Configuring 2nd Monitor

[1sttomars]

Dearest Il-2 Community,

 

I'm seeking some assistance in configuring a second monitor I purchased for playing Il-2. I'm trying to configure to merge the two screens together. My research on this within the forum's has been a little challenging, I apologize in advance if there is a thread that discusses this.

 

My googling suggests that merging the displays is done within the Nvidia control panel but it seems that my laptops native display is configured by my internal graphics card, not the discrete card (which is powering my new monitor).

 

Any help or pointing in the right direction would be greatly appreciated!

 

Thanks for reading.

[Guest deleted@134347]

 

so you want to merge two monitors being powered by two separate graphics cards in to a single image?

 

I don't think that's going to work with Nvidia. The merging is done on driver level, which is tied to a single hardware instance. I.e. it can merge 2 monitors connected to the same graphics card where the driver is running. I haven't seen the merging work across 2 drivers, i.e. where one is being used by laptop screen and another by external card....

 

there maybe other solutions, but I honestly never seen them...

[1sttomars]

Hey Didney_World - Actually no! My goal is simply to have two monitors showing a single image. In fact, perhaps your comment better helps me understand the right question to ask. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to get my laptop's display to be powered by my discrete graphics card? I can't seem to figure out how.

Within the NVIDIA control panel it seems to have an ability to 'merge' but I can't get it to power my laptops screen as well as my extra monitor.

 

Thanks for moving this post to a more appropriate sub-forum. I'm very new here.

 

Thanks for your help

[IckyATLAS]

Your laptop image as far as I know will be the image generated by your graphic card inside the laptop. You cannot have an external graphic card that will generate an image on your laptop screen. You do not have an video input port on a laptop. You can output your laptop screen image onto another screen. There is always an output video port, like HDMI (standard or mini, micro) or Display Port (standard and mini) or DVI for older laptops. You can then duplicate or extend the image across the two monitors.

 

If you duplicate both images will be identical.

If you want to combine the two images as being one unique surface you can do that in Windows but only from your laptop with its internal graphic cards, and this will work for your office space. You will have a double monitor size which is nice for work as you can open application windows across the two monitors.

 

Better have identical monitor size and resolution to avoid scaling and size effects, but if the two monitors have distinct functions and different displays then no problem to have monitors different but adapted to the specific task.

 

What I have not tested as IL2 does not run on my professional laptops, is if you launch IL2 in a double extended monitor configuration, will the image cover both monitors as a unique larger image. To be tested, and I am interested to know how it works. It could work if in IL2 you can set an image resolution compatible with the size of the double monitor resolution. Probably you need to play in windowed mode and not full screen mode, but again this is to be tested.

 

Beware that your performance will drop significantly as even if it works your laptop graphic card will have to manage double the number of pixels. Your FPS will suffer and be less than half the FPS with one monitor.

 

On my personal gaming rig I prefer a large 42 inch, full 4K  monitor, instead of multiple ones smaller and at lower resolution.

 

Your question makes me remember about some professional military grade simulators I saw many many years ago, where you had multiple graphic cards on one motherboard (a special purpose built motherboard) , each graphic card was driving one monitor connected to it. It was a quad graphic card configuration driving four monitors. Each video output was a separate channel. Three monitors were for displaying images out of the window and one was internal to the cockpit data display. This is the best way to go as every image has the full power of one graphic card.

The CPU load may become an issue. In those time you did not have multiple core CPUs but you had quad sockets with four CPUs.  The software has also to be designed to take full advantage of this type of hardware. Anyway these systems were completely out of reach for the general public.

 

A GTX 3090 that we will have available in a few weeks now is multiple times more powerful than the four graphic cards combined of that time, and the image quality has nothing to compare as it is also multiple times better in visual quality.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited August 29, 2020 by IckyATLAS