I am currently running a PCI TNT2 and an AGP GF4MX, and using Xinerama. I am noticing that its kind of slow on Visual effects (transparancy). This is on both monitors, so its not the fact that the TNT2 card is sloooow. Anyway, I just found out that the Nvidia drivers have TwinView.

So my question, Whats the differences,if any in performance/features/compatability?


Thanks.

Twinview is for a nvidia card with two outputs, any combination of vga, dvi or tv out on the same card can be configured through your XF86Config if you have the nvidia drivers installed, xinerama is for running two seperate cards or a non nvidia dual head card.

Oh. So Twinview is just for dual head cards? In Windows, TwinView is for dual cards or dual head. Oh well. Thanks.

You don't have to have nvidia cards to run two seperate heads. You just have to set up your XF86Config file correctly. I run two heads on several machines, one has a dual headed card, another has two cards, my laptop has two outputs. I hate xinerama, so only use two different screens rather than one extended screen. So, while the information above about "TwinView" is probably correct (I can't evaluate it as I have ATI cards), you can still use two cards to get two screens with different information on them (the two screens cannot exactly communicate so you won't be able to drag windows from one monitor to the other unless you use xinerama).