World of Warcraft (and other stuff) - one large monitor or two medium ones?

[Askance]

@Tastes of Chocolate

I’ve got a friend who plays WoW across a 3 screen set up. He uses a Triplehead2go on a PC. It’s not a stretched picture, there is actually a video setting that will support that ratio. I would NOT suggest spanning 2 monitors for the reason Kayeby mentioned. Do you really want to have the edges of 2 monitors running right down the center of your picture?

No, I don’t I hadn’t really thought of that, I guess I thought you’d get you character’s view on one monitor and stuff like maps and bags on the other, but it seems not. Mind you the Mac monitors have extremely thin surrounds and perfectly flat sides, precisely so you can butt them up next to each other and have the minimum possible gap between the two image fields.

[Askance]

Anyway, thanks to all for the great responses so far. It looks to me like the answer is that for PCs dual monitors are the way to go, but with Macs a single large screen is better.

Agree or disagree?

[Jayn_Newell]

@Askance

My current PC has a 3.2ghz CPU and 1gb of memory, so it’s not as if it’s short of resources. Nevertheless when alt-tabbing out of WoW it takes a few minutes of furious disk activity before I get decent access to my desktop. It’s only with WoW; Rome:Total War is perfectly fine and quick.

This will be a bit moot if you get a Mac, but is there any reason not to run WoW in a maximized window in XP? Performance does go down a little but you’ll get easier access to background resources–Thottbot, Vent, etc. Only real worry is accidentally minimizing the window :smack:

[Askance]

Just the performance thing; to be honest as my PC is a custom built job I’m not convinced I ended up with as fast a machine as I should have given the above specs. Today in a large city I was getting FPS of less than 2 sometimes, and that’s in full screen mode! I get around 30 in normal countryside. So dropping it further is not desirable … also even when in a window switching back and forth is still very slow. Looking forward to my new Mac, I have to say … !

[MattTheCroc]

@Askance

So this is Windows, obviously. Is it *possible *to stretch WoW across both screens?

I take it the settings you refer to are in the Windows display settings? Thanks!

I honestly don’t know if it’s possible to stretch across both windows, but I wouldn’t recommend it if you could – your character would be split across two screens.

The settings I was referring to are within WoW itself. I haven’t noticed an FPS drop when running in maximised windowed mode, and I’m not running the latest hardware (Athlon 64 3200, Nvidia 6600GT, 1 gig RAM). But to be honest, I haven’t used regular full screen since I discovered windowed full screen. It stutters in busy areas, but I suspect that’s due to network traffic and my low end hardware. To be honest, I’d rather lower the detail settings than lose access to easy web browsing whilst playing.