Horizontal span with different cards

[Quinto]

I did a search but didnt find anything useful, sorry if i dbl post this.

So i have a Sapphire 4870 1GB video card. Ive recently discovered Horizontal Spanning, but ive realized that i wouldnt want two monitors. Therefore im going to be buying another video card to add the third monitor. Question is, if i want to be cheap can i just buy a lower end 4800 card? Will it affect my gaming experience too much?

I heard that when you run three monitors you cant use the cards in CrossFire, and thats okay with me. But if i buy a lower end card, will one of my monitors have crappy quality when i run games and videos across all three monitors? Or am i just overthinking it and probably wont even be able to notice the difference?

If its a tiny difference i could just put the lower end card off to the side where i wont be staring at and wont be able to notice it even more.

 

[jedimasterben]

I'm pretty sure gaming performance would be destroyed by adding a third monitor, as it's adding a buttload of extra space that it has to process, so it'd be safe to say you'd probably need another 4870.

BTW, have you actually gotten horizontal spanning to work with games? My friend has two monitors, and he can only play on one screen at a time, even though the desktop settings are set to span.

 

[Quinto]

Ive been doing research on it, and it only works in Window XP. and yes, i actually got it to work in XP. i read on some forums that it worked in the Beta of Windows 7, but i could not for the life of me get it to work.