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Comment by klohto | Hacker News Reader

Imagine they did and now you have to pay $50 extra to never use one of these niche and gimmicky possibilities

The original PS3 demoed at E3 2005 had 2 HDMI ports and I suspect they removed it for the same reason. Extra cost and little value.

The Raspberry Pi 4 has dual HDMI and it costs $35 for the entire board. Cost is absolutely NOT the factor for an extra port. Extra ports and extended monitor support are literal pennies.

Ignoring HDCP for the secondary port, it would cost an additional $0.27 to add a secondary hardware port along with whatever cost for the software, which still wouldn't even add up to $5, let alone $50.

I don't know how you see the prospect of saving $27 million dollars and say that cost isn't a factor.

Pretty much all PCs support multiple video outputs. It's not a gimmick at all.

True - but I can't think of a single game which actually makes use of multiple monitors even on PC where plenty of people have the hardware to support that sort of thing. A second monitor with Discord on it, or for streaming? Sure. But nothing that video games themselves make use of.

Even if games supported it, who has multiple TVs in their lounge room close enough to connect both of them to your xbox? That sounds super niche.

Supreme Commander did it all the way back in 2007, you could have a second independent viewport on the second monitor to keep an eye on a different part of the map. IIRC it had to jump through some weird hoops to pull that off with the graphics APIs of the time, it spawned a second instance of the game which acted as a spectator client for the primary instance.

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_games_that_support...

Simracers use triples quite often! Alignment is a pain.

Gran Turismo 5 supported a triple monitor setup, but you needed three PS3s and three copies of the game.

Gran Turismo 4 had that too, all you needed was three PS2s, three network adapters, three TVs and three copies of the game. The feature was mainly intended for installations at E3 and the like but it was left in the retail build so anyone dedicated enough could set it up at home.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHM42OcnX_E

That is cool, I didn’t know that! PC simracers just use wide viewports, I think.

Live For Speed renders from multiple cameras - one camera per monitor - to prevent distortions. It can render a 360 degree view if you have enough monitors. Can't do that with a single viewport.

Perspective projection only works for FOV < 180deg. At FOV = 180 the projected coordinate has to be +inf and it won’t work, so games that support FOV beyond 180 stitches multiple viewports, either on display or by having multiple displays.

I really want to try that one, it sounds like an amazing game.

I figured out what you meant eventually, but when I first read this comment I thought you meant paying $50 extra if you didn't want these features.

I think that about the HDMI In port every time I see it on my OG Xbox One.

Is that why modern GPUs are so costly? Half a dozen unused connections?

No, it is a per-product royalty.

https://www.symmetryelectronics.com/blog/what-are-the-licens...

Above link is broken, use: https://www.symmetryelectronics.com/blog/what-are-the-licens...

They’re expensive simply because people will pay that much.

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