Multi Monitor setups

Sunday, April 1, 2007 by konstareal | Discussion: Animated Wallpapers

I'm currently using a multimonitor setup - I have a 24", and a 17" in portrait mode at the side of it. I'm using an Nvidia 8800 GTS 320MB.

I am able to run dreams on both screens, but it has to be the same dream, which obviously looks daft if it is a dream with some sort of central focal point, as it is appearing twice.

I'm curious to know if there are any plans to implement some level of support for multi monitor setups - ideally the ability to run a different dream on each screen, but failing that, at least the possibility of using a dream on one screen, and a static wallpaper on the other. Regards
29 Reply 36 Referrals
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PoSmedley
Reply #1 Sunday, April 1, 2007 11:43 AM
I know with UltraMon you can run two different walls. (Ultramon isn't free, though) I don't know how it would work with Dreams.

konstareal
Reply #2 Sunday, April 1, 2007 11:51 AM
I've got the latest beta of ultramon, released last night. Unfortunately, it doesn't support Dreams in any way.

PoSmedley
Reply #3 Sunday, April 1, 2007 12:17 PM
Bummer.

Hopefully, this will be something SD add's in future updates. I'm thinking it might be a bit demanding on the system, but then I think too much. lol.

konstareal
Reply #4 Sunday, April 1, 2007 12:24 PM
...Presumably it would be less demanding to use a Dream on one monitor, and a static background on the other than to put the same Dream on both monitors, as is currently happening.

Burntcrispy
Reply #5 Sunday, April 1, 2007 12:33 PM
I also would love to see Stardock support multi-monitor setups better, for all there apps.

There's the wallpaper issues, but on top of that windows blinds or XP?, displays please wait messages on my secondary screen, which I leave off when not needed.

I also have two different size screens being a 17" normal and a 20" Widescreen, both being the same height if I run them at something by 1024.

Razster
Reply #6 Wednesday, April 4, 2007 3:49 AM
From what I have been told stardock has no plans to add
Dual/multi monitor support.

hopefully when/if nView for Vista is released they can add something
but i dought it.. I just wish i could make one desktop out of my two
monitors like I did with XP and nView.

konstareal
Reply #7 Thursday, April 5, 2007 11:18 AM
If that's the case, then it is a real shame - programs like Stardocks are to a large extent targeted at the enthusiast community, and so they should cater for us adequately...

Alternate Setting
Reply #8 Thursday, April 5, 2007 11:45 AM
There's a flash based LCARS screensaver that works quite neatly with dual monitors.

Being flash, to save on resources, it is able to be divided into what might be thought of as several episodes or modules. If I remember correctly, it simply directs the same screensaver only at a slightly different point of the run, to the second monitor.

This offers two complementary but differing screens routed from the same design.

I haven't looked at how Dreamscenes are created and so this may be an inappropriate solution. I just add this post to offer a sort of lateral viewpoint to the challenge.

Edit addition; so in a Seasonal dreamscene - Autumn would be on monitor 1, while Winter is on 2 & obviously each then follows its routine through the Seasons.

NebulaSleuth
Reply #9 Thursday, April 5, 2007 3:20 PM
I'm surprised anyone is doing multi monitor. I have a reasonable setup with 3 monitors running on 2 ATI X800's, 1gb ram and 3ghz P4, but dreams in a multple monitor mode are horribly slow for me. It makes my system unusable. Works great if I turn off all but a single display.

Is there some trick?


konstareal
Reply #10 Thursday, April 5, 2007 6:47 PM



I'm surprised anyone is doing multi monitor. I have a reasonable setup with 3 monitors running on 2 ATI X800's, 1gb ram and 3ghz P4, but dreams in a multple monitor mode are horribly slow for me. It makes my system unusable. Works great if I turn off all but a single display.

Is there some trick?


I honestly don't mean to brag here, but my specs are around double that. You can call it a "trick" if you like..

Phoon
Reply #11 Thursday, April 5, 2007 7:13 PM
I have another thread going on this too.
Here it is
You can see my specs there. I was trying to run it on 4 monitors.
I finally got it to run by lowering my resolution to 1024x768 (ewwwww) as a test.

I can't type the words AWFUL, SUCKS, AND SLOWWWWWW nearly large enough to convey the true amount of Awful, Sucks, and Slow that I incurred.

These things are entirely useless on a multi-monitor setup. Your system becomes entirely unusable for anything but watching a choppy wallpaper move on your screen.

On a positive side, running on my laptop it looks nice, but still eats my cpu.

