Dual Head (Possible Quad) Video on Vista - Status

[zanthor]

So I got my nVidia 7900gt back from the shop, the 8500gt I picked up as a "keep me going" is of course outside the return policy so I figured I'd make the best of it...

I fired up Vista with both cards installed, no problems as far as actually running WoW with two different video cards, however the performance issues that plauged me in XP without horizontal span are VERY present with multiple video cards. With one wow on the 7900gt and two on the 8500gt I get no better than 30fps anywhere. Once I flip the monitor back to the 7900gt I'm back to 30+fps on the main screen with 50-100fps on the smaller lower settings windows...

I would guess there is a chance for this to work with matched video cards, perhaps it's just the fact that I've got an 8000 series and a 7000 series in the same system thats the hitch...

[Xzin]

Vista.... in my opinion.... sucks. It has buggy driver support and even though it is touted as THE (only) DX 10 solution..... many of the advanced drivers are STILL buggy.

I have THREE 8800GTXes and I STILL cannot enable SLI on two of them because I have 6 monitors attached. This is with XP. Good luck with Vista.

It's bogus.

Have you tried horizontal spanning?

Also - your 7900 GT is a BEAST of a card compared to your 8500 GT.

Take a look:

http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics_2007.html?modelx=33&model1=711&model2=856&chart=285

http://www23.tomshardware.com/charts16/711-856-285.png

So even though you think 8 series is better than 7 series.... It isn't.

[zanthor]

Horizontal span has been removed from the vista drivers. I'm not certain if they intend to bring them back or not. Well aware of the limitations of the 8500gt vs the 7900gt, it was mostly information for those who may be interested.

Vista is new and shiny, I like it from a user standpoint *IF* the machine is balls enough to use it. You do have to accept that you are throwing away a TON of processor, video and ram to the OS. If I didn't know that I'd be supporting Vista at work within 12 months I'd go back to XP, but the only way I'll learn it is through immersion...

The one thing that bothers me is how poorly WoW runs in general on my machine (it runs just fine, however with an x2 6000 with 2gb of ddr2 and an nvidia 7900gt I'd expect much better)... I get the exact same performance @ 1280x1024 as I do @ 800x600... Same for all graphics settings min/max... In shattrah I get around 20-30fps, I can even turn on FRAPS and get the same framerate...

CPU isn't capped, GPU obsiously isn't pegged (I can run two more copies on the same video card without a performance hit) so the only thing I can see is WoW it's self being the damn bottleneck...

[zanthor]

4457 3dmarks for what it's worth.

[Xzin]

Ahh ok -

Just FYI - changing resolution in WoW will barely if at all make a difference in FPS. I have gone as high as 3000x3000 resolution and still - my actual rendered area is the same.

Of course, my FPS goes to crap but not because of the resolution. It goes to crap because I am spanning across multiple video cards.

Didn't realize Vista removed horizontal span. Without that, I know of no real way to get it going short of multiple machines.

Eventually, you could use VMs but no VM that I know of does DX 9 yet.