1920X1200 Gaming goodness

Enforcer · Posted: Tue, 26 Jul 2005 10:15:57 Post Subject: 1920X1200 Gaming goodness

In the next few months, I might be investing in some (3 to be exact) Dell 2405FPW's for some great old fashioned Multi-Monitor desktop goodness. 1920X1200 is the max resolution on this guy. So the first question I've been researching is, how to pull this off with 1 PC?

I've been reading that a single link DVI card cannot support 1920X1200@60hz without doing something called "Reduce Blanking" which I am not familiar with, does anyone know what this is, and what effect it'll have on the display quality? I've seen reviews of these monitors (this aritcle comes to mind for the HP 23" LCD that does 1920X1200) and they speak nothing of special settings to get the native resolution to work.

On another note, I've already noticed that Dual DVI cards usually cannot support higher than 1280X1024 on both monitors or it will allow up to 1600X1200 and 1280X1024 or some other sort. I have come across the P series of cards from Matrox (here) though they only mention the reduced blankings on their shop page as opposed to their product page.

I found a discussion here that talks about having to enable reduced blanking and also mentions the limitations of single-link DVI. I guess the main thing I am wondering is if reduced blanking will hurt the multimedia experience and/or gaming enough to look for ways around it, which at this point leads me to believe I'd have to get quadro or firegl cards, or if it is livable. I guess the other idea was to get a thread up here for discussion of these huge LCD's and also widescreen gaming in general since it is starting to pick up.

EDIT: Reduced blanking is kinda like overclocking, and is perfectly good and shouldn't disrupt display quality, plus it looks like as long as the card is anywhere near current, it will support 1 output at this res.