Real Life DirectX 10 Performance
AnandTech has a look at the performance PC gamers can expect see under Windows Fista with DirectX 10. Unfortunately, it isn't pretty. Despite the power of the new 10-compliant graphics cards, the choices made in developing this technology have resulted in a significant gap between what is possible and what is actually obtainable from commercial PC hardware. What's worse, the article starts off by pointing out that much of the shiny effects exclusive to DX10 games would have been possible with DX9, had Microsoft been inclined to develop in that direction. From the article: "[Current] cards are just not powerful enough to enable widespread use of any features that reach beyond the capability of DirectX 9. Even our high-end hardware struggled to keep up in some cases, and the highest resolution we tested was 2.3 megapixels. Pushing the resolution up to 4 MP (with 30" display resolutions of 2560x1600) brings all of our cards to their knees. In short, we really need to see faster hardware before developers can start doing more impressive things with DirectX 10."
Also, a display like that would be awesome for Photoshop.
I can't think of a situation where I could have it at a distance to be able to comfortably view it all without getting neck-ache, yet be close enough to benefit from the resolution.
It's be okay if I was concentrating on one area at a time, but I can do that with two screens more comfortably, and way more cheaply.
My current res is umm, 2960x1050-ish across whatever a 19" 4:3 and a 22" 16:10 add up to - but I only look at one screen at a time and still have to use my ocular zoom function sometimes.
I suppose if a game was programmed so that the edges of the screen were more like peripheral vision, it could work.
I find my Dell 24" Widescreen monitor at 1920 x 1200 seems to be perfect, as I can tile windows vertically and thus have a "kind of" multiple monitor for working on 2 things at once, and the screen size is still small enough to sit about the same distance as a regular 17"/19" TFT.
Any bigger than a 24" widescreen, and I'd have to sit a lot further back, and it just wouldn't work very well.
Mr Bobbins has one of these as well, and I'd imagine he would say the same.
You then get 2 nicely proportioned windows in portrait mode alongside each other, kind of like when you see those flatscreens that rotate 90 degrees.
Basically if you tile 2 windows vertically on a 4x3 monitor, they are too narrow to do anything useful with, but on a large widescreen (at 1920x1200) you get 2 windows next to each other at 960 pixels width each.
Does that make sense, or have I just confused you even more
Woo Elephant Yeah wrote:Any bigger than a 24" widescreen, and I'd have to sit a lot further back, and it just wouldn't work very well.
Mr Bobbins has one of these as well, and I'd imagine he would say the same.
Yes, Indeed I would, also with added 17" for extra.. screeniness. Most of the time the 24" is enough (TWSS etc.) but with the CRT I can watch TV/video at the same time, also handy for Soups as shown (Desync detected)
I'm amazed how many people I have spoken to here at work (who now have dual screens running through Citrix, so it only treats the 2 screens as one wide display) who have never not once noticed you could tile windows horizontally or vertically.
It's a very useful feature, but has been underused in the past due to the limited 4x3 screen size, whereas widescreen displays have changed all that.