Would thisa reduce my fps?

  • Thread starter Gdog96
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Gdog96

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I was thinking about adding a second monitor to display random stuff (like temps and web pages and stuff) whilst playing a game. It wouldn't be like eyefinity, because the game wouldn't display on both monitors, just on one.
My question is, would that fact that my GPU (550 ti) has to render the extra pixels cause my fps to drop in games?
 
It will cause very little fps drop. All you will notice is up to 5-6C increase in the GPU's temperatures.
 
Have you tried going to screen resolutions and clicking "Detect" after you plugged the monitor in? Are you very sure it's dead?
 
It won't even turn on though. I have tried with a different monitor and it works like plug and play, but it's too small really. Thanks though
 
The amoynt of VRam it will use is.
number of pixels X 4 / 1024 / 1024

eg: a 1920x1080 screen has 2,073,600 pixels and it displays in 32bit color which is made up of 4 8 bit color channels, this will give you your Vram usage in bytes then by 1024 to get usage in kilobytes and by 1024 to get it in megabytes.

2,073,600X4/1024/1024=7.91MB of extra vram being used.
 
It will not affect the performance at all, because you only render the game on one display. Only if you extend the display of the game over the two monitors it will affect your performance.
Only one problem, most of the current games will deactivate the second display or just switch it black while playing.
On some games you can even get a problem, like the game runs on the main display only in window mode, or the second display shows the desktop and some part of the game from the main display.

Best solution would be a USB LCD with a simple plugin to show the values you like, or if you decide to buy a new keyboard in the near future you can have a Logitech G19 or G510, which can run some plugins as well to display temps and co.

e.g. this one http://www.aquatuning.de/product_info.php/info/p1018_Alphacool-LCD-Display-240x128-Pixel-blue-neg--silver.html
 
Spike125
It will not affect the performance at all, because you only render the game on one display. Only if you extend the display of the game over the two monitors it will affect your performance.
Only one problem, most of the current games will deactivate the second display or just switch it black while playing.
Click to expand...

Um, no they won't. In fact, I've not had a single game disable my other monitors despite my games all running on a single screen out of my 3. The only time anything is odd is if I Alt+tab and I'm not running Windowed fullscreen mode or such. Not sure why you think these kind of things are common or even an issue.

For reference, using an ATI 5770 with two DVI out and a displayport out.

Also, those keyboards you suggested are trash and not worth half of what Logitech asks for them.

As for the OP's question, you will only notice a hit in performance if you have a bunch of applications running in the background. Which is pretty much the standard regardless of how many monitors you have, just more likely to do it if you have more screen space :P
 
Then it's driver/Nvidia related, but could also be, because I'm running SLI with single display performance mode ;)
My last ATI card is ages ago, but maybe someone with a single Nvidia can shed some light.
 

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