On Saturday 24 January 2009, alex stone wrote: [...] > For those driving larger LCD screens, what's the general consensus > for graphic cards, and any extra tweaks you might have had to cope > with? I've been using on Apple 30" LCD for a little over three years now, for pretty much everything; games, racing simulators, programming, and the usual web, email etc stuff. The first issue I ran into was the fact that 2560x1600 requires dual link DVI, and that basically wasn't available on anything but high end workstation video cards at the time. That caused me some ATI/Linux related headaches at first, and forced me to go for a top-of-the-line 512 MB gamer card at twice the cost of any normal GF6800 card - but that card worked flawlessly with the 30", and (as of course) performed very well. You won't need dual link for any lower resolutions, but if you go for a 2560x1600 display, you should be fine with any reasonably serious gamer card. I think pretty much any GF 8800 GT or better should have dual link DVI, but beware of "cripled" variants like 8400, 8600 etc... Don't know about the later generation cards. Anyway, depending on what you want to do, you may have to consider that these large, high resolution screens have a lot of pixels to move around! Several times as many as any "sensible" size display... This severely impacts dragging large windows, playing fullscreen video and things like that. I'm currently using a dual GF 8800 GT SLI setup with 1 GB VRAM per card (rougly equivalent to one of the latest generation nVidia cards, according to benchmarks), and that's just about sufficient for playing Half-life 2, Doom 3, Quake 4 and similar at the native display resolution without dropping below 60 fps too frequently. (That is with "everything maxed out", except for FSAA, which doesn't really add all that much in these resolutions.) You certainly won't need a multi-GPU setup for normal desktop work, but you should probably stay away from the budget models with some disabled pipelines, slow VRAM and stuff. If you're going to use these new OpenGL rendered desktop environments, I'm not quite sure what you need, actually... I've not exactly been impressed so far, but OTOH, the HL2 GUI (translucent windows and stuff over rather complex real time animated 3D scenes) is perfectly nice and smooth, so I strongly doubt it's a raw performance issue. Finally, from a user POV, it might be worth noting that a display this large doesn't really work like a bigger single display. At a normal working distance (close enough that you don't need 20+ pixels tall letters to be able to read), you can't see that MSN client flashing in the corner if you're reading something over at the other side of the display! It's more like working with a multihead setup, only cleaner, more efficient and more flexible. I totally loved it from the start, but apparently, some people just never seem to get used to it. //David Olofson - Programmer, Composer, Open Source Advocate .------- http://olofson.net - Games, SDL examples -------. | http://zeespace.net - 2.5D rendering engine | | http://audiality.org - Music/audio engine | | http://eel.olofson.net - Real time scripting | '-- http://www.reologica.se - Rheology instrumentation --' _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-audio-user
