Nvidia 2D Surround tested

does the Nvidia 2D Surround Mode behave like a spanmode ? has anyone a 680 and done a test with 3 monitors and one renderer ? i’m thinking of buying a new card and would like to know if this card is capable of spanmode…

cheers

the 680gtx arrived today. 3 monitor span seems to work. i didnt get the full resolution to work coz i don’t have 3 identical displays…

but so far i’m happy, dvi + dvi + hdmi = spanmode.

btw. this card is a monster, it took me 30 minutes to force this brick into the pc tower.

sweet! glad to hear that nvidia finally got their act together…

Would be nice to know if it works with three Tripleheads attached.

not that great with external projectors
you need exact same monitors
also works with trippleheads but 4v crashes on fullscreen like that

no tripleheads in the attic. to be honest, i’ll try to avoid tripleheads, never been happy with them in combination with v4.

so my conclusion is, i want 6 outputs with lots of GPU power…i’ll take two 680’s with 2 renderer. if i don’t need GPU power, i’ll do it the way like elektromeier showed in his 20 display ATI setup.

20x1920x1050-on-one-machine

but it’s not connecting to the displays you want…

@u7 did u tetsted if the dvi and hdmi outputs of your cards are genlocked? on ati this is a problem if you use the version which has 4 dp and 2 dvi outs…

@anto, it will be connected to identical projectors / encore systems…this is not meant for my desktop

@milo, how can i test the gelock ?

fairly simple testcase: just put any content in spanmode (using at least 1 dvi and 1 hdmi output) if the outputs are not genlocked you will notice sometimes kind of tearings or framelags on one screen.
but maybe there no such problems between hdmi and dvi as the ati uses dp and dvi.

no tearing…super smooth it is. and i could use dvi + dvi + dp too…not tested though

im-3-t2go-on-590s that was after my last try

just assembled the machine and did a quick test with the Zotac Double HDMI adapters. Pretty smooth setup it is. 2x Spanmode at 3840x1080

next test will be Nvidia Surround with Gefen DVI Detectives and Displays. the goal is 2x Spanmode with 5760x1200. i’ll report back.

gefens are rock

thinking about the new texture sharing technique of alpha28… does this make the whole spanmode stuff obsolet ? i had a look at it yesterday but didnt test it thoroughly. this could be a solution across different heads.

@u7 - that’s what I’m hoping. Going to test over the next couple of days and if it goes well, use it at a 6 projector gig next weekend (2xTH2go)

If I can bring myself to use an alpha at a gig… :)

using a beta is just one step away from using an alpha version. not really trustworthy either ;)

dvi detectives fool the nvidia surround mode quite perfectly. so this part works. i have three different display running in span mode.

what doesnt work is having two nvidia cards running two surround modes. the driver just wants them to run in sli. there is no way to handle them on their own. constant complains from the driver the sli cable is missing. and funny enough, to be able to use the option “disable SLI” only works if there is an actual SLI cable connecting the card. bollox.
this is a pure driver thing…i have little confidence this will ever be changed since nvidia has no interest in multiple card setups with no sli.

gonna try plan B and C and D to get my 6 hi-res outputs.

Do you need span mode?
The only reason I have found to use span mode is the filestream node and I have used VLC lately instead running in separate renderers across two (Different) Nvidia cards.

i need spanmode to run particle shaders only once or lets say, reduce the number of instances.