OpenGL support for 3-monitor laptop

I’m using a Dell M70 laptop with an onboard Nvidia Quadro FX Go 1400. It’s a PCI Express card with 245 Mb. It’s driving two flat-panel monitors. A third monitor is driven by a PCI card in a docking station. We’ve tried a GeForce FX 5200 and a Quadro FX 600 card. With either, non-OpenGL applications work on all three monitors. For OpenGL apps, when the application window is moved onto the third (PCI) monitor, the image freezes, and theres no interaction with the application. I’d appreciate suggestions or recommendations.

You can thank Microsoft for that one.

Multimonitor OpenGL under MS Windows require ugly driver level hacks and hence only works inside the same driver.

I have never seen that somebody got multimonitor OpenGL across different boards under windows, it works fine under MacOS-X though.

Using Windows you are stuck with multimonitor support for one card driving two or in case of a matrox parhelia three screens.

We’re using the latest Nvidia driver 71.84, which supports both cards.

The three-monitor setup worked on the prior generation with a onboard GeForce4 440 Go, and 2 GeForce4 MX 440s in a docking station. This combination was AGP and PCI. The combination we’re testing now is a PCI Express and PCI.

You got that working? Interesting.

Eventhough you only have one installer the Nvidia driver contains differend driver subsets for each chip version.

<theory>

The Geforce4 GO 440 and the Geforce4MX440 both use the NV17 core so they share the same driver.

The Geforce FX GO 1400 uses the NV41 core while the FX5200 uses the NV30 and the FX-600 uses the NV36 core and hence you end up with differend driver subsets and the different driver instances -> no multimonitor OpenGL.

You could try to find a PCI based NV41 but this could be a difficult task.

Cards based on the NV41 are: GeforceFX 6800 LE, 6800, 6800GT, 6800 Ultra.

</theory>