Better to divide monitors between GPU and CPU or have it all under the GPU.

[ErykYT3]

I have two upper monitors that are mostly static and display either wallpaper engine and/or spotify and discord. 

 

Not sure if I should run these on my gpu anymore, it's a 1070. 

I have for half a year now and it's been alright, are there significant benefits to doing so? 

 

I do notice some big changes sometimes when pausing wallpaper engine while playing on my main monitor.

[TubsAlwaysWins]

Id run them both off of the GPU. Its been a while since I drove multiple displays from seperate GPUs, the last time I did it was kind of glitchy when moving things between them, but not bad.

 

Wallpaper engine might no like it either but I know nothing about it. Worst thing you can do it try it and then go back

[Hairless Monkey Boy]

In my experience, using both the iGPU and a dedicated GPU at the same time can cause problems in some games including crashing and lower performance. It's been a while since I've done it, so it may have changed.

 

You'll also lose a bit of system RAM when you enable the iGPU, so that might be relevant to you depending on how much you have and use normally.

[ErykYT3]

1 minute ago, HairlessMonkeyBoy said:

In my experience, using both the iGPU and a dedicated GPU at the same time can cause problems in some games including crashing and lower performance. It's been a while since I've done it, so it may have changed.

 

You'll also lose a bit of system RAM when you enable the iGPU, so that might be relevant to you depending on how much you have and use normally.

Very well, 

 

An additional incentive to doing this was to possibly be able to load into bios without having to remove my graphics card entirely and changing to the igpu for output with a hdmi cable. 

For some reason I would get no output when entering bios otherwise, It's happened to others and I have not found any fix from scouring forums ever since I encountered it. Thankfully, a lot of that stuff can be edited with software so it isn't too bad but it's a pain for when I do need access to it. 

 

My plan is foiled anyhow as gpu usage on intel's side rises to somewhere around 65% when running the things I usually do on those secondary monitors and that seems to slow the entire system down so I'll be plugging back in to the 1070. Thanks for the replies. 

 

 

[Hairless Monkey Boy]

2 minutes ago, ErykYT3 said:

For some reason I would get no output when entering bios otherwise

Do you have the iGPU enabled in the BIOS? In the Asus bios there is a setting under something like advanced->System agent called something like "multi monitor support". disabling that would probably stop that from happening. What motherboard do you have?

[GuiltySpark_]

My experience back from my 970 days all the way through my current 3090 setup is I don't want any display but my main high refresh rate display connector to my GPU. All the bad experiences with early G-Sync helped with that. Back when I used an Intel platform, every problem was instantly solved by using the iGPU on my 4690k for my secondary display.

 

Today, on AMD, I don't have an iGPU so my second and third monitors run off of DisplayLink adapters from Plugable. Been flawless for many years, though I will admit I'm sure using multi-refreshrate displays on your GPU together has probably become a better experience but years ago, it absolutely was not.

[Hairless Monkey Boy]

37 minutes ago, rickeo said:

All the bad experiences with early G-Sync helped with that.

Got any more details about this? Just curious. ATM I have a freesync primary monitor (144Hz) and my old Gsync monitor(165Hz) as secondary. I've noticed that setting them to the same refresh rate(144Hz) makes dragging windows on the second display smoother. Maybe I should give iGPU multi-monitor another go.

[GuiltySpark_]

15 minutes ago, HairlessMonkeyBoy said:

Got any more details about this? Just curious. ATM I have a freesync primary monitor (144Hz) and my old Gsync monitor(165Hz) as secondary. I've noticed that setting them to the same refresh rate(144Hz) makes dragging windows on the second display smoother. Maybe I should give iGPU multi-monitor another go.

I can't say for how things react with Freesync and my experience with GSync is outdated at this point but yes, it was quite common to have problems running multiple displays of varying refresh rates. 

 

After a lot of troubleshooting I chose to just diverge myself from the situation and use onboard graphics for my secondary display.

[ErykYT3]

17 hours ago, HairlessMonkeyBoy said:

Do you have the iGPU enabled in the BIOS? In the Asus bios there is a setting under something like advanced->System agent called something like "multi monitor support". disabling that would probably stop that from happening. What motherboard do you have?

I have the MSI Z490 Gaming Edge Wifi. 

 

I had a look at these settings and while I am not sure, I recall those options being set to disabled. Certainly had iGPU disabled as any spec check would show just my 1070 unlike a laptop for example as my old Lenovo would show the dedicated 860m as well as the igpu on the 4700HQ.

Enabling the iGPU would show it as gpu-0 and the 1070 as gpu-1 iirc.

 

I may have a look at the other option which was multi monitor support as I don't remember what that was on but I believe it would be greyed out no?

 

EDIT: I did use my pc without a GPU for some times so I suppose my problem arises from setting up back then. I will definitely share if I resolve this as there is literally nothing on any forum I have looked at. 

[Hairless Monkey Boy]

There should also be a setting somewhere to set the primary GPU display. Try setting that to the PCIe option.