When vidcards say 'TV-out'

[SlateGrey]

what exactly is being offered? I'm trying to understand the limitations of multi-display outputs off of the current crop of video cards in terms of DVI and TV-out.

Can 'TV-out' show a different screen than the main DVI output, or is it limited to just a duplication of the main output sent to the television?

Assuming 'Dual-DVI' outputs means two different screen outputs, what are the limitations? I'm guessing two combined screens can't go beyond the single maximum display resolution of the video card. Since both ATI and nVidia seem to output 2048x15xx max, that probably means that 'Dual-DVI' can only support two 1024x768 screens max. Yes?

 

[zetto]

1) yes, TV-out can have a different output, u can have 2 screens with either second dvi or tv-out enabled
2) no, both dvi outputs can go up to the max res, u can have 2 screens at 16x12 each, or whatever it is ur monitors capable of - except super highres LCDs like ACD 30"

 

[zetto]

the reason why single videocard can have 2 outputs at max res because most if not all moden videocards carry 2 ramdacs that generate the output signal.

 

[SlateGrey]

That's double good news, thanks zetto. For twenty years it's been nothing but limitations for multiple video cards on motherboards and on the cards themselves. Dual-DVI sounds like a real good option in that case.

I'm running on a 1650x1080 now and am working towards a 1920x1200 soon. Is that within the 'super highres' limits? Would both of those run off of one video card?

If it's not resolution that's the tradeoff, is it refresh time, ie if you run two monitors, say a game on one and just standard output on the other, does that slow the game down?

 

[jiffylube1024]

Originally posted by: SlateGrey
That's double good news, thanks zetto. For twenty years it's been nothing but limitations for multiple video cards on motherboards and on the cards themselves. Dual-DVI sounds like a real good option in that case.

I'm running on a 1650x1080 now and am working towards a 1920x1200 soon. Is that within the 'super highres' limits? Would both of those run off of one video card?

If it's not resolution that's the tradeoff, is it refresh time, ie if you run two monitors, say a game on one and just standard output on the other, does that slow the game down?

The last generation that had a single RAMDac was the GeForce 3 series (and the original Radeon 7200's); after that pretty much everything with multiple outputs can do dual display.

Today's cards (GeForce 4 or newer; Radeon 7500 or newer) pretty much all feature 1-2 outputs plus a TV out (99.9% of the time it's Svideo out which can also do composite with a composite to Svideo dongle; a slim few can do component video out as well).

You can do either 2 monitors or 1 monitor + 1 TV with these video cards.