Multiple Displays registered as 1 display

[Styrofoam]

Hello,
Okay, I've spent hours trying to find an answer to my question but its hard to get an answer when your not sure what the question is.

Lets put this into a scenario. A 2560x1600 projector is really expensive. However 2 1280x800 projectors are a fraction of the price. How can you get windows to register the output to each 1280x800 projector (in portrait mode) as a single individual screen.

To clarify, if I did that now, I will have a main window and an extended window so when I run an application, play a movie to full screen, it will maximized to the monitor that is set to be the main monitor (the one with the windows task bar).

Or if I want to be really fancy and have an ultra wide screen using 3 1280x800 to get a 3840x2400 as a single window would that be possible?

I've seen something similar at exhibitions or display stands with an array of 3x3 screens displaying a movie over the 9 screens. How are they doing it as I got a feeling that's the solution to my problem.

Here's an image of what am trying to explain to a degree.
http://i.msdn.microsoft.com/dynimg/IC140135.jpg

Many thanks and hope I can find the answer to my problems!

 

[jfreggie]

I think that you are thinking about Eyefinity or Nvidia Surround.
Both will make multiple monitors appear as one.

http://www.amd.com/us/products/technologies/amd-eyefinity-technology/for-consumers/Pages/what-is-eyefinity.aspx

 

[Styrofoam]

WOW.... soo simple. Thank you for that answer. It would appear it does exactly what I want.

Maybe I'll get an answer faster here before I find it myself but, they mention multiple display at 1080p... which means XXXX x 1080 resolution. Is the vertical pixel count limited to 1080 or can I surpass it to 1600 or higher even?

Belay that, a few clicks gave me an answer to that and yes it does but not with 3D.

 

[wolfram23]

As far as I know it's whatever you want. I've heard of people with 3 1920x1080 displays in portrait mode, so their overall image is 3240x1920 instead of 5760x1080.

 

[Styrofoam]

Yeah, I figured that. They do state 3 display so it looks like Nvidia surround is not happy doing a 4 screen surround which is fine.

Was looking into doing an ultra wide portrait mode projector setup with the new fancy lampless projectors. Its a shame they only come in XGA and WXGA res. so I cant exceed 2400x1280. Maybe another half year and they'll start popping out higher res. lampless projectors.

Have to test out XXXX x 1280 and see if the vertical height is enough for what I want.

On a side note Matrox has a nifty little external device that takes 1 signal input and spits it out to dual or triple monitor. The possibilities are endless. Maybe I can have a super expensive quad or 6 projector setup... pray to god those lampless projectors life expectancy really is 20,000 hours haha!!!

 

[wolfram23]

AMD Eyefinity allows 6 monitors in 6x1 or 3x2 setup. Projectors are definitely a great way to exploit that. No borders at all!

 

[Styrofoam]

Yeah I saw but unfortunately, I am not a fan of ATI cards. Had a GeForce 4, upgraded to ATI, then went back to Nvidia and never back since. Party due to my current monitor being 2560x1600 with several reviews on Tom's Hardware stating, if you want to play with these resolution, Nvidia flag ship is the way to go. So here I am with a very out dated PC (A8N32-SLI, 4gb Ram [Ouch I know], 460GTX SLI'd, SSD and a 5x1tb Samsung F3 [soon to be thrown into a NAS box]).

Interestingly I was looking up using a combination of the Matrox display splitter and Nvidia surround.

I essentially can get a 3x3 screen setup. (Yes I know, with ATI I can reach 6x3 screen setup). But the thing was, you can get those rather cheap projectors, Pico projectors, pocket projectors etc. Use them in an array to form a larger image. These new small projectors are all using the laser/led as the light source instead so they last a fairly long time.

Make a nice little mount to hold all the projectors and adjust them to have one giant image.

Calculations eventually came up with almost the same costs as going for just some standard mid range resolution projectors and a lot less trouble of aligning soo many projectors and ensuring their all sync and working in tandem or not having 1 fail and missing a square block of image from the entire display.

It all boils down to what resolution you want to achieve. If your happy with 1080p or 1080p x 2 width then its not too bad. When you aim for 2560x1600 or 4k res, the costs is literally exponential even with a single projector or multiple projectors.