Quad Monitrs.. cant run Dreams

get newer video cards

wrong answer Razster   
There is nothing wrong with these cards.
One is a Pcie Nvidia Quadro NVS 285 256MB, the other is a PCI Nvidia GeForce FX5200 w 256MB memory. All with the latest drivers.

These cards are well more than capable of running DreamScene. It just doesn't like me doing it on 4 monitors. I can run it on up to 3 connected monitors but when I extend my desktop to the 4th one DS won't run.

Show off.

I just wish it was my HOME system. It's my work PC   

Dell Precision 690 workstation, Dual Xeon 1.6Ghz Dual Core Processors, 1066Mhz Bus, 2 GB Ram, 2 160GB SATA Hard Drives.. 
Then I come home to my lowly system which gets pissed if I even break out the Vista DVD     

Have you tried lowering the resolution on all of the monitors just to see if its a total desktop resolution issue?

I'd rather stick a red hot poker in my eye  
I can try it, but I would rather not have DreamScenes than to live with 1024x768.

Four monitors?

Not being a techy, I'm just trying to imagine what the hell you'd need four monitors for anyway.


I hate you.

Well, I do quite a bit with VMWare so I have a virtual machine or 2 or 3 running.
I keep domain administration tools open.
Outlook,
Reading documentation and connected to another system with Dameware or remote desktop. Writing installation proceedures etc.

One of the monitors is also connected to an 8 port KVM so I can be doing builds on up to 5 more PC's at a time.

So, I have quite a bit going on. I hate minimizing unless I have to.

I have two 20" and two 30" Dell monitors on my GB. They are most excellent for "wow" factor when clients come in for a meeting. Now if I can only get rid of the damn black bars between the monitors. One day when I'm stupid rich I guess I'll get the Athens monitor array from www.l-computer.com. but sadly it has the bars as well albeit very thin ones.

Delete Me - Double post

And that's why I'm not a techy. I like to have one monitor that works . . . and once I'm good with that, I'm good to go. Give me my OD and I'm set.

It won't work on my 256mb X850XT either in dual monitor mode.

What a joke.... "cutting edge" and it can't handle more than one frackin monitor.

Oh come on! I hate it when people dis software like that.

Even I can take a guess at what is really going on: because it *is* cutting edge, DreamScenes uses hardware acceleration in order not to slow your PC down to a crawl with wallpaper animation. The worst performance killer in terms of graphics is transferring bitmaps from main memory into video memory, so, in order to prevent this, DreamScenes probably tries to load the bitmaps 'permanently' into the video card RAM as a texture. It's then up to the GPU, instead of the CPU, to take over the job of animating the wallpaper.

I never tried running DreamScenes, but I think the problem here is that either it is trying to stretch the wallpaper from monitor 1 to monitor 4 (instead of making each monitor have its own individual animated wallpaper) which requires a HUGE texture OR, with each video card supporting two monitors at high resolution, they simply don't have enough RAM left to store the required textures.

The same thing can happen with the WDM in Vista, except Microsoft developed a method to store window bitmaps in main memory when the system runs out of video card memory. With an animated wallpaper, though, I'm not sure this would be a good solution - performance would suffer tremendously.

Most people call it "cutting edge" because it’s the latest thing, but some people call it “cutting edge” because it's enters first. When you use a knife, it’s the cutting edge that gets the glory when it cuts and the abuse when it hits something hard.

I dunno, but an X850 driving 2 monitors is rather far from cutting edge.
Respect your graphics card- WDM isn't like simple GDI calls that can be processed easily. And the X850XT is 2.5-year tech, to add unto it.

By cutting edge, I was referring to Windows Vista, not the x850xt....

And I'm sorry, it IS ridiculous that a video card with the power of an x850xt can't do this. There is NO technical reason why it can't. It's not like the GPU is "just too slow" - it all comes down to idiotic design at MS.

Why, exactly can it render 1600x1200 in Oblivion with no trouble, yet can't handle a simple video loop? That has NOTHING to do with how cutting edge the card is.

One of my favorite quotes:

If it can run Oblivion at 3200*1200, then call me throughly impressed. Chances are only a Crossfire X1900+ rig could do that. This is full-motion 24/30p video, and at THAT big a resolution, even Adobe After Effects, a CPU/RAM based software, has issues coding. There probably isn't a frame buffer big enough for 2 screen video support in last-gen (preDX10) cards so they left support out from DS for a while- I presume. It might also be a technical flaw in DirectX Video Acceleration as how the code handles video.

If you really want 2 monitor video just use the VLC Player hack. See how badly it runs and finally disconnect your 2nd doodle.

NGTV: Rendering a video is *nothing* compared to thousands of polygons and shaders. Funny, I can render the Vista desktop in Aero on two screens with no trouble - my point is rendering a desktop *isn't* that much work.

The whole point is that it can't do it NOT because of a lack of horsepower, but because of an idiotic decision by MS to render the ENTIRE wallpaper in a SINGLE texture. This is not necessary in a dual monitor situation, and indeed is a waste of resources. It isn't a horsepower limit that it bumps into doing this, but merely a limit on maximum texture size, that could have EASILY been solved by rendering each desktop seperately. Obviously the DWN already does this - otherwise I wouldn't be able to have an Aero desktop on dual monitors.

Additionally, Stardock has gotten around this issue with dynamic dreams, which are actually more comparable to the Oblivion example, since they are rendered images rather than video loops. With a dynamic dream, I CAN run dual monitors and dreams together. It is merely better programming on Stardock's part. Rendering Desktop Earth is barely even noticeable on my system. There's no reason it couldn't do two screens of video EXCEPT for the decision by MS to use a single texture. Unfortunately, there are currently only TWO dynamic dreams that have been released to the public, and they aren't exactly as easy to create as video loops.

Umm... and WHY would I want to use a VLC player hack???

You should add a coule of computers and get Multiplicity.

Heh... amazing that my $130 Nintendo DS does better dual screen than Windows on a $3,000 computer.

Microsoft has never designed it's multimonitor support for Windows all that well. At least compared to Apple and MacOS (which has supported multi-monitors since the late 80s). I honestly don't think Microsoft takes multimonitor support all that seriously. There is no reason why it should not be possible to display different dynamic content on each seperate monitor you have, be it if you have two, three, four, even seven monitors. As it is, you maximize any window on any monitor, Windows dreamscene will pause. Hmm... I can see why it's still in "beta".

I can create dreamscenes with 3200x1200 and even higher resolutions. Will those run on dual-monitor systems?

No, they won't. Each monitor displays a repeat of the same dream; the dreams are not actually stretched over the entire set of displays - see my post here: Multi Monitor Setups

I have dual monitors, and then I have another pc with duals, it and expensive at all