Does a 2nd Monitor drop your FPS?

[Mike87]

Hi all,

I was wondering, I am using 2 24" Monitors. When I play a game (atm BF1) my 2nd screen is either off or showing my Desktop. Does the 2nd Monitor use a noticeable amount of resources, especialy fps, or is it ok to game with 2 Monitors

 

Thanks

[79wjd]

It won't make any noticeable difference. 

[bgibbz]

While it does use resources, it doesn't use very much, definitely not enough to be noticeable. 

[Mike87]

1 minute ago, bgibbz said:

While it does use resources, it doesn't use very much, definitely not enough to be noticeable. 

Great, thanks

 

[♠FlamieMeister♠]

Depends on card. An old card, yes. 2 cards, no.

[Mike87]

1 minute ago, ♠FlamieMeister♠ said:

Depends on card. An old card, yes. 2 cards, no.

Saphire Radeon R9 290 Tri-X should do it

 

[roylapoutre]

Nah rendering pixels on a second monitor is a breeze (provided you don't render your games on this monitor ofc). Just look at your GPU activity while starring at a Chrome tab. For me, it's 2% usage @135MHz. That is ridiculous, the GPU isn't even working at that point. Don't worry about using a second monitor, your R9 290 is capable enough for that

[Oshino Shinobu]

It does not. I did a load of testing to figure this out a while back. Basically, if the monitor is just showing the desktop or a web browser (not playing video or anything like that), it makes no difference. 

 

I've tested it with 3x 1080p monitors and 1x 4K monitor in every combination possible (as in, game on 4K, one 1080p running, two 1080p, three 1080p. Game on 1080p with one 1080p running, 1080p and 4K running etc. etc.). 

 

The only time FPS dropped was when running programs that are somewhat demanding compared to the desktop. 1080p video playback on VLC drops FPS on average around 1-4 FPS and 1080P Youtube playback drops around 3-7 FPS. That said, that could very much be a CPU bound issue rather than GPU. I wasn't able to determine which it was with my available hardware for testing.

 

This testing was done on both single Titan Black and SLI Titan Blacks with i7 3770K. Even running a game on 1080p with another 2 1080p monitors and a 4K monitor running, there's no performance impact when they're showing the desktop. 

 

EDIT: I also tested running the GPUs out of SLI, with the game on one card and the other monitors on the other to see if that made a difference. It didn't, performance was exactly the same as all monitors running off a single card. 

[aithos]

3 hours ago, Mike87 said:

Hi all,

I was wondering, I am using 2 24" Monitors. When I play a game (atm BF1) my 2nd screen is either off or showing my Desktop. Does the 2nd Monitor use a noticeable amount of resources, especialy fps, or is it ok to game with 2 Monitors

 

Thanks

Unless you're gaming on a toaster you shouldn't have any problem.  Particularly if you aren't streaming video or anything that would use more resources.  I would never go back to a single monitor setup at this point...

[Paula_The_Butter_Fairy]

Nothing noticeable.