I want a three monitor setup. Two monitors on a fast powerful card and one monitor on a slower card. They are not linked together, no sli and all that. Can I run a game on all three monitors or will it only run on one card? Will the more powerful card help the slower card? What are my display options. Can I extend the desktop on all three or will the cards have to mirror each other, how does this work?
What happens when you have two graphics cards in a computer
graphics card
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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.
Of course only one card was maxing out the single GPU, you can't run SLI with different GPU cores.
Save up and get another GTX 560 Ti if you want to increase triple monitor 3D performance too. The only ability you get by adding a lower performance graphics card is the ability to use three monitors, that's it.
You can also use a slower card to perform the PhysX rendering. Also, if you use any CUDA-specific applications, you can offset them to one particular GPU if you needed to.
If your second GPU happens to be SLI-compatible with the first one (as with Crossfire, which only happens when they share the same GPU core), when SLI/Crossfire is enabled, your performance will be limited by the slower card (or rather, the card with a lower amount of memory or lower clock frequency).
Best Answer
My experience has been that the graphics cards will not properly show 3D graphics or overlays that extend to more than one screen on the separate card.
In other words, if you show a video (usually done in an overlay) in a window on a single monitor, then move the window to show across two monitors, it will only work when both monitors are either
Similar things happen with 3D graphics, and in many cases you simply can't extend the window beyond the two screens on the better card, or the one screen on the lessor card.
In order to have the best chance at getting this to work seamlessly, use cards from the same manufacturer that use the same graphics driver - which usually means using cards within the same family.
However, if you really need to use three or more displays with advanced 3D rendering across all three, you should look at video cards that explicitly support this feature. Both ATI and nVidia have cards that will support this usage.