Wait, but isn't that comparing games rendering to the whole expanded resolution? Using that 1920x1080 Crysis 2 example, if you have two other monitors simply displaying desktops, the framerate shouldn't dip too far below the example's 50 fps. On my aging PC I get about 55 fps in StarCraft 2 on low settings (lol) at the start of the game whether or not I have other programs open on another monitor. It only dips when another program tries to hog the CPU/GPU. For example, if I play a 360p YouTube video in Firefox, it drops to about 40 fps because flash is pretty inefficient. On the other hand, if I play a 720p video in VLC it only dips to about 51 fps.
So displaying a panoramic video on the subscreen shouldn't eat up nearly as many resources as rendering a complex 3D scene all over again. Even though it's only at 480p the second time, that's still 44% more pixels to render if the main scene is 720p. Basically what I'm trying to say is that the bird demo wouldn't necessarily look much better without the subscreen view if the view is simply a panoramic video. Not that the demo NEEDS to look better -- just saying it might not be magically producing such great visuals in real-time on both the TV and the subscreen at once. That is, perhaps it's able to produce such great visuals because the TV view is the only one that's being rendered in real-time.
Agh! Am I making sense? Sorry, I have trouble explaining my thoughts sometimes... Certainly doesn't help when I'm tired...
At any rate, I haven't seen good enough footage of the subscreen view to really know, which is why I decided to ask about it.
