2 monitors affect FPS??

[Aggravated Salmon]

I am gonna get a new monitor, so was just wondering whether plugging both monitors into one graphics card is gonna affect my FPS, if it affects even 5 fps +-, i'll just pop in my spare graphics card.

My second monitor will have browsers, Spotify etc. open.

Or will using a second graphics card reduce my PCI-E lanes to x8 and bottleneck my main graphics card? Doubt so seeing my motherboard is pretty decent.

[Clanscorpia]

1 minute ago, Aggravated Salmon said:

I am gonna get a new monitor, so was just wondering whether plugging both monitors into one graphics card is gonna affect my FPS, if it affects even 5 fps +-, i'll just pop in my spare graphics card.

My second monitor will have browsers, Spotify etc. open.

Or will using a second graphics card reduce my PCI-E lanes to x8 and bottleneck my main graphics card? Doubt so seeing my motherboard is pretty decent.

Id throw in the extra card just to be safe. Your motherboard should have at least 2 PCIe x16 lanes. Personally I think PCs always look better with more stuff in the PCIe slots so Id just throw it in. 

[r4tch3t]

13 minutes ago, Aggravated Salmon said:

I am gonna get a new monitor, so was just wondering whether plugging both monitors into one graphics card is gonna affect my FPS, if it affects even 5 fps +-, i'll just pop in my spare graphics card.

My second monitor will have browsers, Spotify etc. open.

Or will using a second graphics card reduce my PCI-E lanes to x8 and bottleneck my main graphics card? Doubt so seeing my motherboard is pretty decent.

You'll be fine, as long as the second screen isn't showing 3d content it won't affect it. If you're worried about it you can always disable the second screen when you play games.

If you're wanting to watch YouTube or Netflix whilst playing games I'd recommend a raspberry pi for the second screen. 

[Mick Naughty]

Using another card will drop them down to 8x. Unless you have a fancy setup with a board and cpu to support 2 x16 devices. 

 

Doubt the card can saturate a 8x lane.

Just test and see, if you can get within margin of error with the testing to even see a consistent 5fps loss. 

 

Running other stuff pulls resources so that depends on the hardware itself. 

 

I never think about it myself, have multiple monitors on every rig. 

[Aggravated Salmon]

On 12/7/2018 at 3:24 AM, Mick Naughty said:

Using another card will drop them down to 8x. Unless you have a fancy setup with a board and cpu to support 2 x16 devices. 

 

Doubt the card can saturate a 8x lane.

Just test and see, if you can get within margin of error with the testing to even see a consistent 5fps loss. 

 

Running other stuff pulls resources so that depends on the hardware itself. 

 

I never think about it myself, have multiple monitors on every rig. 

will test but luckily my mobo supports 36 PCI-E lanes

[Mick Naughty]

21 minutes ago, Aggravated Salmon said:

will test but luckily my mobo supports 36 PCI-E lanes

Yea the total lanes won’t say what the board will drop to based on what’s used. 

[Ebony Falcon]

I have 2 monitors and run Netflix / YouTube at the same time and gaming is like 2 fps differences 

only thing that takes a hit at all even when second screen is idle is firestrike score drops a few hundred points

[Aggravated Salmon]

8 hours ago, Mick Naughty said:

Yea the total lanes won’t say what the board will drop to based on what’s used. 

well then, whats the point of more than 32 PCI-E lanes?

[mockedarche]

@Aggravated Salmon if you have xeon probably for work station tasks. Possibly a raid card or a sound card etc.

[Aggravated Salmon]

3 minutes ago, Ohsnaps said:

@Aggravated Salmon if you have xeon probably for work station tasks. Possibly a raid card or a sound card etc.

i understand but 36 lanes is enough for 2 graphics cards at x16 and x4 for other stuff

[Dabombinable]

3 minutes ago, Aggravated Salmon said:

i understand but 36 lanes is enough for 2 graphics cards at x16 and x4 for other stuff

Think of PCIe gen 3.0 x4 NVME SSD. Having more lanes is never bad as it means that less has to go through the southbridge/PCH with what is effectively a PCIe x4 link shared across everything (USB 3.0, SATA, ethernet and so on)

On another note, if your only using the second card for non gaming or compute tasks, even PCIe Gen 2.0 x1 is fine (Asus H87M Pro +GTX 970 & GTX 650ti 2GB).

[Aggravated Salmon]

1 minute ago, Dabombinable said:

Think of PCIe gen 3.0 x4 NVME SSD. Having more lanes is never bad as it means that less has to go through the southbridge/PCH with what is effectively a PCIe x4 link shared across everything (USB 3.0, SATA, ethernet and so on)

i agree, i'm just questioning why mick things my board would drop both my graphics cards to x8 if these are literally the only two things on my board (two graphics cards @ x16) using PCI-E lanes.

[mockedarche]

@Aggravated Salmon

[mockedarche]

Sorry about the blank post ^ website glitched out and wouldn't let me type after that or delete it. I would suggest you try it if it does add the 2nd gpu. I use two monitors one 1080p and 1 1440p I honestly haven't noticed any reduction unless its displaying something.

[Dabombinable]

22 minutes ago, Aggravated Salmon said:

i agree, i'm just questioning why mick things my board would drop both my graphics cards to x8 if these are literally the only two things on my board (two graphics cards @ x16) using PCI-E lanes.

Some times the manufacturers decide to limit high end boards in the same manner as consumer level ones, as that allows them to tick a lot more boxes when it comes to features. That and only the highest end graphics card can even come close to saturating PCIe gen 3.0 x8.

[Aggravated Salmon]

2 minutes ago, Dabombinable said:

Some times the manufacturers decide to limit high end boards in the same manner as consumer level ones, as that allows them to tick a lot more boxes when it comes to features. That and only the highest end graphics card can even come close to saturating PCIe gen 3.0 x8.

welp unfortuantely, i'm on PCI-E gen 2 so x8 would be pretty bad, but i checked ASUS' website and it looks like the main PCI-E device only drops to x8 when all the 4 x16 slots are populated.

[Mick Naughty]

Depends on the pci slots used. Like I said, if the board is fancy you can keep the gpu at 16x, not like it would matter. 

Ive never had a board like that so I can’t say. 

[Vedge]

I've seen my 1080ti idling at 1450MHz and ~25% power draw with two 1440p 144Hz screens connected just at desktop with nothing displaying. It powers down to ~350MHz and 15% power with just one screen connected. I wouldnt be surprised if this costs some frames

 

Funny enough, the RTX 2080 has no trouble powering down to ~300MHz and 12% power draw with those same 2 screens connected.