RE: [GD-Design] Game UI's

[Tom H. <to...@3d...>]

At 03:25 AM 6/26/2002, Tom Forsyth wrote:
>If using OpenGL, the moment you enable the second monitor, all hardware
>rendering support vanishes. Various IHVs have fudged it so it doesn't (by
>tricking Windows into thinking it's running on a single large monitor) but
>that causes all sorts of problems of its own, especially the different-sized
>monitor case.

Actually .. this isn't accurate any more (and hasn't been for quite some 
time). Right now my buddy runs a GeForce2 as primary AGP, and PCI TNT card 
as secondary. Both are hardware accelerated with OpenGL. The place where 
things get ugly is when a window straddles two monitors ... only the part 
of the window on the display where the window was created still works 
properly by default ;) If a window moves from one monitor to another, you 
can destroy the old RC and get a new one within that monitor and get 
acceleration again. You _might_ even be able to use the shared texture and 
display list stuff and only use one copy of textures and display lists for 
dual-head cards ... but that's probably a stretch ;)

I don't know how things work with mutli-mon and going full screen .. 
specifically switching resolutions and generally dealing with devices, but 
I suspect there's some form of solution.

>Under DirectX, you can use multimonitor, and have been able to do for some
>time, but itmeans keeping track of multiple devices, each with its own set
>of texture, VBs, etc, even though they actually all live on the same card.
>This is changing for the better in DX9 I believe, so that a single device
>can have multiple RAMDAC surfaces (which is the way to go), but it does
>require new driver support, etc - so you need to decide when you're shipping
>and what the market support will be.

I'm not personally familiar with things under DX at the moment, but that 
sounds accurate.

>So I'm going to express cautious support for multimonitor, especially if
>using DX9 and shipping in a year or so. But it is cautious.

I wouldn't make multi-mon a required feature ... nor would I put a lot of 
effort into it. Maybe a couple of days or a week ... tops. There just 
aren't enough people that use it yet.

Tom