2 monitors without windowed mode?

[khurzog]

hi, ive been multiboxing in WoW for a week now and have enjoyed the quick leveling with the new refer-a-friend promo. im only running 2 accounts. today i decided i was sick of alt-tabbing and went out and bought a little 15" LCD (my main display is 24" ws) anyways my problem is that my second WoW wont go up to the second monitor without being in windowed mode, and when im in windowed mode i go from 100 down to 10 fps, which is unacceptable. somewhere i read to get UltraMon, which i did, and it does works with other applications, but not with WoW. ive scanned through numerous posts here and havent found the exact fix im looking for, so any info would be very useful. ill list my specs below if that matters...

Vista Ultimate 32 bit
Intel Core2Duo 6600 2.4ghz
3007 mb ram (really 4 gig)
NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT

any advice on this would be greatly appreciated, thank you!

[ZorbaTheGeek]

Misread your post so deleted the reply

[khurzog]

and ill delete my reply =p

[HPAVC]

I believe this is a DirectX issue in that the fullscreen display always encompasses all the monitor space. If you had a program that made your second WoW runtime it would be wrapping it all in a overlay I would assume (ewww)

I use Ultramon/MultiMon at work, I cannot see how it would give you any WoW benefits other than making windowed mode WoW runtimes easier placement perhaps?

My instincts tell me your game video settings need to be castrated perhaps, 100 to 10fps is a pretty big hit. Also I am sure some of the Windows IT arch people could tell you how to performance monitor what is actually causing the 10fps and it should be trivial to determine.

[khurzog]

i disabled all my addons and brought all settings down to min, no improvement at all :-< the only thing thats killing my performance is being in windowed mode. surely there has to be a way to asign display location without having them windowed, right?

[Tizer]

Run them windowed, use maximiser to stretch it full screen so you dont know the difference. Job done?

[khurzog]

Run them windowed, use maximiser to stretch it full screen so you dont know the difference. Job done?

my problem is that in windowed mode i get 1-10 fps and in fullscreen i get 50-100 fps. just looking like its fullscreen doesnt really do anything for my performance, and maximiser requires windowed mode. i am looking for a set up which allows me to keep WoW in fullscreen mode and choose which display to use, or somehow miraculously improve my fps in windowed mode.

[-silencer-]

NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT

That is the main source of your problem.

If you use the Maximizer program, you can set it up so it will run one instance of WoW per monitor in full-screen mode. I guess KeyClone's maximizer would work the same, but I don't have KC. Now, the videocard issue. With two monitors of such vastly differing resolutions, you're going to have to run dual-view mode, which seriously kills performance. I know, since I use an 8800GTX in dual-view to display on a 24" and 22" at the same time. On one monitor with 5x windows, all of them are lightning quick. But as soon as I move one of the windows to a 2nd monitor, performance on them all goes down the drain. That's an expected "feature" of dual-view. It's a big drawback using an 8800GTX, but I can't imagine trying to split an 8600GT card to two monitors for 3D apps.. ouch.

The easiest solution is to have a 2nd videocard drive the 2nd monitor, if your motherboard has an additional pci-x16 slot. You don't run it in SLI - just two separate cards going to two monitors. Another 8600GT shouldn't be expensive at all, or upgrade your main card to a more powerful nVidia card and use the 8600GT to drive the smaller LCD. You can attempt to run horizontal span mode on your 8600GT, but it may be very difficult since there will be a ton of "hidden" desktop around that smaller display. I was running horizontal span (computer assumes I have 2x 1920x1200 monitors) across my 24 & 22, and there was an unseen "hidden" desktop around around the bottom and right side of my 1680x1050 22" display. Although performance was much better, I found this dead space more annoying than the fps hit.

Edit: With Maximizer, you can even have "windows" of WoW that have the border and title bar stripped, so they appear as mini-fullscreen windows. That's how I have my 4 alts on my 22" display.

[khurzog]

question, is keyclone maximizer what you are referring too, or is there a different maximizer out there? because every time i use keyclone maximizer it automatically puts both instances of WoW into windowed mode. other than that, it does what its supposed to do perfectly, but causes the fps drop which i mentioned. when i take them out of windowed mode manually, then both WoWs are back on my main monitor, and running quite smoothly. I also have tried to switched the main monitor over to the small one between running each WoW, but that caused all sorts of problems. if you claim maximizer will run both instances of WoW as fullscreen then i am failing to set it up right, and will try and figure that out now, but if it is some other maximizer program, please let me know. i really hope it isnt a video card problem, because i had just upgraded it back in january to the best i could afford, and since i just bought this second monitor and a second account and keyclone and various nonwow related expenses, i really cant afford to put more money into this for awhile :-X thank you everyone for the replies, i feel im inches away from figuring it out.