Hypothetical situation - I have a computer that runs a 20" monitor just fine. I want to move up to a 60" plasma screen. Will the computer “run” the monitor just fine? Let’s assume resolution stays the same (1024x768).
Now, what if I want the same computer to run 3 different 60" monitors at the same time?
What determines effectiveness of monitor? Is it the computer, or the video card, or both? Or are they totally irrelevant if the resolution stays the same?
If resolution (pixels and bytes/pix) stay the same, then the video card doesn’t care what you are displaying it on.
The video card controls the maximum resolution you can output. In normal windows, the performance drop from increasing resolutions is negligible. In 3d games, it can be quite significant.
Running the plasma won’t be an issue but be aware of certain limitations. My Toshiba laptop has a TV out but cannot run D3D or DVD output. A good videocard might let you output everything to a TV but you’re going to be faced with poor resolution due to the fact that computer monitors are designed for a much higher resolution than your typical TV (I’m not sure about plasmas though).
Getting a 3 monitor/TV output is fine. You will need 3 videocards (or 2 cards, one with dual outputs) and one will be foreced to be a PCI videocard (slow as dirt).
My 54" projection TV sucks compaired to my 19" viewsonic and is pretty much unplayable for high-res games.
The computer doesn’t know or care how big the screen is. When you set ‘monitor type’, it lets your computer know what resolutions and refresh rates the monitor can handle, but the computer doesn’t care how large the actual screen is. At most you’d need some kind of splitter to show the same image on 3 plasma screens, though if you want to have 3 screens each with its own feed then you need multiple video cards or one adapted to have multiple outputs.
If you’re using a 60" plasma screen designed as a computer monitor then you should have no trouble, but if you’re running your computer to a 60" plasma TV then you’ll need to make sure the adapters are right, since most TV’s don’t have a VGA cable (which monitors do). A 60" plasma TV will also not support 1024x768 resolution, you’ll be stuck at 640x480.
I don’t know what you mean by ‘effectiveness’, it’s not a well-defined term. The maximum resolutions (and color depths) and refresh rates a monitor can support are determined by how good the monitor is. The video card (and CPU, though modern CPUs are pretty overkill) will also have a maximum resolution (and color depth) that it will support based on the amount of memory the card has. You’re limited overall to the lower of the two for obvious reasons.