Enumerating Your System's Adapters

Many systems today can support multiple monitors per machine. While it hasn't quite hit the “mainstream,” having multiple monitors (multimon for short) can be quite useful, and is rapidly becoming more popular. With the higher-end graphics card supporting multimon natively, you can expect this feature to be used more exclusively. The latest cards from ATI, nVidia, and Matrox all have dual head support, which can allow multiple monitors to be attached to a single graphics card.

Direct3D devices are specified per adapter. In this case, you can think of an “adapter” as the actual graphics hardware that connects to the monitor. While the ATI Radeon 9700 is only one “physical” adapter, it has two monitor hookups ...

Get Managed DirectX® 9 Kick Start: Graphics and Game Programming now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.