More Parhelia features

Author
Aron Schatz
Posted
May 15, 2002
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1980
Tags Graphics

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Extremetech has an excellent overview of the features of the parhelia.

Multi-monitor displays have been part of PCs for going on ten years now, but most of them tend to come in even-numbered configurations: two, four, sometimes even eight. And while Nvidia, ATI, and Matrox have all made big noises about their respective multi-monitor display technology trouncing the competition, none of them to date had much use in 3D games. Why? Several reasons: for starters, it would likely involve going back and tweaking game code to support a feature that isn't widely deployed and won't net the game maker many incremental sales. Game developers will sometimes implement features they think are cool for that reason alone, but with the game business being more bottom-line-oriented than ever, and with engineering man-hours tight, feature support for its own sake is increasingly rare. Secondly, and this is the show-stopper, most 3D GPUs simply didn't have the horsepower to drive two (or more) displays owing to both increased fill-rate requirements, and the memory management issues of the multiple display surfaces.

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