Questions: Radeon driver, dual head, gaming and first display ?

Darksoul71 · 2010-05-02 14:16:36

Hi all,

I have big success using the opensource radeon drivers with my dual head configuration.
While performance is still not on par with fglrx, those opensource drivers rule when it comes to dual head stuff.

A few questions / concerns still exist to me. May be someone can sort them out.

Before I ask the questions I'll post my output of xrandr to show you my monitor configuration:

Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 2304 x 1024, maximum 8192 x 8192
VGA-0 connected 1280x1024+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 376mm x 301mm
   1280x1024      60.0 +   75.0* 
   1024x768       75.1     70.1     60.0  
   832x624        74.6  
   800x600        72.2     75.0     60.3     56.2  
   640x480        72.8     75.0     66.7     60.0  
   720x400        70.1  
HDMI-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DVI-0 connected 1024x768+1280+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 304mm x 228mm
   1024x768       75.0*+   75.1     70.1     60.0  
   832x624        74.6  
   800x600        72.2     75.0     60.3     56.2  
   640x480        75.0     72.8     66.7     60.0  
   720x400        70.1

You can find my system configuration in my footer. My monitors are setup like this:
The "main monitor" is my 19" AOC which runs in 1280x1024. On the right side of it I have another TFT display (15" Liteon) running 1024x768

The gnome menu shows up at my 19" monitor which is fine.

Ok, here are my questions / concerns:

1) Gaming in dual head only rendered to one display ?
I mainly play 3D shooters (both native and under WINE inside 32 bit chroot). Is there a simple way to force the output of fullscreen rendered games to only one monitor ? In my case this would be my 19" monitor. In most cases running 3D games natively (e.g. UT2k4) with dual head enabled produces the following behaviour:
Both monitor go to clone mode in the maximum resolution which is possible for my 15". After closing the game my gnome desktop runs in the same mode: clone mode at resolution of 1024x768.

As workaround I use the same scripts as I did under Sidux: One script before starting the game to disable the 15" display and one script after exiting the game to restore dual head mode.

Is there a different solution to this ?

2) How do I set up the "main display" under gnome ?
It seems to me that gnome uses the display connected to the first connector of my graphic adater (VGA-0 to be specificially) as main display which translates to "display which shows the menu bar". In the first place I had my monitor setup connected vice versa (19" connected to DVI-0 via DVI2VGA adapter and 15" to VGA-0). This resulted in the menu bar being on the 15" display and not the 19" as I liked it. I switched the displays now but is there a simple way (similar to Windows) to define a primary and secondary display (may be via Xorg.conf) ?

TIA,
D$

Arch Linux

#1 2010-05-02 14:16:36

Questions: Radeon driver, dual head, gaming and first display ?

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