Multiple Monitors Working with Quad SLi

[Natalia]

I hope this is "news worthy," as the results excited me quite a bit.

I managed to get Quad-SLi and a second monitor working together by adding in a cheap little 8600 to the mix. The steps to get the setup working are:

1- Uninstall all nVidia drivers

2- Power off and install all three video cards ( in my case, two 9800GX2's and one 8600GT )

3- Boot up and let Vista recognize the cards.

4- Install new drivers

5- Restart

6- Disable the 8600 ( or what ever small card ) via the Device manager

7- Restart

8- Enable Quad SLi ( or regular SLi if you don't have GX2's, tested and worked with 8800GT's before I had the GX2's )

9- Restart

10- When windows comes back up, the 8600 will be enabled again and you can assign a monitor to it. The SLi option is still missing from the nVidia control panel, but evey benchmark I have tried proves the effect of the SLi.



Hope this is exciting to other people too!

Oh, and that pesky issue where you can't access the second monitor while gamine? Fixed that by writing a little program. Now I can use both monitors even in a game without forcing the game closed


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Full Resolution ( very large image! )

[Frank M]

Quint-SLi

fix'd

[systemviper]

I actually wanted to run my cards in multi montor mode
(4)but was unable because of SLI. I found it amazing that i have 2 cards, 4 heads and could not run my 4 monitors.

I actually had to do the same thing, go to a basic card and use the pci slot also. It was a pain in leg. I had all this horsepower and couldn't use it....

I hope someday the cards could be used either way, easily

[WRC]

there's 5 graphic cards in your system

[SafeFire]

Neato trick, good news for us multi monitor geeks
Slight question though, do you plug the second monitor into the cheap card? Or whatever, one monitor per card, both monitors plugged into the master card, how does it work?

If the second monitor runs off the cheap card, then I'm pretty sure I've seen it somewhere, ages and ages ago, was with regular sli though.

[Krizby87]

can you kindly share your little program :-). I would like to use my second monitor without minimizing my game, that would be fantastic ^^.

[Natalia]

can you kindly share your little program :-). I would like to use my second monitor without minimizing my game, that would be fantastic ^^.

Still testing it out. When I made it, I did it on just my 8600, while I was waiting for my GX2's. Seemed to work better then than it does now. For some reason, it feels like when I go into windowed mode with a game, regardless of resolution, the performance goes in the toilet. It is almost as if the game switches over to being rendered with the 8600GT and not the Quad SLi. That is all before I even run my app. Running my app doesn't seem to make the performance any worse.

The other thing I need to do is make the app more customizable. Right now all the games and sizes are hard coded into the app.

Neato trick, good news for us multi monitor geeks
Slight question though, do you plug the second monitor into the cheap card? Or whatever, one monitor per card, both monitors plugged into the master card, how does it work?

If the second monitor runs off the cheap card, then I'm pretty sure I've seen it somewhere, ages and ages ago, was with regular sli though.

One monitor on my primary GX2 one on the 8600GT.

there's 5 graphic cards in your system

Yup!!

[skinnee]

So no dual monitors when running SLI?

[SafeFire]

Skinnee, that's exactly what it does, allows you to run one monitor on the two 9800's, and the other one the 8600.

Be sure to drop us that application nat, sounds good to me

[X.T.R.E.M.E_ICE]

Skinnee, that's exactly what it does, allows you to run one monitor on the two 9800's, and the other one the 8600.

Be sure to drop us that application nat, sounds good to me

skinnee means for gaming. Like supreme commander you can play the game on Dual Screen mode.

[Helmore]

skinnee means for gaming. Like supreme commander you can play the game on Dual Screen mode.

I'm not to much into multi-monitor setups and multi card systems, but does Crossfire X support this way of gaming? (accelerated and all....)

[Natalia]

I'm not to much into multi-monitor setups and multi card systems, but does Crossfire X support this way of gaming? (accelerated and all....)

From what I understand and have heard, with Crossfire, you can run Windows just fine with dual monitors, but once you start a game, one turns off.

skinnee means for gaming. Like supreme commander you can play the game on Dual Screen mode.

Yeah, not sure. Don't have that game.

[safan80]

What's your 3dmark06 sm2 and sm3 score?

[Anemone]

the 3870x2 runs dual monitors just fine while having crossfire active to run a game on one of the monitors

[Natalia]

What's your 3dmark06 sm2 and sm3 score?

Still tweaking out my final clocks. Been busy, but I should have them later this week when I get some time.

[skinnee]

skinnee means for gaming. Like supreme commander you can play the game on Dual Screen mode.

