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Aero slowing down peformance?

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Usually aero (desktop composition, the graphics hardware accelerated bit) is disabled when the user runs a game. For old games I tend to switch off desktop composition in the shortcut's compatibility settings just to play on the safe side.

This was true in Vista, in 7, none of my games disable aero unless specifically told to do so in the compatibility tab... I know this to be true because my 2nd monitor still has all the translucency enabled when I launch a game.
 
I noticed that having a 2nd monitor hooked up displaying the desktop would reduce performance and make more intensive games jerk a little, but that was with Nvidia cards, not sure how well AMD cards handle it.

One thing is for sure It will take up even more of a vram footprint so disabling themes like I mentioned before would be advantageous. You will probably free up over 100MB of vram this way, check with GPUz or similar.
 
Can't say I've had any performance issues from having 2 monitors going with either brand. It does use a little more VRAM though. I've mitigated that with my current setup by driving the 2nd monitor off the IGP. 🙂 prior to this though I've always had two monitors connected to a single GPU.
 
Can't say I've had any performance issues from having 2 monitors going with either brand. It does use a little more VRAM though. I've mitigated that with my current setup by driving the 2nd monitor off the IGP. 🙂 prior to this though I've always had two monitors connected to a single GPU.

I did try experimenting with the single/multiple monitor setting but this lead to either worse performance or one of the monitors switching off which seeing as I only wanted it to monitor in game performance seemed to defeat the object. This happened with my old 9800GTX+ SLI setup as well as my 560TI and current 670.

I'm using the statistics server incorporated into EVGA's PrecisionX instead at the moment.
 
I did try experimenting with the single/multiple monitor setting but this lead to either worse performance or one of the monitors switching off which seeing as I only wanted it to monitor in game performance seemed to defeat the object. This happened with my old 9800GTX+ SLI setup as well as my 560TI and current 670.

I'm using the statistics server incorporated into EVGA's PrecisionX instead at the moment.

Often times, ALT+TAB out of the game and back it will activate the 2nd monitor. I've had a handful of games that would blank the 2nd monitor (whether or not it was connected to the same GPU) and alt+tab USUALLY did the trick.
 
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