2 monitors without windowed mode?
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!
RE: 2 monitors without windowed mode?
Quote:
Originally Posted by 'khurzog',index.php?page=Thread&postID=102597#post 102597
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.