Neil Banfield
Reply #12 Thursday, April 5, 2007 8:10 PM

Deskscapes supports multiple monitors already.  The existing dynamic content is set to show the same thing on all monitors, but thats something that is decided by the content itself.  If I wanted to I could have one monitor showing one thing and a second showing something different.

For videos things are much more limited.  Having 2 HD res videos open at once would start to stress machines even more.

Regarding the performance problems with multiple display adapters : Deskscapes is designed for systems with 1 or 2 monitors on a single video adapter.  If you have more than 1 card then things are going to need to be sent from card to card and that can be slow.

When I wrote the engine I looked into making things happier on multiple physical cards, but my tests showed that it was not going to be possible without some serious compromises which would impact the most common users (people with 1 video card)

Phoon: Your PCI video card is the problem.  Dreamscene / deskscapes will be saturating the PCI bus.

Just a reminder to everyone.  If you want low cpu usage then pick a dynamic dream.  They should run with almost no cpu usage (assuming you don't have a setup like Phoon's)


Phoon
Reply #13 Thursday, April 5, 2007 9:26 PM
Neil,
Thanks for the insight.
Also, I should mention that Deskscapes ran all but 1 of the default animations at 1280x1024 on all 4 monitors. Dreamscene would not even think about it.
Is it possible to work something in to tell deskscapes to run on any 1 monitor only?

To anyone else,
Don't take my post as a negative endorsemnet of Deskscapes. If I were running just one monitor with the powerhouse system I have you can rest assured that it would run without a hitch. (I shouldda' used a wink wink smiley or two in that post to show humor.)        

Alternate Setting
Reply #14 Friday, April 6, 2007 12:18 AM
So re. my #8, can that not be made to work at all with Dreamscenes ?

The calling up of the one video file, which is then sent to each monitor, only from a different point in that file.

NebulaSleuth
Reply #15 Friday, April 6, 2007 1:08 AM
Ok, so I turned off the 3rd monitor running on the second video card and things get MUCH better.

So this means that we need dynamic content that can "deselect" certain displays/cards

I'd take a crack at that if I could find the API/toolkit for making them, as posted in another thread

Until then, those of us who are addicted to our multiple monitors (> 2) AND our animated desktops will have to choose one or the other.


konstareal
Reply #16 Friday, April 6, 2007 6:01 AM
Deskscapes supports multiple monitors already. The existing dynamic content is set to show the same thing on all monitors, but thats something that is decided by the content itself. If I wanted to I could have one monitor showing one thing and a second showing something different.


Thank you for this response, but in reference to my original question at the top of the thread, is there any way that a user can designate a video based dream to appear on only one screen, rather than both, which is the default behaviour and causes the stress problems, and looks "wrong" for 90% of dreams.

Shaun Guido
Reply #17 Thursday, July 5, 2007 12:19 PM
"If you want low cpu usage then pick a dynamic dream"

I assume this is what the spinning world and box are ? If so is there any easy way to find other downloads like these? All of the ones I've tried on this site require Dreamscenes which doesn't work on my 2 monitor setup. So far only the spinning world and Stardock spinning box have worked correctly.

ZubaZ
Reply #18 Thursday, July 5, 2007 12:46 PM
Liquid Dream is dynamic.
https://www.wincustomize.com/skins.aspx?tag=dynamic

Neil Banfield
Reply #19 Friday, July 6, 2007 4:47 AM
Ovals, expanding shapes, spinning box, desktop earth, liquid dream and desktop collage are all dynamic dreams.

TheMasterBaron
Reply #20 Saturday, July 14, 2007 2:19 PM
If you want to try different videos on different monitors to see what the CPU load would be (or just to see what it would be like) you can try my SSDream application. It doesn't support the .dream file format, but it will play different WMV and MPEG files on each monitor.

On my:
6600 Core Duo 2.4ghz Over clocked to 3.2ghz
NVidia 8800 GTS

I get a 14% CPU load when I run two MPEG2 videos:
Ripple Purple Rays MPEG2(1152x720) on the 24" 1920x1600 Monitor
Apollo v2 MPEG2(1024x768) on the 21" 1600x1200 Monitor

I get a 25% CPU load when I run two WMV videos:
Ripple Purple Rays WMV(1920x1200) on the 24" 1920x1600 Monitor
Apollo v2 WMV(1600x1200) on the 21" 1600x1200 Monitor

These numbers a on par with what I'm seeing if I add the CPU loads together when running them separately.

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