Florin
27-Aug-2003, 04:23
Hi,
I have a somewhat complicated problem with an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro. There seem to be some very knowledgeable people on this website so I was hoping perhaps someone might be able to provide some insight. Unfortunately, it's a long story. :(
I really enjoy playing Flight Simulator 2004 on two monitors. In Windows 2000 with some videocards like Matrox G550, Nvidia Ti4200 and FX series one can select a resolution like 2304*864 which includes both monitors. Some Direct3D applications like FS2004 provide the same resolution options and treat both displays as one big screen. You can drag 3D views across both screens so that you have a wide panoramic cockpit display or a huge spot plane view for instance. This works both in windowed and full screen mode, with both docked and undocked windows, and even with minimal loss of frame rate compared to a single monitor.
In Windows XP on the other hand, regardless of which card or driver version you use, the OS and the game are aware of the individual screens. So you'd set 1152*864 for each display instead. But in that mode, wide full screen flight simming doesn't seem possible. You can put a full screen 3D view on one monitor, and another full screen view on the other, and it's fast, but you can't span a single full screen view across both monitors. And when you use windowed mode the (undocked) window does allow dragging onto the second screen, but it only renders correctly for the part that stretches as wide as the horizontal resolution of a single screen. The rest of the window is black.
But ok, while it would be nice if there was a solution for wide screen gaming in XP, I'm fine with continuing to use Windows 2000 for Flight Sim. :)
Now, I've found that you can select how Nvidia and Matrox drivers behave in Windows 2000. Nvidia provides a checkbox in the Windows 2000 driver properties tab called 'Enable Dualview (Treat multiple outputs on an NVIDIA GPU-based card as separate display devices)'. As long as you leave that disabled you can use wide screen resolutions like 2304*768 and have panoramic Flight Sim. If you enable it, Windows 2000 behaves the same way as Windows XP - undesirable for my purposes. Matrox allows one to make a similar choice but at driver installation time.
However I haven't been able to find a way to change the way my Radeon 9800 Pro behaves in Windows 2000. This card always emulates the XP behavior - separate resolution settings for each screen, and no wide screen Direct3D. I've tried many drivers and looked for options, registry keys and what more but so far I haven't come up with a solution. This is odd because the wide screen feature supposedly did once work on older dual head Radeon cards like the 7000 - its old drivers provided their own interface for extending the desktop onto the second screen, instead of emulating the 98/ME/XP interface on 2000 as more modern drivers do.
Anyway, this is all a bit disappointing to me because this makes the ATI 9800 Pro completely useless for what I want to do with it. So I'm back to using the Ti4200 for now. If anyone knows how to make the 9800 stop being aware of the individual screens and revert to native Windows 2000 multi-monitor behavior I'd really love to hear about it because I'd love to use this card :cry:
I have a somewhat complicated problem with an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro. There seem to be some very knowledgeable people on this website so I was hoping perhaps someone might be able to provide some insight. Unfortunately, it's a long story. :(
I really enjoy playing Flight Simulator 2004 on two monitors. In Windows 2000 with some videocards like Matrox G550, Nvidia Ti4200 and FX series one can select a resolution like 2304*864 which includes both monitors. Some Direct3D applications like FS2004 provide the same resolution options and treat both displays as one big screen. You can drag 3D views across both screens so that you have a wide panoramic cockpit display or a huge spot plane view for instance. This works both in windowed and full screen mode, with both docked and undocked windows, and even with minimal loss of frame rate compared to a single monitor.
In Windows XP on the other hand, regardless of which card or driver version you use, the OS and the game are aware of the individual screens. So you'd set 1152*864 for each display instead. But in that mode, wide full screen flight simming doesn't seem possible. You can put a full screen 3D view on one monitor, and another full screen view on the other, and it's fast, but you can't span a single full screen view across both monitors. And when you use windowed mode the (undocked) window does allow dragging onto the second screen, but it only renders correctly for the part that stretches as wide as the horizontal resolution of a single screen. The rest of the window is black.
But ok, while it would be nice if there was a solution for wide screen gaming in XP, I'm fine with continuing to use Windows 2000 for Flight Sim. :)
Now, I've found that you can select how Nvidia and Matrox drivers behave in Windows 2000. Nvidia provides a checkbox in the Windows 2000 driver properties tab called 'Enable Dualview (Treat multiple outputs on an NVIDIA GPU-based card as separate display devices)'. As long as you leave that disabled you can use wide screen resolutions like 2304*768 and have panoramic Flight Sim. If you enable it, Windows 2000 behaves the same way as Windows XP - undesirable for my purposes. Matrox allows one to make a similar choice but at driver installation time.
However I haven't been able to find a way to change the way my Radeon 9800 Pro behaves in Windows 2000. This card always emulates the XP behavior - separate resolution settings for each screen, and no wide screen Direct3D. I've tried many drivers and looked for options, registry keys and what more but so far I haven't come up with a solution. This is odd because the wide screen feature supposedly did once work on older dual head Radeon cards like the 7000 - its old drivers provided their own interface for extending the desktop onto the second screen, instead of emulating the 98/ME/XP interface on 2000 as more modern drivers do.
Anyway, this is all a bit disappointing to me because this makes the ATI 9800 Pro completely useless for what I want to do with it. So I'm back to using the Ti4200 for now. If anyone knows how to make the 9800 stop being aware of the individual screens and revert to native Windows 2000 multi-monitor behavior I'd really love to hear about it because I'd love to use this card :cry: