triple head - parhelia replacement

[fortressgame]

i have a triple head setup using a matrox parhelia 128mb card. i do game development, and find 3 monitors to be a huge productivity boost. plus, some games look really nice on it

anyway, the parhelia was never that fast, and i'm finding now that certain textures will not load properly into it. that is, a texture of 384x384 won't load, but 256x256 does. almost all major games work fine however. just not that fast anymore.

i haven't done much testing, but since the card isn't all that fast anyway I was thinking of replacing it with 3 newer cards. that is, i'm replacing 1 triple output card with 3 regular cards.

does anyone know, is this totally doable? i haven't really found anyone who has done this. i just want to plug them in, configure it to run all 3 cards as a big canvas and be done with it.

i have a media center pc with dual outputs, and i got that working just fine like this, but that's 1 card, 2 outputs. i want to try 3 cards, 3 outputs.

does anyone have experience with this? i was thinking of running 3 X800 XT PE's. SLI looks fun, but i really want lots of real estate instead.

will 3 x8000 xt pe's in one computer work? (or should i get the parhelia 256mb card?? too confused)

 

[jasonja]

You can do this with 2 cards. Most cards out now support dual view... get one of those and a 2nd cheapo PCI card to drive the 3rd monitor. All your games with run on the primary dual monitor card and the 3rd cheapo PCI one is just a frame buffer.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: jasonja
You can do this with 2 cards. Most cards out now support dual view... get one of those and a 2nd cheapo PCI card to drive the 3rd monitor. All your games with run on the primary dual monitor card and the 3rd cheapo PCI one is just a frame buffer.

Actually, if you read his post, this will NOT work. He wants to 'span' his monitor across three screens, and, unfortunately, thus far that Parhelia is the ONLY card that supports this. NVIDIA dual-head cards can span across two monitors, and adding a third PCI card will (of course) get you a third screen, but it will be a separate display -- you won't be able to have a 'fullscreen' application stretched across all 3 of them. ATI cards currently cannot 'span' at all -- every monitor is treated as a separate display. You can stretch windowed applications or games across multiple monitors, but it may not work well (or at all) with 3D games or things that use video overlay (like most DVD player software).

 

[otispunkmeyer]

listen to this guy he knows his stuff! put me in my place a few mins ago!!!

 

[fortressgame]

sounds like he does know his stuff!



SO it sounds like I need to stick with Matrox Parhelia, and from the looks of it, we'll see a Parhelia 512, but i don't know when.

Do you suppose that my texture loading problem is related to the fact that I have a Parhelia 128 and would be solved if i get a Parhelia 256?

it's a $600 move, so would be great to know if possibly it would help.

the only difference i can see between the two is 256 DDR memory as opposed to 128mb

and it appears there's no way to simply add more ram to my existing card?

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: fortressgame
sounds like he does know his stuff!

Hey, I try.

SO it sounds like I need to stick with Matrox Parhelia, and from the looks of it, we'll see a Parhelia 512, but i don't know when.

Do you suppose that my texture loading problem is related to the fact that I have a Parhelia 128 and would be solved if i get a Parhelia 256?

it's a $600 move, so would be great to know if possibly it would help.

the only difference i can see between the two is 256 DDR memory as opposed to 128mb

Sorry, I just don't know. I've never used a Parhelia card personally (except in some workstations I used a few years back, but never in a computer I owned or played games on). I know there are some games that can't run with their highest-quality textures unless you have 256MB of RAM on the card, but I've never heard of something not being able to load textures above a certain size just because of the amount of RAM (unless you're trying to load so many of them that they just don't *fit*). This seems more likely to be a driver issue to me -- have you checked with Matrox about it?

and it appears there's no way to simply add more ram to my existing card?

Uh, no.

 

[jasonja]

Well that depends on what he means by "span" for one big convas. If you just want 3 cards to give you one giant Windows desktop (with the start menu only on one) then 1 dual card and a PCI card can do this (because I do this now). If you want games to run across all 3 then that's a different issue and yes you will need a single card with 3 outputs to do this.

 

[ZobarStyl]

Does anyone know if dual PCI-E 6800's (not in SLI mode, but perhaps using the connector) on a 2 x16 mobo would be able to span 3 monitors like their current dual head cards do?

 

[acx]

If you want a card with Parhelia's multi display but better performance you are going to have to plunk down $ for something like a Quadro FX with quad display.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: fortressgame
anyway, the parhelia was never that fast, and i'm finding now that certain textures will not load properly into it. that is, a texture of 384x384 won't load, but 256x256 does. almost all major games work fine however. just not that fast anymore.

Perhaps the hardware only properly handles power-of-two texture sizes? Have you tried changing it to a 512x512 texture, perhaps moving the content of the old texture to the appropriate corner in the new one? Or is the Parhelia limited to 256x256 textures, like the old Voodoo 2 cards? (I haven't heard of such a limitation in any newer cards, they are usually 2048x2048 if anything, although I think that some hardware is power-of-two sizes only.)

 

[Concillian]

Originally posted by: fortressgame
will 3 x8000 xt pe's in one computer work?

Am I the only one who'd like to see not only 3 XT PEs for sale at the same place at the same time, but also the motherboard that can accept three of these?

Let's nevermind the fact that they wouldn't be able to be used at the same time, there are no boards with more than one AGP or PCI-e slot currently available.

 

[Gamingphreek]

That still wouldn't work. Too much bandwidth needed. 2 is already pushing it a bit.

-Kevin