I'm doing some research for my next build and I came up across a couple questions that I can't seem to find the answer for on google (I get different answers from each link) So. If I have enough money to get 2 graphics cards and 4 monitors. If I got two SLI Graphics Cards and enabled SLI, would I be able to use four monitors? Or would I be better off getting two different cards and install the drivers for both of them?
SLI Graphics Cards – Using 4 Monitors with 2 SLI Cards
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Today I realised that I was actually playing them on the two monitors that are both powered by the 8800. Thinking that I might as well make use of the power of both cards I tried switching the monitor cables over so that each card would be "powering" one of the clients. (Is it silly to assume this is how it works?)
This doesn't seem to have had the desired effect, as the client running on the 8800 screen is running worse than it was before.
I assume you are running Everquest in Windowed mode. From the website it says it uses DirectX 9.
Presumably the game is written to create an instance of the IDirect3DDevice9
object that provides 3D acceleration on the default adapter. This most likely will be your GeForce 8800.
When you drag the window on to your second monitor running the GT120 there is no magic trick to swapping the 3D acceleration over to the GT120 (you would have to copy all the assets from Card A to Card B, what if one card is DirectX 8 compatible, what if one card is DirectX9, what if there isn't enough VRAM on Card B, what if you have the window spanning two monitors), so the GeForce 8800 renders the scene and then Windows copies it into the framebuffer of the GT120.
The latter step is where you will see the performance degradation.
Or do I have to set the client to use a particular GPU (an option I can't seem to find in EQ2)?
You have two solutions/workarounds:
- Make Everquest launch on the different adapters. You will probably need third party software to accomplish this. There are some DirectX tweaking programs out there that might do it.
- Use SLI. This will accelerate the rendering and hopefully accelerate the copying between one adapter and the next, assuming SLI is smart enough. You may want to research this more to make sure SLI will give you a significant performance increase in this scenario.
Scalable Link Interface (SLI) is a brand name for a multi-GPU solution developed by NVIDIA for linking two or more video cards together to produce a single output. SLI is an application of parallel processing for computer graphics, meant to increase the processing power available for graphics.
An SLI ready card or power supply means it's capable of adding a second (or more) video card. Adding a second card usually can increase overall performance but there are times when the communication between the two cards can create overhead (see micro stuttering)
You don't specify which video card you currently have but you may not need a second card just to drive three monitors. If you just want to have an extended desktop with three screens your current card may support that option. Depends on the outputs and options. If you want to have three screens for game playing you may need a second card depending on what resolution and level of quality you enable but this is not a requirement. I use a single AMD XFX 6950 on three monitors for both work and gaming just fine.
Best Answer
No, you cannot. nVidia cards are limited to driving 2 independent displays per master GPU. When you enable SLI, one GPU becomes a slave to the other, and is no longer capable of driving independent displays.
With SLI disabled, you can power/drive all four monitors just fine.
If you enable SLI however, two will be shut off. You can get one to turn back on if you set the cards to run the monitors in Surround 2D or Surround 3D, but then you lose the benefits of them being separate monitors - windows simply sees the setup as one triple-wide monitor - one independent display (but built off of three linked displays).
There's little reason to get two different cards - If you're not going to run SLI, might as well keep things simple and get two of the same. Then you can always SLI if you need that additional power for something.
What you can do, and I did until one of my cards died, is run 3 graphics cards, two the same, and one different. You can SLI the two similar cards, and use those to power two of the monitors, and then drive the remaining two monitors off of the third card. Because the third card is different & unable to SLI with the first two, it will not have any of its outputs turned off when you enable SLI. It doesn't even have to be an expensive one, unless you plan to run fullscreen applications on the monitors connected to it. I used a $25 card since I only used the monitors for webbrowsing / chat windows or similar, and you can drag windowed games onto the auxiliary monitors and they'll continue to run with SLI since that's all rendered off-screen and composited into place in most of today's operating systems.
You can also look into AMD cards, as they are capable of driving up to 6 displays off of a single GPU (provided correct connectors, usually you'll need a monitor with DisplayPort, or an adapter to convert from DisplayPort to what your monitor can accept), but I'm afraid my knowledge there isn't quite as extensive.
This answer is slightly out of date now. The GTX680 and later cards can drive up to 4 independent displays off of a single GPU, though I think it will only do 3 of the monitors in a nVidia Surround setup; the fourth is limited to being an auxiliary monitor, typical of a "3+1" setup.