Help: Surround Gaming, Spanning, and PCI Express

[Lain]

After seeing my friend show off his Parahelia 256MB graphics card, my interest in surround gaming has peeked, but although as cool as it is, and as popular as it could be, there are few cards that support such setups.

Mostly professional grade cards, such as the Parahelia series or the NVS series support it, but lack the performance you'd see in high-end consumer cards like 9800's or 5950's.

The alternative is to run a PCI and AGP graphics card, such as a Geforce FX 5950 and PCI the version of the FX 5200. My only concern there is the performance difference between those cards which is pretty great.

Also I read that spanning is only supported for two displays, that are connected to the same graphics card. I don't know if that is true, or if nvidia has changed this recently in a update of their det drivers.

Finally with PCI Express on the horizon, I wonder if there will be a possibility of Multiple x16's on a single mainboard, or even x8 graphics cards that are just as powerful as their x16 counterpart (if there will be x8 type graphics cards at all).

[rios__]

as far as i knew, you can only use 1 vid card on a computer at a time.

to get multiple displays, you need a card that has 2 monitor connectors

[Lain]

http://www.realtimesoft.com/multimon...pic=2686&tmpl=

Nvidia's nView lets you run both a AGP and PCI graphics card together.

[rios__]

i stand corrected
ill have to try this out sometime