4870 X2 and two monitors

[Schnippzle]

Howdy,
As I understand it, when you run crossfire in a game you cannot run two monitors as the game will default to one card. Is this the same for the 4870X2? The reason I ask is because I love playing SupCom and WiC with dual monitors set up, and it would be a shame to not be able to utilise the full power of the 4870 X2 in these games with dual monitors.

 

[ACESHIGH]

Howdy,
As I understand it, when you run crossfire in a game you cannot run two monitors as the game will default to one card. Is this the same for the 4870X2? The reason I ask is because I love playing SupCom and WiC with dual monitors set up, and it would be a shame to not be able to utilise the full power of the 4870 X2 in these games with dual monitors.

Thats not my understanding.
AFAIK in crossfire and as for the 4870X2, 3870X2 etc you can run multiple monitors fine.

see these links ..
http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=475&pgno=8
http://techreport.com/articles.x/13967/3

Happily, though, AMD's newer drivers pretty much blow that limitation away. They've delivered the "seamless" multi-monitor/multi-GPU support AMD promised at the time of the Radeon HD 3870 launch. Here's what I was able to do as a result. I connected a pair of monitors—a 30" LCD with a dual-link DVI port and an analog CRT—to a Radeon HD 3870 in a CrossFire pairing and enabled CrossFire. Both displays continued to show the Vista desktop with CrossFire enabled. Then I ran UT3 and played full-screen on the LCD. The CRT continued to show the Vista desktop just fine. Next, I switched UT3 into windowed mode, without exiting the game, and the transition went smoothly, with both displays active. Finally, I dragged the UT3 window to span both desktops, and it continued to render everything perfectly. Here's a screenshot, wildly shrunken, of my desktop session. Its original dimensions were 2048x1536 plus 2560x1600, with the UT3 window at 2560x1600.

On the codenamed Spider platform, utilizing CrossFireX with AMD 790FX chipset and Radeon HD 3800 series video cards, the user can use multiple displays and maintain CrossFire functionality while SLI and previous generation CrossFire setups are limited to one display only.

You cannot run multiple monitors under SLI though, using Nvidia cards..

 

[Schnippzle]

Most excellent 2 x 4870X2's here I come

 

[LoadsaMoney]

CrossfireX can do dual monitors, its Nvidia's rubbish SLi that can't.

 

[Crashgate3]

As long as its a single card (ie, a 4870X2, not two 4870s on seperate cards) then SoftTH can put games across two monitors, using the full power of the card.

http://www.kegetys.net/softth/

It can do three, but you need a second PCI-E card to plug the third monitor into, although this second card isn't used for rendering, just displaying the image, so it can be a very cheap, low powered card.