[ale] Nvidia Magic for dual head

[Dow Hurst]

Okay,
I went and got an Asylum Geforce 4 Ti-4200 on sale.  Paid enough but 
knew I was in for it since I wanted my "fix" right now instead of 
waiting or hunting around alot.  But, the beauty of this beast is that I 
pulled out the Geforce2 MX card and the SiS cheapo card, dropped in the 
new card and it worked.  Hooked up both monitors thru the SVGA and DVI 
outs.  The card came with the converter for the DVI port to a SVGA out.  
My XF86Config was already setup for TwinView since I had been beating on 
the Geforce2 trying stuff.  Lo! and behold!  My dual head desktop came 
up beautifully!  I experimented with Gears and some 3D games 
successfully on both monitors.  The trick is to read the docs on the 3D 
games to see if a control on whether the full screen, windowing, or 
window size is available.  So I am screaming down the slopes in TuxRacer 
at 127km/hr while on the other desktop I am showing a Mozilla browser or 
GRip.  Exactly what I had hoped for!

The performance on the card with Gears is about ~5800fps which isn't 
great compared to the top of the line cards.  But, I am not a top of the 
line gamer nor have that kind of money.  I do like having the 
capabilities that the Nvidia driver provides.  It is more functional 
under Linux than Windows.  You can have different refresh rates and 
resolutions at the same time on your OpenGL hardware accelerated single 
desktop.  It is what Xinerama should be.  I have yet to play Quake or 
anything after that so I'll be easy to please compared to kids today.  
In fact, I've noticed a resurrection of Wolfenstein 3D which was my 
alltime favorite in my gaming years.  I want to try out the new Flight 
program that came available this fall.
Dow

-- 
__________________________________________________________
Dow Hurst                  Office: 770-499-3428
Systems Support Specialist    Fax: 770-423-6744
1000 Chastain Rd., Bldg. 12
Chemistry Department SC428  Email:dhurst at kennesaw.edu
Kennesaw State University         Dow.Hurst at mindspring.com
Kennesaw, GA 30144
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*Computational Chemistry is fun!*
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