I currently have an application that requires 3 machines to run - 1 machine is a control machine displaying a GUI, and the other two produce stereo views of a graphics intensive 3D application.
What I would like to do is move this setup to a single machine.
Would it be possible to get 2 PCI-express nvidia cards running in non-SLI mode to drive at least 3 monitors where two of these monitors have hardware accelerated, fullscreen opengl windows? Obviously, I’d want one of those fullscreen displays to be run by each card to distribute the load.
If it’s possible, what sorts of issues would come up? Could both windows be spawned by a single instance of the application so that they could share texture and geometry data? How would you specify which card/monitor the window opens up in?
I don’t really have any experience with multi-monitor or multi-card OpenGL, so any advice is appreciated.
I would suggest a dual view AGP/PCIe card for the stereo application where you can use one output window spanning both monitors containing 2 viewports.
This is what worked for me, even using one VGA and one S-Video output.
Add a PCI (Quadro) graphics card for your Interface, or maybe you could use a mainboard with integrated graphics.
Cannot help you with the details of adressing two separate cards…
The helmet takes the two DVI outputs of the Quadro, so there is no way to plug a screen to see what’s going on in the 3D scene.
I was wondering if, with two PCI-Express cards, it is possible to do a “clone” mode between the two cards:
meaning that card B would display exactly the same thing as card A, so that with two screens you would see what the user sees in the helmet.
Btw, I’m using the helmet on Linux (XFree86) for the moment, but it would be interesting to know how to do that on Linux too.
i run 3 monitors on one machine with a dual view agp card, and a pci card.
works for me with win2k and debian linux. a pci card is good for gui. win2k and nvidia nview do not cooperate well though once you add a 3rd pci monitor. you can’t play with nview options unless you remove the pci monitor from the ‘windows’ display settings. after you get the nview options you like you can add the pci display back and nview will work just fine, but hide its options interface from windows.
for win2k you will need the newest api libraries you can find. multiple monitors really weren’t supported originally by win2k as far as i can tell, though you can find a lot about them in msvc docs.