Multi Monitors

[Gunny04]

Alright, say when I get a computer I want more then 2 monitors (2 on one GPU) then say 2 or more, would I need to get a second (low spec) Computer? and if so, How would I link them togethor? I'm just looking way into the future when I'm able to set up a flight cockpit, cheers, Gunny

[JBaymore]

Gunny,

Welcome to the Dark Side

[Gunny04]

Will do, I dont plan to start for many months yet, but I have some, errrrr scrap parts from an old comp (900Mhz Intel celeron prolly OC to 1.2) and some other stuff, Thanks for info will do when I get job, Cheers, Gunny

[The_Mickmeister]

I'm considering this system:

 -Gateway media center w/ Pentium D 830 GM

 -1 gig SDRAM

 -250 gb Sata HD

 -Envision monitors

 -A8N-SLI motherboard

 -(2) NVidea GEForce 6600 GT gfx cards (128 mb)


Does this sound like it would give me 3 seperate 3D views with a decent frame rate? What about antialiasing? I'm also wondering why the place that's putting it together said that they can only use 128 mb graphics cards - they can't do 256. It seems odd that with all this other high tech stuff, you would use 128 mb cards.

[JBaymore]

Mickmeister,

Hi and welcome to the "Homebuild Cockpit"  forum.

Give this post a bit of time to be read and you should get some knowledgable responses to your question.  I am not "up" on SLI that much..... so I can't say for sure.  Let me give you some "background" info though:

In general from looking around at simpits ........  people don't seem to have very good luck with more than two 3-d views....... but that mostly has been with AGP/PCI cards.

Most people who use two monitors on a single graphics card use one output for exterior display and one output for guages.  The guage screen is far less demanding than another 3-d view.  And there are some issues with running graphics acceleration on undocked full screen views on multiple monitors.

The typical solution for what you mention up til now for multiple exterior views appears to have been running a single high end machine per exterior view desired and then linking them  on a 100 mbit LAN with FSUIPC, WideFS, and particularly WideView.  The speed of display of the SLOWEST machine will be the limiting factor on framerates.

One issue of this approach at the moment however is that the WideView program apprently does not pass AI traffic data across the machines nor weather data.  So you'll get some variation in the pix on the monitors (ie a cloud will not be in the same place).  Plus you have to have the exact same scenery files installed in every machine.... or you'll get other anomalies also.

Anyway..... I'll let someone who knows more about your hardware give you the more definitive answers.

best,

....................john