Dual Monitors != Twice The Gaming Goodness?
- December 9th, 2009
- By weasel
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Those of us that run our computers with multiple displays have long known that Windows’ multiple display support is…well, somewhat lackluster. To run a game in fullscreen mode is to dedicate your “primary” display to the game, and nothing but the game, usually with no choice as to which screen is considered primary (except through some video card driver settings, which are not the easiest things to get to sometimes). Running a fullscreen game at anything less than your desktop resolution makes the other monitor scale and malform itself, moving any windows you might have had open. And if a game isn’t smart about not letting your mouse cursor “escape” from the game screen, a mis-aimed click could accidentally minimize your game, potentially killing you.
All this time, I thought that was the worst it could get. Then I played SWAT 4.
SWAT 4 is, presently, the last game in Sierra’s heralded police action game. It was released in 2003 by Irrational Games, better known for System Shock 2, and runs on the Unreal 2 engine. Unreal 2’s engine was pretty far ahead of its time, but there’s the problem – the developers assumed that, even though it performed slowly on the hardware of the day, that the load times and such would just speed up as time went on. Problem is, it doesn’t. Having a faster computer with a speedier hard drive and four times the RAM doesn’t affect load times one bit; the game still requires upwards of two minutes to load each level, and should you fail a mission, it has to reload the entire level.
I’m getting a bit off the point though…
SWAT 4, running on the Unreal engine, ought to be friendly towards the people that want to run their games in a window – that is, the people that run dual-monitor setups. Unfortunately, the game has a complete fit if you attempt to run it while a second monitor is active. When attempting to play the corporate logos, the game begins changing screen resolutions repeatedly, assumedly fighting with my NVIDIA drivers over whether or not there is a second monitor active. The game changes screen resolutions ad infinitum, while I can almost hear the music of Sierra’s logo video. This only stops when I press Control-Alt-Delete to open Windows 7’s “panic” menu. From there, I either have to terminate the Swat4.exe process, or wait for it to crash, with a claim that it cannot set its screen resolution.
After three such attempts to run the game, I finally checked to see if my multi-monitor setup was the cause of such issues. After waiting about three minutes for the game to start again (unsure of what it’s doing outside of showing a splash screen and wasting my CPU cycles), the intro videos play perfectly and I’m in the menus. Hmph.
The game seems to run just about perfectly outside of that; well, insane load times notwithstanding…I have no idea why the game is so hateful of extra displays, but I’m pretty sure this is the only Unreal 2 engine game that does this. (Feel free to correct me, though.)
What really sucks, though, is that since this game is over five years old and Activision has already bought out Vivendi Universal (the owners of the Sierra label that published SWAT 4), it is extremely unlikely that an official patch will be made that corrects this. Let it be known, though, in case someone in the future has issues with it: SWAT 4 doesn’t like multiple monitors!