They way I have it now is two displays. Games all go to display 1, while TS and other junk is over on display 2. So yes, Dual Monitors all the time in Windows.

Can you do this with SLI?

[SafeFire]

I'm pretty sure you can run supreme commander on both monitors, depending on how you have your monitors set up with windows/whatever os you use.

I'm also pretty sure the performance would go through the floor, at least on the second monitor, it being run off a smallish card.

And that's why you need four 9800 cards, each pair of two in sli, running independently of one another.
We could call it Nested SLI, just like raid volumes, SLI 0+1!

[Martijn]

I'm pretty sure you can run supreme commander on both monitors, depending on how you have your monitors set up with windows/whatever os you use.

I'm also pretty sure the performance would go through the floor, at least on the second monitor, it being run off a smallish card.

And that's why you need four 9800 cards, each pair of two in sli, running independently of one another.
We could call it Nested SLI, just like raid volumes, SLI 0+1!

So far, I haven't managed SC to run the second screen from my other videocard. It only works as long as both screens are connected to the main videocard.

If someone knows how to fix this, please help me

[cadaveca]

It owrks that way due to how XP works.

I can run with the screen stretched across two monitors(2560x1024), or map/main screen, depending on how your desktop is configured. Obviously a desktop with taskbar across both screen can stretch or use single screen, but not main window and map, while taks bar on one window allows both to display their respective images.

needing the screens attached to main vid card is OS/driver limitation.

[Winzeler]

So if I have two 9800 GTX's and an 8400GS in my 780i would I have to go through all that to get SLI on my 24" and the GS working my 19", or is the multiple monitor thing a problem just with Quad-SLI? I have a dual boot XP-32 and Vista-64, spending most of my time in XP, if that makes any difference.

[THE JEW (RaVeN)]

From what I understand and have heard, with Crossfire, you can run Windows just fine with dual monitors, but once you start a game, one turns off.

I've heard contrary:

Happily, though, AMD's newer drivers pretty much blow that limitation away. They've delivered the "seamless" multi-monitor/multi-GPU support AMD promised at the time of the Radeon HD 3870 launch. Here's what I was able to do as a result. I connected a pair of monitors—a 30" LCD with a dual-link DVI port and an analog CRT—to a Radeon HD 3870 in a CrossFire pairing and enabled CrossFire. Both displays continued to show the Vista desktop with CrossFire enabled. Then I ran UT3 and played full-screen on the LCD. The CRT continued to show the Vista desktop just fine. Next, I switched UT3 into windowed mode, without exiting the game, and the transition went smoothly, with both displays active. Finally, I dragged the UT3 window to span both desktops, and it continued to render everything perfectly. Here's a screenshot, wildly shrunken, of my desktop session. Its original dimensions were 2048x1536 plus 2560x1600, with the UT3 window at 2560x1600.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/13967/3

[Natalia]

I've heard contrary:



http://techreport.com/articles.x/13967/3

Ah cool, thanks for the clarification. As I sorta mentioned, I really am not too familiar with CrossFire, so thanks for that clarification

So if I have two 9800 GTX's and an 8400GS in my 780i would I have to go through all that to get SLI on my 24" and the GS working my 19", or is the multiple monitor thing a problem just with Quad-SLI? I have a dual boot XP-32 and Vista-64, spending most of my time in XP, if that makes any difference.

Yeah, same procedure for two 9800GTX's. Before I had the 9800GX2's I was doing this trick on two 8800GT's with that same 8600GT. So I know it works for traditional SLi and for Quad-SLi.

And the process to get it to work is identical.

[thephenom]

I wonder what's taking NV so long to support multi-monitor. CrossFire supports it at least for the desktop usage. AFAIK, windowed mode in SLI or Crossfire, it'll no longer have SLI/CF performance in Windowed mode.

[Natalia]

I wonder what's taking NV so long to support multi-monitor. CrossFire supports it at least for the desktop usage. AFAIK, windowed mode in SLI or Crossfire, it'll no longer have SLI/CF performance in Windowed mode.

Yeah, in developing my app (see above), I was wondering if people with and without SLi could give me some FPS numbers of games running fullscreen vs. windowed, all other things equal.

I'm getting weird windowed behavior (full screen is perfect), and am not sure if it has to do with the GX2, the Quad-SLi, or this whole dual monitor hack I am doing.

[Gunslinger]

Running 1 9800GX2 at stock speeds, CPU at 3.66, resolution at 2560x1600, COD4 runs at ~120FPS windowed mode as well as regular mode. It may dip down to 80-90 running a few of the modded maps, but stock maps are smooth as silk.