Gaming on one monitor out of a 4 monitor setup

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haffey

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Oct 6, 2008
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i have a setup of 4 monitors that run at 1080p. a single Nvidia GTX 770 4GB provides display output to all 4 monitors. i play games on one of these monitors.

i run all games as borderless windowed if possible. in most games, i can keep my 3 other monitors enabled while maintaining a high framerate and good-looking graphics settings in the game i am playing. however, with more taxing games like The Witcher 3, i have to disable the 3 other monitors or else my framerate takes a dump.

i'm looking to upgrade my card and am trying to determine whether i should be concerned about VRAM capacity. i know it's usually a concern at high resolutions like 4K. but since i only play games on one of the monitors, i feel like i'm somewhere in between a 1080p setup and a 4K setup.

thanks in advance for any help.
 
Just enable Nvidia surround and it will turn off the aux monitors.

To keep them on in non-surround mode while gaming would require a lot more horsepower.
 
frunction said:
Just enable Nvidia surround and it will turn off the aux monitors.

To keep them on in non-surround mode while gaming would require a lot more horsepower.
Click to expand...

well they're in a 2x2 array and they aren't all the same make/model, so they don't line up very nicely. i only use the lower left monitor for games (144hz) and the rest are used for social media, web browsing, watching streams, etc.

can you enable Nvidia surround with just one monitor being used for gaming? can i change it every now and then so that the top two monitors are disabled? or just the right two?

i'll try it when i get home but i'm at work now. (sorry for the questions.)
 
A better solution would be to use 2 cards, one dedicated for gaming, and the other to run all the non-gaming stuff.

VRAM mainly comes into play when you are running a GPU intensive application with a large resolution, IE running a game in surround mode on 5760x1080 with all the bells and whistles. If you use 2 cards for this scenario, then VRAM really won't play much of a factor.
 
NoOther said:
A better solution would be to use 2 cards, one dedicated for gaming, and the other to run all the non-gaming stuff.

VRAM mainly comes into play when you are running a GPU intensive application with a large resolution, IE running a game in surround mode on 5760x1080 with all the bells and whistles. If you use 2 cards for this scenario, then VRAM really won't play much of a factor.
Click to expand...

cool, thanks. so i'd obviously be using two cards in a CF/SLI setup, depending on what brand i pick. would i need to do anything special to "assign" a card to the gaming monitor and the other card to the 3 remaining monitors? how would i do that?
 
NoOther said:
A better solution would be to use 2 cards, one dedicated for gaming, and the other to run all the non-gaming stuff.

VRAM mainly comes into play when you are running a GPU intensive application with a large resolution, IE running a game in surround mode on 5760x1080 with all the bells and whistles. If you use 2 cards for this scenario, then VRAM really won't play much of a factor.
Click to expand...

This is the best solution I have found personally.

I currently have a 1920x1200 main monitor that I game on and another 3 monitors for productivity in an upside down "T" configuration. The 3 work monitors are run off of a previous leftover card that wasn't worth reselling while my main monitor gets it's own.

I also shunt physx to the second card as a bonus.
 
Depending on your CPU you may have already have 3 video outputs available for your non-gaming monitors.

On my 4770K I plug in 3 monitors into the onboard graphics and connect my gaming monitors to my tri-fire cards.
 
Hamakua said:
This is the best solution I have found personally.

I currently have a 1920x1200 main monitor that I game on and another 3 monitors for productivity in an upside down "T" configuration. The 3 work monitors are run off of a previous leftover card that wasn't worth reselling while my main monitor gets it's own.

I also shunt physx to the second card as a bonus.
Click to expand...
out of curiosity, what cards do you run in this configuration? i thought you had to run multiple cards in a CF/SLI setup and they had to be the same generation, but you make it sound like the older card is totally different from your gaming card.

rtangwai said:
Depending on your CPU you may have already have 3 video outputs available for your non-gaming monitors.

On my 4770K I plug in 3 monitors into the onboard graphics and connect my gaming monitors to my tri-fire cards.
Click to expand...
i have an i7-5820K. no onboard graphics :(
 
haffey said:
cool, thanks. so i'd obviously be using two cards in a CF/SLI setup, depending on what brand i pick. would i need to do anything special to "assign" a card to the gaming monitor and the other card to the 3 remaining monitors? how would i do that?
Click to expand...

Actually put it into a CF/SLI setup would negate what you are trying to do. CF/SLI is for combining the cards to render a larger resolution screen, so effectively they would be doing the same kind of thing your current card is trying to do. Also, if you went SLI, you would need to buy the same card.

Instead what you do is you install 2 GPU cards, and do not put them in CF/SLI. You can have 2 totally separate cards, then you can plug the monitors you want the cards to run. So the main card you want to game on, you plug in the monitor you want to game on. The other card you can plug all the other monitors into.
 
For multiple cards, make sure you aren't running an Nvidia and an AMD card or else the Nvidia drivers will disable hardware PhysX because they are retarded like that.
 
I would just try a stronger gpu first (or a stronger gpu setup)

I've only run into noticeable performance drops once I got really overkill monitor setups

4k+1080p x3, no difference
3440x1440+1080p x3, no difference
1080p surround + 1080p x2, maybe ~5fps at most with a youtube video, no difference anything else (monitoring software, chrome, etc, anything non-video processing related)
1440p surround + 1080p x2, if there was a youtube video running on one of the extra's, I would lose about 15fps; no difference if anything else

I'm running 3 Titans (original), so yes, it's quite different, but I think you're overestimating the performance requirement of those accessory monitors. I think your 770 is just struggling to keep up anyway, and that last bit of accessory monitors just pushed it past that point
 
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