Dual monitors

[snidy1]

I was thinking about adding a second monitor, I was wondering if it would decrease my overall performance of the system?

 

[Need4Speed]

no

 

[MDE]

Nope

 

[Special1Sauce]

Nope

 

[JBT]

Nope your all set that why they make 2 DACs on these newer cards.

 

[Confused]

Nope, if anything it will increase your overall performance.



Well, not CPU wise, but productivity wise.


Confused

 

[volrath]

Does the same go for vga + svideo out?

 

[amdskip]

I can do anything I want while having a dvd playing through svideo with no hit on performance.

 

[volrath]

I noticed some tearing effects while using vga and svideo. Might have just been my eyes.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: snidy1
I was thinking about adding a second monitor, I was wondering if it would decrease my overall performance of the system?

Possibly Yes, and possibly No.

I set up a multi-mon system on a K6-2 400Mhz, originally with a PCI 4MB Maxtrox Millenium hooked to a 19" MAG multisync. I later added one, and then another, 20" Sony fixed-freq displays, hooked up to two more PCI 4MB Matrox Millenium cards. I definately noticed an additional hit on both CPU power and system PCI bandwidth. So the extra display real-estate is not totally "free", there is an additional small cost to it. More modern (2-3Ghz) systems will probably be affected far less, and the 3 x 1280x1024 displays were oh-so-nice to use. Multi-mon is still highly-recommended, in any case. 🙂

Much more recently, I had a 32MB AGP 4x GF2 MX and a 16MB PCI TNT1 card, on my Athlon XP2000 rig with a KT400 chipset. I could leave the secondary display running my TV-in card's display, and/or capture, and play Unreal Tournament on the primary, without any noticable issues, although getting the right versions of drivers for video, 3D, and tv-in, and getting them to all work properly, in multi-mon configs, can be a real B----. Good luck, whatever you choose to do.

 

[JustAnAverageGuy]

I notice no slowdowns when using a second monitor when playing games with a 9800pro

 

[TerryMathews]

This is a very complicated question. The simplest answer would be not much of one if you're using a dual-head video card.

The only thing that really affects a video card's performance is the resolution it's running at. If you add a second monitor and your games only occupy the first monitor, you're not going to notice a performance difference. Force the card to run the game across both monitors and you'll notice a big difference if you don't adjust your resolution accordingly.

In technical terms, if you've got a screen running 1024x768 and add a second monitor of the same resoultion, your video card would have to fill a framebuffer of 2048x768 to fill both monitors.

 

[snidy1]

Thanks for the info. I'll only use the second monitor for when I'm editing video, I'll only use my main monitor for gaming.