The Plucky Programmer

Two monitors are better than one

This was the wise, insightful statement made by some smart guy many years ago. However, he got so busy playing stuff on his dual monitored rig, that he forgot to write it down. Ergo, no-one’s heard of it.

There was this old PC lying in my house. It had a cheap, 20″ AOC (an unehard of company) LCD monitor (wasn’t very high res, though). Since no one else used it much anymore, it had been my workhorse, on 24x7 downloading stuff.

Then, today, I realized that I could put this monitor to better use. My graphics card has two DVI output ports. And I had a DVI to VGA cable lying around. Therefore, today I decided to set it up in conjunction with my newer, 23″ 1080p HP monitor.  My PC went from being Wowbagger to Zaphod Beeblebrox, as it now has another head. And boy is it fun.

South Park, and the blog post (this one) being edited on the left. Later, I realized it was much smarter if I did it the other way round, and hence South Park is now playing on the right monitor

Most gamers normally position their second and third (if present) monitors flanking their primary one, so as to extend the display to enjoy larger than life resolutions. My objective, however, was different. I wanted to do multitasking. I.e., I wanted to run a game/movie/other video on my primary HD monitor, while I periodically checked Facebook/blogged/tweeted from the one right next to it.

Needless to say, all my problems were solved.

However, I would have loved it if there were games that had in-built support for multimonitor setups. I thought this was true for many, games, but then Wikipedia told me otherwise. The list gave ONLY 7 games that had inbuilt (i.e. without any third party software) multi-monitor setup.

There was World in Conflict, which I’ve heard features a tactical map and inventory on the second monitor. I had Burnout Paradise, but it didn’t work with that coz I need two monitors that are almost exactly the same. As for the other games, I don’t have them. So its still something I’ll have to wait for.

(Above: World In Conflict Multi-Monitor Demo)

But the shocking thing is this: there are only 7 games that feature inbuilt support for this feature, and I bet many of them are faulty/incomplete. There are of course millions of third party hardware and software extensions (such as ATI’s Eyefinity)  that let you span your game window across 2, 3 or 42 (kidding) monitors, but its just that: spanning. You cannot have the two different monitors perform different functions or things like that. Now THAT would be cool.

However, till then, heres a video I made demonstrating the cool capabilities of a multi-monitor setup:

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