Four Heads Are Better Than One

By David Em

September 6, 2004

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Most people are perfectly happy with a single display on their desks. But that's a confining work environment for financial analysts, engineers, 3D animators and video editors who deal with massive amounts of visual information. Even a sharp 1600 by 1200 pixel LCD doesn't yield enough elbow room for these demanding professionals.

These days, most good graphics cards, including the ones in many portables, will support two 1600 by 1200 displays. Before AGP became the industry's graphics architecture standard about six years ago, it was possible to mix and match PCI cards from different vendors to drive multiple monitors. The implementation was far better on the Mac than the PC, where it was possible, but difficult. Once AGP became entrenched however, new PCI cards and the companies that made them went away.

We've tried to incorporate AGP and PCI cards on a single system with little success, in part because of mismatched product and driver sets. This year, NVIDIA released two new PCI cards, the $199 64 MB Quadro NVS 280 and the $650 256 MB Quadro FX 600 specifically to alleviate this situation. The 280 is intended for 2D applications, while the 600 is for programs that need OpenGL 3D hardware acceleration. Of course, if you're still using a perfectly good legacy PCI system and simply want to outfit it with a more up to date graphics board, this is welcome news as well.

Why More Is Better

For several years, most of our test systems at the Media Lab have operated in dual head mode. With the exception of Microsoft Word and Internet Explorer, I don't think there's a single program we work with that doesn't benefit from having a second display. This includes image and photo manipulation, video editing, 3D animation, and web design.

You can enhance your creativity with apps like Adobe's Photoshop CS and Corel's Painter 8 by dragging all the toolbars and palettes over to a separate monitor so you can concentrate on your image without a pile of visual clutter surrounding it. With a web design program like Macromedia's Dreamweaver MX, you can look at your web page design on one screen while another shows a window with the underlying HTML code.

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