia has is the ability to use two seperate wallpapers. To get different wallpapers on both screens you have to make the wallpaper one big image that will equal your monitor's combined resolutions and set it to "tile" in the windows desktop options. For example on two 19 inch LCD's like I have I make a 2560*1024 wallpaper and use that instead of two 1280*1024 wallpapers like I would with an nVidia card.

Neither are very big issues, and I do like having the multimonitor support integrated into CCC instead of being in a seperate place like nView. Also, sometimes nView would "forget" to switch my desktop wallpaper back to the correct resolution after running a fullscreen app that wasnt running at desktop resolution. I would have to re-apply my wallpaper settings to get them to go back to normal. This hasnt happened yet using an ATI card.

Although I personally prefer nView both of them work without many problems.

 

[Tempered81]

ati tray tools by ray adams has excellent multi-monitor support compared to CCC. I just bought an 8800gt and moved from ati, to nview for multidisplay setups, and i prefer ATT.

 

[lifeblood]

Thanks for the input. I guess I can use either ATI or nvidia, although I did want different wallpapers per monitor. My 4 yr old daughter picked out 3 different images for me to use (unicorns, fairies, and dragons of course) on the 3 monitors so I guess I will just have to do what schneiderguy suggested and make them into one big image.