How Bad is ATI Multi Monitor??

[GT98]

Well I hate to say it but I got a Radeon 9700 from Ebay coming UPS to me this week. I sold off my 2 19in Monitors to help pay for it, since the Parhelia is going to be retired and its future detemed at a later date. I'm kicking around getting a Dell 2000FP next year after I save up some cash to go with my Cornerstone 21in monitor so I can still do dual head and see how bad/good gaming is on a LCD.

My question is is how bad/good is the software that ATI uses to do Hydravision (think thats what they call their dualhead)? I'm just looking to have something like Outlook or another window of Opera/IE opened in the secondary montior so I can surf two pages at once or what not. I never tried Dualhead with ATI software so I'm looking for someone that has.

[K6-III]

Was pretty bad on my R8500 128mb retail....should be better with the second ramdac integrated ondie....

[Indiana]

If you care about dual head you should know not to get a model with only one RAMDAC...

The dual RAMDAC models (all R9700PRO are dual ones as those are both integrated in the GPU core) are fine for dual monitor operation and should do what GT98 wants just fine.

[fleabus2]

GT98:
Here is another good place to ask:

http://www.rage3d.com/board/index.php?s=

Happy trails,

[Novdid]

You won't get a decent answer there. The majority of the people posting at rage3d doesn't know the difference between left and right.

[GT98]

Originally posted by Novdid
You won't get a decent answer there. The majority of the people posting at rage3d doesn't know the difference between left and right.

Got that right...I hate that place for the most part...filled with ATIfaniactics

[The PIT]

Hydra vision don't use it.
Multi monitor support is poor compaired matrox I've also noticed a marked detoration in quality on one my Monitors when I have both running at the same time. Ones an LCD so of course theres no differance there but on CRT the image detorates visable with both monitors connected.
Other problems I've found with ATi's dualhead is that the damn thing gets the monitor drivers mixed up and uses the wrong drivers for your display by default. So under ME the thickie drivers being used for my LCD are in fact my IIlyama 512 drivers. Since I use my CRT for gaming I can't be arsed to sort it out as thats all I use ME for. Under win2k the drivers are the right way round but theres no guarentee it will stay like that.
Another solution use the same monitors on both heads.

[Indiana]

The Pit, you don't mention which ATI card you have. The R8500 mostly have a 230MHz secondary RamDAC and the display quality on this one is quite a bit worse than the one on the already not so good primary.

But this is not true for the R9700. This one has two 400MHz RAMDACs with decent/equal quality on both outputs and there was no deterioration in signal quality when two displys were connected (an 22" Iiyama VisionMaster Pro510 and a 17" Eizo TFT here). No problem with the monitor drivers being mixed up as well.

[The PIT]

9700 I've got I see I missed it off the sig. Definat drop in quality. With just CRT plugged in I can run 2048 * whatever and the text is readable. Plug both the LCD in and CRT and it's isn't and too be honest you wouldn't want to leave it's recommended resolution.
I'm not the only whos had the drivers get mixed up it seems if you install new drivers with only one monitor active it will use the same driver for both monitors. It ain't as massive problem unless you set your lcd to 100hz 1600 x 1200.

[fleabus2]

See my sig above:

I use the Radeon 9700 Pro in the same way as I used the Parhelia ... ie although separate settings are available, I use both CRTs at 1600x1200 32bit 85Hz. Looks every bit as good as the Parhelia to these ol' eyes.
I haven't installed the HydraVision software and don't know if I will. I don't yet know what it is exactly for.
The 6200 drivers that I downloaded from the ATI site seem (along with WinXP HE SP1) to give me all of the "DualHead/S-video TV-OUT capabilities I need. (Have to look into it & see what it offers beyond what I have).
I haven't had the 9700 Pro long but 2 & 3D look as good as the Parhelia and it is faster in games. I havent tried DVD movies since i have a Denon Progressive scan/component cabled console player in the same (living) room as my computer. Why bother?
GT98. I know the link I gave you has a lot of frothatthemouth ATI users there but like with any forum I can usually separate the wheat from the chaff.
Here is another site that offers advice. Not very busy but the noise level is low.

Happy trails,

[fleabus2]

Whoops!

http://www.rageunderground.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi

[dbdg]

I got so annoyed with dualhead on the 8500 that I went out myself and PCI crad.

Definately the best option. On the 8500 at least the options that you are used to from Matrox are just not there. Not sure about the 9700 although I can't imagine them improving it that much.

Rage3D forums are definately not worth the effort. In the last post I bothered to look and reply to the guy just started flaming me for no reason. They are all too interested in fps and what card ownz.

[DGhost]

the 8500's was pretty craptacular. first problem was the fact that I couldn't disable it. I have seen this lead to issues with old DX7 games. besides that I saw corruption and general instability when running two monitors, as well as the issue that a lot of people had where it wouldn't support non-DCC monitors.

Have not seen the 9700's so i cannot verify it. just know that of the people i know who have purchased them, one couldn't get it to work in his system, and the other is perfectly happy with it. neither run it in multimon though.

And yes, Hydravision can sukkit. not worth installing.

[The PIT]

The main reason why I don't use Hydravision is that my chess programs fritz7 etc don't like it one bit.