Multi monitor celestia

General discussion about Celestia that doesn't fit into other forums.
Topic author
marc
Posts: 426
Joined: 13.03.2002
With us: 23 years
Location: Outback Australia

Multi monitor celestia

Post #1by marc » 10.08.2002, 05:34

Ive been running celestia successfully on two monitors using both a
Geforce2 MX400 64M twinview
and
Geforce4 MX440 64M twinview.
respectively of course.

Id like to know what other multi monitor cards will run celestia.
Particularly high end cards that will handle more than 2 monitors.

My aim is to get celestia running on three projectors.

Has anyone used a quadro4 NVS 400 with celestia?

Know of any other high end multimonitor video cards that might do the job?

UncleSpam
Posts: 38
Joined: 03.02.2002
With us: 23 years 2 months
Location: Burbank, CA

Post #2by UncleSpam » 11.08.2002, 20:47

Marc,

I will try this on my Dell i8100 laptop with a GeForce4 440 Go, using the built-in LCD panel and a 21" IBM Trinitron... I will let you know how it works.


Bogdan

Topic author
marc
Posts: 426
Joined: 13.03.2002
With us: 23 years
Location: Outback Australia

Post #3by marc » 12.08.2002, 06:39

I assumed that the gf4mx440 worked fine. It seems I cannot get it to work in fullscreen mode at 2048x1024 (across both screens) like i can with the gf2mx400.

It will run fine across both screens in windowed mode though.

matthall
Posts: 2
Joined: 12.08.2002
With us: 22 years 8 months
Location: Calgary

Multiple monitors

Post #4by matthall » 12.08.2002, 16:34

Hi,

I am running Celestia successfully on 3 projectors. I am using three 2-year old Electrohome Marquee 9500LCs (only about 250 lumens each), projecting onto a 2 x 8 m curved screen (more or less). The images are blended, with 25% overlap zones. (I can't wait for blended, curved screen, active stereo DLPs to come along... hopefully we'll get some next year.)

I am running Celestia on a not-very-good 300 MHz PC with a Colorgraphics Predator 4 card, which is very old and slow but does the job. It seems that although many newer cards support three montiors, I am not sure they will do the blending. If anyone knows more about this, I'd love to hear your thoughts. I run it in 2560 x 768 x 16 or 32 mode, as I do with my desktop.

So, Celestia runs nicely. The images are beautiful but of course, no night-side lights and fairly poor performance for flying etc. I work in a visualization room at an energy company, and use Celestia to talk about the power of visualization, with the June 14th 2002 MN asteroid flyby as a demo. I usually start off with it --- all the lights out, no text in the display, just Io with Jupiter floating past. It's great, especially for younger people. Hats off to all the developers.

I also have a very nice SGI Onyx 3 in here, but cannot for the life of me get Celestia to compile on it. I would obviously get better performance on there, and can also do 3 projectors, even in stereo, if Celestia ever gets that. Full res on that is 3200 x 1024, or 2560 x 768 for stereo.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Matt

Topic author
marc
Posts: 426
Joined: 13.03.2002
With us: 23 years
Location: Outback Australia

Post #5by marc » 13.08.2002, 03:34

thanks matt, I know now that its possible.
Is the blending done by the video card? , or is it software?

Any one else had any multi monitor experience?

Marc

matthall
Posts: 2
Joined: 12.08.2002
With us: 22 years 8 months
Location: Calgary

Multiple monitors

Post #6by matthall » 13.08.2002, 17:45

Hi Marc,

Good question... When I wrote yesterday, I was absentmindedly thinking that the card does the blending, but actually it doesn't. If I had thought about it, I would have mentioned that the three video channels go via three RGBS converters to a Panoram Matrix Switcher (Panoram are at http://www.panoramtech.com), which controls the various video and audio sources, and then to a Panoram Integrator (a glorified PC). The Integrator does the blending, and sends the blended signals to the projectors.

Hope that helps,
Cheers,
Matt


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