2nd Monitor Using Up A Lot of Resources

Cools · April 18

I got my first 1440p monitor not so long ago, used it for console. Eventually swapped back to my PC for gaming and used my 240hz 1080 monitor. Noticed my performance was much worse in MWIII than it was in MWII last year, and at this point I hadn't played PC CoD all year. I used the in-game benchmark (which hasn't worked for a few weeks so I can't compare tests) and noticed my 3080 was pushing out 180fps compared to my 10900k's 250+ fps. I'm using the same ram as last year, which is 2 sticks of 8gb 4k ram underclocked to 3866hz since I get crashes @4kghz. Last year's MWII benchmark I got around a 50/50 bottleneck and 250fps. I tried a variety of windows settings, nvidia settings, and in-game settings, nothing really made a difference on the bottleneck % or FPS output in MWIII. Different games (although not by much) and different benchmarks, I suppose, but a 70fps drop in FPS seems a little drastic. I just wrote it off, assuming 180 was as good as it's gonna get.

The other day, I tried to see how many frames I'd lose playing in 1440p. Swapped to my 2nd monitor to see. When I did, I got more frames, like 20% more frames. Swapped back, framerate dropped again. I figured it could be my 2nd monitor using more resources in the background compared to my old one, which was 1080p. I changed the monitor's resolution in Windows to 1080p, and I got around 20% more frames, just like that. I watched the Linus video which found multiple extra 4k monitors didn't even dent in-game FPS, so whatever I'm experiencing isn't normal.

I'm less concerned with getting my 2nd monitor back to 1440p and more concerned with what exactly is wrong with my system. All drivers are up to date, GPU and CPU benchmarks haven't changed, doesn't appear to be any particular windows or in-game setting. I'm completely stumped on this. Wondering if anyone else has seen anything like this and can assist.