How do I start WoW on the my second GPU?

Hi,

I've been having some problems when using Linux and playing WoW. Usually it hangs 1-2 times per day. Although after the 3.0.8 patch I crashed once about 10-30min. Of course it didn't take long till I got tired. I think it's one of my addons that crashes it. However since I have Vista installed on my computer I started playing Wow on Vista, which was rather convenient since I'm currently programming DX10. It still crashes, but only when I've teleported or used HS.

I have a 9800GX2.
Anyway to my problem. When I was multiboxing in Linux I had the main on one display and the four on the other one. There was only a slightly FPS drop on my main, but I came to the conclusion that when you were using both GPUs at max you only got about 90% of the power of each card. I tested this with glxgears. In Linux then one display was bound to one GPU and the other to the second GPU.

Now when I'm running Vista and wanted to start multiboxing again, I came to the conclusion that after I started a second instance of Wow it always ran on the first GPU even when I moved it to the second display. This is because my main dropped from 60FPS to about 30 when I added one more instance.

I've googled and searched these forums but I never found an answer to this. Although I found some saying that when you disable SLI you only use one GPU, I don't believe this since in nVidia Control Panel when you hover over "Do not use SLI" it says "Using displays on each GPU" under "Typical usage scenarios". I also saw someone saying something like this: "There are tools for selecting which GPU wow should run on". However I have failed to locate such a tool.

I've tried all 4 different modes in "Multi-display/mixed-GPU acceleration" in nVidia Control Panel under Manage 3D settings.

So, is there any way that you can force a wow client to run on the second GPU rather than the first? I know there is a setting i DirectX that allows you to choose which port to use. Usually all games runs on the first standard port, thus your "main" screen.

Thanks for all the help :)

Hi there,

I had the same issue when i bought my super rig with 2x 280GTX's.
There is a crude solution, and that is to set your primary monitor in display options to your second physical monitor, load the slave sessions, change the primary monitor back to the original and launch your main session and that'll set you right.

I have no idea where this restriction is coming from considering how easy it is to get around. I have 3x monitors, two connected to 1 card, 1 on the other, running 5 sessions. As long as you don't 'cross the beams' so to speak with moving sessions from one cards display area to another (2 monitors on the same card is ok.. assuming there's two dvi ports), you'll be okay.

Enjoy!