How can I start a game on my secondary monitor?

[Azndude51]

I have a 1680x1050 22" widescreen my primary and a 1280x1024 19" 5:4 LCD as my secondary on Dualview with NVIDIA. I want to play a game at 1280x1024 natively on my secondary montior. Is there any way to do that without having to switch the 19" to the primary first?

 

[Matthias99]

AFAIK, if you run them as discrete monitors you won't get 3D acceleration on anything but the primary display. So yes, basically you have to flip the primary/secondary (although maybe you can get a script/program that would do this for you when you launch a particular game?)

 

[Azndude51]

Does anyone know of something like Ultramon will get it to do what I want?

 

[zylander]

With ultramon you can easily change which monitor is the primary. You could also try running the the game in window mode and just drag the window to the second monitor.

 

[zylander]

Ya, ultramon will let you do this. I have a 24" as my primary and a 19" as my secondary. I switched my 19" over to primary and started up a few games. They all opened up fine on the 19". Just right click on the ultramon icon on the taskbar and select set primary.

edit: doing this can screw your icons up a little bit depending on the game you run. Make sure not to restore your icon positions until you set your original monitor back to primary or they will get screwed up even more.

 

[Noema]

I was wondering about that myself. I have almost the exact same setup as Azndude51, only with a 17" instead of the 19", but it's the same resolution.

I also want to run some games on my 17" because F.E.A.R and Oblivion run like a slideshow at 1680x1050 and they are pretty playable at 1280x1024...unfortunately I can't get my damn ViewSonic to scale and there's no way I'm playing an streched image on the 22".

Will try this out tonight.

 

[Azndude51]

Right now I'm just right clicking on the Nvidia control thing in the taskbar and there it has the option to change from Dualview to clone. That way I can keep the 22" as primary yet games that run on 1280x1024 will show up correctly on the 19". So far it seems to work pretty well and it's only a couple of mouse clicks.

 

[zylander]

Originally posted by: Azndude51
Right now I'm just right clicking on the Nvidia control thing in the taskbar and there it has the option to change from Dualview to clone. That way I can keep the 22" as primary yet games that run on 1280x1024 will show up correctly on the 19". So far it seems to work pretty well and it's only a couple of mouse clicks.

So you are displaying the game on both monitors at the same resolution and just waatching the 19"?

 

[Azndude51]

Originally posted by: zylander

Originally posted by: Azndude51
Right now I'm just right clicking on the Nvidia control thing in the taskbar and there it has the option to change from Dualview to clone. That way I can keep the 22" as primary yet games that run on 1280x1024 will show up correctly on the 19". So far it seems to work pretty well and it's only a couple of mouse clicks.

So you are displaying the game on both monitors at the same resolution and just waatching the 19"?

Yeah, I turn off the 22" and just use the 19" when playing games at 1280x1024 since that is its native.

 

[vhx]

I don't think you can. Whenever I maximize a program it just switches to the first monitor and maximizes it on there. Not sure if it's my settings or what though.