The difference between Windows 7 multi-monitor and multi-display (1)

When a user is developing an application, it may need to have two screens. One screen is used to display the development interface and the other screen is used to display the results of the test. In this way, the user can avoid the trouble of switching between different interfaces. To achieve this, it can be implemented in Windows 7 with multiple monitors and multiple displays. Although they can all fulfill this requirement, multi-monitor and multi-display are not the same function, and there are some significant differences between them. Through this article, the author is going to explain two questions to everyone. One is the difference between multiple monitors and multiple displays, and the other is the point of attention in the process of configuring multiple monitors.

The difference between multiple monitors and multiple displays.

Multi-monitor and multi-display have been supported since the 2000 version. However, according to the author's understanding, in the Windows7 version of the operating system, some improvements have been made to this. There has been considerable progress in both performance and display resolution.

Multi-monitor is implemented by installing multiple graphics cards. Users can install multiple graphics cards and configure multiple monitors in the computer, and then extend the display screen to multiple monitors through the multi-monitor display function of the Windows operating system. When implementing multiple monitors, as long as the motherboard supports Users can choose to use PCI or AGP graphics cards. These monitors are divided into a primary monitor and a secondary monitor. The main monitor is the first monitor used after the operating system is started. For example, the login dialog of the operating system is displayed on the main monitor. For this reason, users can also use this feature to determine which one is the primary monitor. The graphics card connected to the main monitor is the main graphics card. The other monitors are auxiliary monitors, and users can install multiple display cards in the computer as needed. If you do not consider the hardware limitations of the motherboard, the 2003 operating system supports up to 9 auxiliary graphics cards; in Windows 7, the number of auxiliary graphics cards can reach 12. By default, the operating system screen is displayed on the main display. If you want to display it on the auxiliary display, you need to log in to the operating system to configure it.

Multiple display is not achieved by installing multiple graphics cards. For example, a video card may have two VGA display interfaces, which can connect two monitors. Another example is that laptops can also achieve dual display. Because laptops have LCD monitors, there is often a display interface that can be connected to a VGA monitor. In fact, the notebook does not have two graphics cards, but through the same graphics card to achieve. We call a multi-screen display that is not implemented by multiple graphics cards called multiple displays. In addition, everyone needs to pay attention to the problem of a fake multiple display. There are so-called multiple displays that, although they can extend the screen to multiple monitors, display the same content on each monitor. This means that it only seems to repeatedly display the same picture on multiple monitors. This is still a certain gap from the multiple displays we often say. For this we call them fake multiple displays.

Because of the different implementation mechanisms of multi-monitor and multi-display, this determines that they have great effects in using the effect. In summary, there are three main differences.

One is that multiple displays cannot choose which one is the primary monitor and which is the secondary monitor. For example, in the case of a notebook, the LCD display is always the first main monitor. For a desktop computer with a graphics card with multiple display interfaces, the monitor connected to the first display interface is the primary monitor. The second display interface of the graphics card becomes the primary monitor only when physical damage occurs to the first display interface. The use of multiple monitors is different. The user can select the main display as needed, such as setting a PCI card with better performance as the main display and so on. So if you display multiple displays, the selectivity is relatively poor.

The second is that the effect of the display is different. The multi-display display is displayed on multiple screens by one graphics card, and the contents displayed on multiple screens are different. In other words, the processing power of multiple screens is concentrated on the same graphics card, which will bring a lot of pressure. When the performance of the graphics card is relatively high, such as 3D games or advanced graphics, a card will be generated on the second monitor. Although the Windows 7 operating system has taken steps to improve the multi-display support mechanism, this hardware limitation will not be obvious by the unilateral efforts of the operating system. If multiple monitors are used, this will not happen because the images of each monitor are handled by separate network cards.

The third is the difference in the number of supports. This is mainly a hardware limitation. Due to the limitations of the processing power of the graphics card, a graphics card may only have an interface of two displays. For multiple monitors, as long as the motherboard supports this, you can have up to 9 or even 12 graphics cards. For this reason, the number of such monitors also has a large gap.

So whether to use multiple monitors or multiple displays, the system administrator needs the cost of deployment (multiple monitors need multiple independent graphics cards), graphics card processing capabilities (multi-monitor display) The effect is better than multiple displays. The number of interfaces (the number of multiple display monitor interfaces is much less than that of multiple monitors) is judged to see which implementation is suitable for the enterprise.