Drivers and nView

nView

New to the Detonator drivers is NVIDIA’s new nView feature. Designed with multiple displays in mind, nView allows you to take advantage of a second monitor, be it an LCD, CRT or TV display. While nView is derived from TwinView, it still hasn’t advanced to the level that we see on Matrox’s DualHead technology. All the new features that are offered in nView that weren’t available in TwinView, are courtesy of drivers and not the actual hardware. We verified this by installing 27.30 drivers on a GeForce3 Titanium 500.

Dual 1600x1200 - Gotta luv it

Not quite as feature filled as...

... Matrox's DualHead

Above are three screenshots, two of which are of nView and the last being a screenshot of Matrox’s DualHead features. A direct comparison shows that DualHead is much more versatile than nView and even more so with Matrox’s eDualHead features.

Some new driver features

Transparent windows, very Mac-ish

We love this feature

Besides the fact that it’s not nearly as mature as DualHead, nView does have a few things going for it. One of the cool features that we found to be of great use is the multi-desktop function built right into the drivers. With a flick of the wrist, and you can switch from one desktop to another. We had our FiringSquad work on one desktop, nice and clean, without anything running to distract us, while the second desktop hosted IRC, instant messaging, FTP, and IE windows. In fact, we’re becoming so fond of nView’s multi-desktop that suddenly the fine looking Sony GDM FW-900 24” monitor doesn’t look so hot anymore. There are other gimmicky features like translucent window-drags, and window-zoom but those things get tiring after a while and they eat precious CPU cycles too.

More Features

Leadtek mentions that it will be releasing another sku of the A250 Ultra board with the TDH extension instead of just TD. TDH stands for TV out/DVI/Hardware monitoring but the board may also include video in as well. We’ve been told that NVIDIA has designed the GeForce4 GPU to be ready for video in board designs as well as video out. Looking at the A250 Ultra TD PCB, there’s a vacant spot for some sort of video ASIC, which presumably is where the video processing chip will sit. When Leadtek releases this side-kick board, users interested in watching TV on their computer can do so through a TV box or VCR that plugs into the A250 Ultra TDH, since the connection to the video card will be either S-Video or RCA composite.