Question about having 2 Monitors and 2 Vid cards AGP/PCI

[RollWave]

I'm wondering if I have one monitor plugged into each card, if I drag the TV window from the main LCD to the secondary LCD would I be able to play a video game while the TV was on?

 

[RollWave]

Anyone?

 

[FlyingPenguin]

Yes and no. You can run many things on both monitors from the desktop, but in games things are a bit different. In 3D mode some funny things happen. You can usually run simple apps in the 2nd monitor (like Teamspeak for instance) but a video may not work. This is because your video game may be tying up some of the DirectX APIs and just because the video drivers may not support it.

You'll also be greatly taxing your SPU and sound probably causing audio stutter. A modern video game uses all your CPU and resources leaving little for anything else, and video playback is very CPU intensive.

If you're talking about Live TV from a video capture card then again it's possible. TV capture uses less CPU time but it may still stutter and your video drivers may not support it.

I would personally recommend you NOT use two seperate video cards for dual monitor - it generally doesn't work very well. The better solution is to use a dual head video card (most gaming video cards are dual head - they have two seperate monitor outputs, like a Radeon 9800 for instance).