Independent And Continuous Displays - HP xw3400 User Manual

SLI Graphics Acceleration: Dual PCIe graphics cards can also be driven together to drive a
single graphics display and achieve up to 2 times the performance of a single graphics card. This is
performed through a new technology provided by Nvidia called SLI (Scalable Link Interface). Only
some of the graphics cards support the SLI technology, and SLI requires that the graphics cards be
of the same type (homogeneous configuration). For more information on these advanced settings,
see the documentation provided with the drivers.

Independent and Continuous Displays

The X server tracks every graphics card video port as a unique entity. Assuming one display monitor
connected to each port, here are some important definitions:
• Independent Display — the type of monitor screen that defines the conventional behavior of
most computers. The edges define a specific boundary from which user windows cannot escape. All
content remains fixed within the surrounding borders. Window managers provide a desktop only
within the specified display. See Figure 1.
• Continuous Display — a type of monitor screen that shares an adjacency relationship with
another display. One or more of its edge borders can share content with its configured neighbors.
Windows are allowed to penetrate and span borders such that multiple monitors share their
content. Window managers provide a continuous desktop across all participating displays. See
Figure 2.
• Xinerama — the XFree86 extension that supports continuous display technology on the X server.
When enabled, it changes independent displays to continuous displays. Xinerama is configured
with a ServerFlags option or enabled with a command-line option. Note: Xinerama only
supports accelerated 3D between screens controlled by independent cards with the more recent
NVIDIA drivers (not ATI drivers). The vizconfig tool (run /opt/hp/viztools/bin/run_vizconfig) is a
multi-card graphics configuration tool that provides a simple way to configure the multiple graphics
cards (see description below).
Figure 1. Two independent displays
Figure 2. Two continuous displays
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