Moraldi: Yeah, I know, that photo is a good example for how it's not done. ;-)
DavidDC: Yep, it's a triple monitor setup with two nVidia 7300GT --- see my latest bug report for BlitzMax. ;-)
These nVidias are not the fastest, but, hm, the Mac version of Doom 3 runs very nicely at 1600x1200 with maximum details on that machine and the Mac version of UT2004 also runs extremely smoothly on 1920x1200 with max details. Of course, they only use one screen of the three.
I also have a 32-bit version of Vista in a BootCamp partition; Crysis and STALKER ran rather crappy on it, but STALKER does not like Vista anyway, as it seems. It was playable, but not overwhelmingly convincing. But otherwise Vista handles the three displays very well, albeit only with a graphics performance index of 4.0-4.3, depending on the graphics driver version.
But I do not really care that much for the gaming performance of that machine, to be honest - the Xbox 360 has become my main gaming vehicle, and she is also connected to that HP display (via VGA). So it would be irrational to upgrade to, let's say, 8800GTs just to have more gaming performance and ventilation noise in the Mac. At the moment the machine is rather quiet, and I'd like to keep it that way.
I'm more interested in how that baby runs stuff like Apple's Aperture, and -that- performance is beyond questioning - thanks to 8GB RAM and four Xeon cores you hardly notice that it is loading the next RAW picture, and image manipulations are applied instantly. But I've already found (and reported) some new bugs in Aperture since I have two graphics cards in the Mac; changing certain settings like contrast or black point can produce a plain black image on the secondary and tertiary display. On a plain one graphics card/two display setup that never happened.
DavidDC: Yep, it's a triple monitor setup with two nVidia 7300GT --- see my latest bug report for BlitzMax. ;-)
These nVidias are not the fastest, but, hm, the Mac version of Doom 3 runs very nicely at 1600x1200 with maximum details on that machine and the Mac version of UT2004 also runs extremely smoothly on 1920x1200 with max details. Of course, they only use one screen of the three.
I also have a 32-bit version of Vista in a BootCamp partition; Crysis and STALKER ran rather crappy on it, but STALKER does not like Vista anyway, as it seems. It was playable, but not overwhelmingly convincing. But otherwise Vista handles the three displays very well, albeit only with a graphics performance index of 4.0-4.3, depending on the graphics driver version.
But I do not really care that much for the gaming performance of that machine, to be honest - the Xbox 360 has become my main gaming vehicle, and she is also connected to that HP display (via VGA). So it would be irrational to upgrade to, let's say, 8800GTs just to have more gaming performance and ventilation noise in the Mac. At the moment the machine is rather quiet, and I'd like to keep it that way.
I'm more interested in how that baby runs stuff like Apple's Aperture, and -that- performance is beyond questioning - thanks to 8GB RAM and four Xeon cores you hardly notice that it is loading the next RAW picture, and image manipulations are applied instantly. But I've already found (and reported) some new bugs in Aperture since I have two graphics cards in the Mac; changing certain settings like contrast or black point can produce a plain black image on the secondary and tertiary display. On a plain one graphics card/two display setup that never happened.