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Specific ATI dual monitor questions

I

imported_Gorath

Member
Currently I have a GeForce Ti 4400 running dual monitors (the primary a 19" LCD @ 1280x1024/60Hz, secondary a 19" CRT @ 1024x768/100Hz).

Since the LCD only supports 60Hz, and the LCD's native resolution of 1280x1024 is uncomfortable on the CRT, I need to retain the ability to adjust the settings independently on each monitor. nVidia's "nView Display Mode: Dualview" allows me to do this, but last time I checked, the "nView Display Mode: [Horizontal|Vertical] Span" modes did not.

I'm considering getting an ATI graphics card, and I'd like to know whether ATI's drivers support Dualview-like independent montior adjustment.

---

Also, the LCD has a 25ms response time, which is uncomfortably slow in many games. With nVidia's drivers, I can easily change the primary display device on the fly to "trick" a game into running on the CRT. Do ATI's drivers allow that sort of on-the-fly adjustment?

Thanks in advance for your advice.
 
Unfortunately no one has answered, so I don't have information on how convenient/quirk-free these feature are in practice, but I dredged ATI's site and came up with:

From the Hydravision features page (http://www.ati.com/products/hydravision/features.html ):
"""
Set independent resolutions and refresh rates on each monitor.
"""
I tried to download the full Hydravision manual, but the link returned by ATI's search engine doesn't work:
http://www.ati.com/support/manualpdf/HydraVision32.pdf

From the X800 AGP series User Guide:
"""
Dynamic Display Reassignment
You can change the assignment of your Primary and Secondary display
on the fly, without rebooting.
"""

So it looks like ATI's cards+drivers do support the features I need. It would be nice if someone would provide first-hand advice on whether their implementation is quirky/inconvenient conpared to nVidia's.
 
Yes, this works just fine (running with different res/settings on each monitor). In fact, that's pretty much the only way to run multiple monitors with ATI (they didn't support span modes with older drivers).

ATI does supposedly support horizontal/vertical span with the more recent drivers, but I haven't had a chance to play with it (I don't have my second monitor hooked up at the moment).

I have not tried switching 'primary' monitors on the fly for gaming, but it seems to work fine on my HTPC for displaying video (RADEON 9600). It doesn't require a reboot, but I haven't tried running 3D games. I have no reason to believe it wouldn't work, though.
 
You can switch the primary and secondary monitor on the fly with ATI driver also.

Nview is definitely better than Hydravision though.
 
Thanks for your responses!

Although I'd like to do so for organizational purposes, I don't use the nView virtual desktop feature because it doesn't keep the windows in order when I switch away from a virtual desktop and back. In other words, if I have windows A, B, and C open on Desktop 1, and I switch to another desktop and back, the windows might end up in any order (e.g., B, A, C).

This problem applies to all Windows virtual desktop software I've tried; I think the cause is that the underlying Windows API for enumerating open windows makes no guarantees about their ordering. Does Hydravision Multidesk suffer from this problem also?
 
As a follow-up, I wanted to point out that the Hydravision FAQ (http://www.ati.com/products/Hydravision/faq.html ) says:
"""
Do both monitors need to run at the same resolution?
Yes, in Windows 2000 and Windows NT4.0
"""

I use Windows 2000, so that kills my interest in ATI cards. nVidia drivers are able to run the monitors at different resolutions in Windows 2000 just fine, so clearly it's not due to limitations in Windows 2000 that ATI doesn't support this. Guess it's another instance of ATI's legendarily subpar driver support.
 
The Windows 2000 limitation is actually Windows's fault, and the info is a bit outdated. Problem is, W2K treats graphics devices and displays on a 1:1 basis only - on a driver level, you can't hook two displays to one graphics device.

However, newer Radeon chips, just like anyone else's dual-head chips, present themselves as two units, circumventing the problem elegantly. I haven't tried for quite a while, but the problem should be no more.
 
Also ATI doesn't really use hydravision anymore, their multi monitor support is done strait through Catalyst Control Center, not with the seperate Hydravision modeule as before. I have had no problems running dual monitors with different resolutions, but then again I am running windows XP. But I vauguely rememebr what Peter is talking about.
 
Thanks for your responses, guys, but things don't look good for ATI on Windows 2000.

I used the feedback form on ATI's web site about a week ago to ask whether the limitation mentioned in the Hydravision FAQ still applies (i.e., whether the claims on the site are in error), but have received no response.

I also haven't found any positive evidence for ATI elsewhere on the web. This TechReport article (http://techreport.com/reviews/2002q4/multimon/index.x?pg=1 ) from 2002 appears to confirm what the Hydravision FAQ says:
"""
Additional incompatibilities also arise with Windows 2000, where only Matrox's DualHead and NVIDIA's nView are capable of adjusting the resolution, refresh rate, and color depth of multiple monitors independently.
...
ATI's official stance on independent resolutions and refresh rates in Windows 2000 is that it doesn't work...
"""

Note that TechReport considers the basic Catalyst drivers and the Hydravision multi-display helper software separately there, so it seems that pulsedrive's point that "ATI doesn't really use Hydravision anymore" was true then approximately to the degree it is now.

It appears to me that Windows 2000's non-uniform resolution support is indeed inferior to that of Windows XP, but nVidia's and Matrox's driver programmers have circumvented 2000's limitations while ATI's have not.

Chalk up another ATI sale lost to driver issues.
 
I've got 2 CRT's spanned on a 9800 pro amd I have no problem doing anything you mentioned in OP. I run both monitors on same res but I just now tried to change res, refresh and pri/sec monitor and it worked for me, took all of 10 seconds

edit:this is on win2000 with standard(no Catalyst Control Center)drivers
 
I can only repeat that all those quotes refer to old hardware and old drivers, before the ATI chips learned to pull that dual-entity trick.
 
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