2nd video card 2nd monitor issues and solution....

Hullo folks,

New multi-boxer and long time lurker here and I just thought I would post my experience with setting up my new rig for multi-boxing.

Been a long time lurker and watcher of a friend that multi-boxes on Mag. I decided to try 5 shaman after watching him and reading here. At first, I went with his approach, using 5 computers and monitors and using Octopus (great program btw!) for broadcasting but after reading about Keyclone's (another great piece of software) PiP feature and the power of focus switching with PiP, I decided to try using my Q6600 based PC to multi-box the five accounts.

Newbie zone was fine, very little lag and playable but once I got around a lot of people or in a city, it was stuttering unplayable. I decided to upgrade the rig a bit and try and get it to work. My goal was to be able to run thru Org with very little lag. I bought an nvidia 9800 GX2 but in non-sli mode (in order for it to drive two monitors, it performed worse then my 8800 GTS that had been driving the two displays. Strange, because the 9800 GX2 is basically two 8800s. So I put the 9800 GX2 in multi-GPU mode and then added the 8800 in the second PCIe x16 slot to drive the second monitor (there is a trick to doing this). I figured the 8800 would drive the main account and the 9800 GX2 would drive the four alts.

Now here is the wierdness. When I had just the 8800 GTS in the computer driving two screens, I could run two wow accounts in 1680x1050, one on each monitor and get 60 fps on both. With the 9800 GX2 driving one monitor and the 8800 GTS driving the second, if I moved just a single wow client from the 9800 screen to the 8800 screen, the frame rate would drop to about half. Just a single wow client, nothing else running. It drove me crazy. I figured out that it has something to do with directx and system video memory only being allocated to the primary display. The 8800 only has 360Mbytes video memory but the 9800 GX2 has 1 Gbytes video memory. Once I switched the 8800 to be the primary display in Vista (so it got the system video memory), then the single wow client worked fine on both monitors.

Some other things I did were bumping up my system memory to 4gig, installed SP1 for Vista, added a second drive and made a second wow installation for alt 2 and then mlinked the alts 3, 4, and 5 to it. The rig is a 2.4 gig Q6600 overclocked to 3.4 gig with two 1680x1050 20" displays. PiP switching is <1sec and there is very little lag in Org even at peak times. Org is not as snappy as with 5 machines, but the PiP switching with focus more then makes up for it. It is very playable.

So, just my experience. Thought I would share the video card experience and maybe help someone. My main is Nazwalk in The Zerg on Mag.

very nice write up. I kinda have the same problem only then with 2 ATI Club 3d 3870 x2 Cards.
What are you keyclone fps settings if i might ask? Since i think my problem lies there.

Keyclone FPS settings are 45 / 15.

I am running 800x600 on all clients, just have the UI scale set to make it fit like it did when I was running at 1680x1050.

When I go into Org or any city, I use Keyclone's (the human, not the program) display detail macros to set the detail to low on all clients. Outside of a city, I set the main client to high and leave the alts on low.

OK unless I am completely misunderstanding your situation, it might have to do with the fact that you are using dual view with video cards that aren't identical, and under the new WDDM standards your dualview cards must use the same drivers. See this article:

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device...imonVista.mspx

See the section on Multimonitor support in WDDM.

Havelcek,

Thanks but wasn't the issue, the cards are both Nvidia and running the same driver. The 9800 GX2 is actually just two 8800 GPUs SLI'ed together.

It is that DirectX only allocates system video memory to the primary display adapter so the 8800 GTS was running on only a half a tank. Once I made the 8800 GTS the primary display, all was good. The 9800 GX2 has 1gig so not having the system video memory allocated to it is not really hurting it.

Got it....that's a good catch.