Questions regarding window management on Parhelia 3-head stretch mode

[UtwigMU]

So I've been playing with 2 monitor for 4 days now.

With Ultramon and Powerdesk driven cards Window management is just smoow and natural, now I'd like to know how 3-head Parhelia does it out of box?

Can you maximize windows to single display, 2 displays or 3 displays with single click or other easy way?

As I read in realtimesoft's (developers of Ultramon) Parhelia review, taskbar is streched accross 3 displays and maximizing windows disregards the taskbar - similar to 2048x768 stretched virtual desktop on G400.

Since on 3-head Parhelia falls back to blitting instead of hardware overlay how does video work?

How do games that don't support triple-head work?

Are there any glitches with 3D applications (AutoCAD, 3D StudioMAX, Maya)? From my Mill/G400 i imagine there shouldn't be any glitches related to 3-head.

[albatorsk]

Re: Questions regarding window management on Parhelia 3-head stretch mode

Originally posted by UtwigMU
Can you maximize windows to single display, 2 displays or 3 displays with single click or other easy way?

You will have to option to choose between maximizing across all three screens, or just the current screen, when installing the drivers. I'm sure you can change it in Powerdesk somwhere, but I can't seem to find it.

Since on 3-head Parhelia falls back to blitting instead of hardware overlay how does video work?

Video overlay is severly crippled in TripleHead at the moment. You will only be able to play video in the first display, which is a step back from the first drivers that supported video overlay on all three heads.

How do games that don't support triple-head work?

Some works better than others (obviously). But, in general, most games that supports it, works quite well. Not a lot of games support it, though, so don't expect to play all your 3D games in TH.

[Kruzin]

Re: Re: Questions regarding window management on Parhelia 3-head stretch mode

Originally posted by albatorsk
You will have to option to choose between maximizing across all three screens, or just the current screen, when installing the drivers. I'm sure you can change it in Powerdesk somwhere, but I can't seem to find it.
You can set it up so that it will maximize to a single screen, or if you hold down the shift button, it will maximize across all three.

Video overlay is severly crippled in TripleHead at the moment. You will only be able to play video in the first display, which is a step back from the first drivers that supported video overlay on all three heads.
You have the option of using a hardware overlay, where you can play a video in a window on the primary display and DVDmax if you want, or you can disable hardware overlay, and use blit, where you can play a video on any display, but have no DVDmax.

Some works better than others (obviously). But, in general, most games that supports it, works quite well. Not a lot of games support it, though, so don't expect to play all your 3D games in TH.
Most single screen games will disable the 2nd and 3rd displays when you start them, but you will get better performance in these games if you switch to singlehead before you start a singlehead game.

[UtwigMU]

Is MaxView there?

[Pace|Work]

Re: Questions regarding window management on Parhelia 3-head stretch mode

Originally posted by Kruzin
you will get better performance in these games if you switch to singlehead before you start a singlehead game

Just a wee curio, does this require a reboot?

[SitFlyer]

No

[WyWyWyWy]

You can even use Ultramon to have an app specific profile to disable TH.

[XHotKolaX]

Any reason in particular for a single-head game to perform a bit slower when using triple-head?

[Wombat]

I believe, but I'm not sure, that when Parhelia starts running in triple-head, it divides the video memory between the heads.

[XHotKolaX]

Does this also happen in dual-head also?

In that scenerio, perhaps a 256MB card would benefit even if clocked lower? 85MB per head instead of ~43MB.