Joe Edmonds Blog
   

Email

Subscribe
RSS



See more of joe's picks at ThisNext.
Shopcast
powered by
ThisNext


       
Fri, 12 May 2006

TwinView vs Xinerama

When I set up my dual monitor workstation, I was in a bit of a rush. I cobbled together an xorg.conf file for my ubuntu breezy workstation, got it so it looked right and didn't think much about it for 5 months.

Over that time, I noticed that window drawing was surprisingly slow for my state-of-the-art workstation. OpenGL screensavers -- which I expected to run reasonably fast with my modern-if-not-gamer-quality Nvidia Quadro NVS 280 PCI-E card -- ran at a pace reminiscent of Mesa.

So yesterday, I did some googling and came upon TwinView. I set it up with a simple device section in xorg.conf:

Section "Device"
	Identifier	"NVIDIA 1"
	Driver		"nvidia"

        Option          "TwinView" "1"
        Option          "MetaModes" "1600x1200,1600x1200"
EndSection
and, suddenly, everything is snappier. Most importantly, my screensavers look better. Now does anyone know how to convince xscreensaver to display 1 hack across both screens?

[] permanent link