Question about dual screening

I

Inverted08

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 12, 2008
Messages
263
Hey all,
my questions are fairly simple, i just cant find an answer online :p
19" Dell Monitor
(getting) 28" Hannspree
8800gt
q6600
3g of ram + Vista

1) Will dual screen put a substantial amount of force on my video card in games like cod4 and Wow??

2) If it does, is there anyway for me to use dual screen just during internet and anything besides games and movies?? If so how? Do i just turn the screen off?
 
It does hurt performance a little bit but its not that bad. If you wanted the second screen off you can just disable it in the nvidia control panel.
 
so ur saying everytime i want to play a game or something, i have to go to nvidia control panel and disable it?? sounds annoying, what if i just turn it off??
 
it's really not too bad. If you're on the edge of playable framerates, then u might notice. but I never noticed when playing Rome total war or Battlefield 2 running on one screen and leaving the other one connected.

my specs for that machine are -
2x 17" Samsung LCDs (712N and 170t)
Sapphire Radeon x800XT
2GB RAM
Intel Pentium 4 3.2C (3.2GHz)
 
I've run dual monitors for a long time and even on older cards the performance will be pretty much the same especially if you just have vent or whatever up on the 2nd monitor. I've even had multiple different games up on each monitor and it usually runs pretty well.
 
2) If it does, is there anyway for me to use dual screen just during internet and anything besides games and movies?? If so how? Do i just turn the screen off?
Click to expand...

No many games (if any) support dual (or more) screens natively. They always run in the primary monitor and thats it. If you want to use dual screen, you need to either have something like triple-head which is a box where all the monitors are connected, and then only one cable to the computer. Computer sees it as one huge display. Or you can run it windowed and stretch window over multiple screens. There is a third way actually, a "software triplehead", but it only works on certain games http://www.kegetys.net/SoftTH/

e: I don't know much bout dual/triple screen monitoring, but I do run dual screen desktop. And as far as I can (or can't) tell, there is no noticeable performance loss. I usually have rivatuner hardware monitor and taskmanager open in secondary display.
 
Inverted08 said:
1) Will dual screen put a substantial amount of force on my video card in games like cod4 and Wow??

2) If it does, is there anyway for me to use dual screen just during internet and anything besides games and movies?? If so how? Do i just turn the screen off?
Click to expand...

Wow doesn't put a lot fo stress on anything. And you'll be fine. I run games like that all the time and leave my second monitor up and running. Unless it actually causes problems, there's no reason to turn off or disable the second monitor.

Like was said, very few games support multiple monitors. WoW does, guild wars does, and several other mmorpgs do, but there are no other ones that I know of.
 
I don't notice any substantial difference. I game with a secondary monitor active all the time. I stick my music player, Vista side bar and Vent over on the secondary display and game on the main display.

As others have said, most games can't actually use both displays, so the second display is more of a utility display.

To clarify. Simply turning off the second display will not disable the 2nd monitor. You would have to go into the Nvidia control panel (or just uncheck the extend desktop option in display properties -> settings tab.)

I love having the second monitor as a sort of status display when gaming, it's awesome.
 
Ooooo ok, thanks alot for so many answers.
I wasn't sure whether my computer could handle it or not, because its not a very wide subject on internet for some reason...
Anyway, again thanks:)
 
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