Maximizing FPS with Maximizer? Issues with very low FPS

[cgistar]

Horizontal Span is a Windows XP only mode. In vista if you run multiple monitors off of a single card you can clone or have unique desktops (dual view). Multiple cards don't have the clone option as far as I am aware.

I am also using a multiple monitor setup with a very similarly beefy system as listed in the original post. The only real difference is that I'm using a dual core cpu instead of quad core. Running WoW of any size/scale on two monitors instantly reduces the frame rate by 50%. Move both windows back to one screen and the frame rate shoots up. This has nothing to do with your hardware. What I've been able to determine is that this is due to how Vista and D3D work along with the new graphics subsystem. NVidia can't support Horizontal span with Vista apparently due to changes in the graphics subsystems. What may be happening is that all frames are rendered on your primary displays graphics card, and then being output to the secondary screens. The only solution I've found is to run every instance on the main monitor, which is less than ideal.

As for the comments about the 750 being throttled to get people to buy the 790, the reasons to buy the 790 are the difference in components. The things that would effect your base performance given similar cpu and ram are front side bus speed etc. Those are going to be identical. While the 750's may have cheaper parts, I've never seen them work poorly compared to a 790 when using the same copmonents. DDR3 vs DDR2 can have benefits, but for most people they won't notice a difference. More importantly it's not the source of frame rate problem being reported. I have a much beefier system than a friend that is also dual boxing. He gets the exact same reduction in frame rate when using two monitors, we can reproduce them in the same way, and we can remove the effects by moving everything to the main monitor. Honestly, if I didn't have other reasons for using Vista 64, I'd go back to XP 64 for the horizontal span option in the drivers which appears to be the only way to get single card multi monitor 3d acceleration working properly.

Edit: I wanted to note that the frame rate reduction I get has nothing to do with maximizer either. Simply starting to instances of wow in windowed mode manually, and then dragging one to the second monitor results in the drop in frame rate. This points back to Vista/Graphics drivers also.

[zanthor]

Edit: I wanted to note that the frame rate reduction I get has nothing to do with maximizer either. Simply starting to instances of wow in windowed mode manually, and then dragging one to the second monitor results in the drop in frame rate. This points back to Vista/Graphics drivers also.

Here's a question for you... are you running dual video cards or just dual display? I'm running vista 64 with an 8800gt and get 40fps out of my main window (maxfps40) with a single instance or 5 copies running...

if you are running dual cards, then if you start wow pointed at the m ain display and move it to the other one, it goes into software rendering, and yes, you'll suffer framerate hits.

If you are running a single card with dual displays and seeing this, something isn't right, because Vista FIXED the graphics subsystem.

[cgistar]

Here's a question for you... are you running dual video cards or just dual display? I'm running vista 64 with an 8800gt and get 40fps out of my main window (maxfps40) with a single instance or 5 copies running...

if you are running dual cards, then if you start wow pointed at the m ain display and move it to the other one, it goes into software rendering, and yes, you'll suffer framerate hits.

If you are running a single card with dual displays and seeing this, something isn't right, because Vista FIXED the graphics subsystem.

I can reproduce this on multiple computers. One video card and two displays - instant frame rate hit. Two video cards and two displays - instant frame rate hit. Vista changes the graphics sub systems a lot, but that doesn't necessarily mean they were fixed. If you read around on the nvidia forums there's lots of complaints about multi monitor 3d acceleration in all kinds of applications including scientific simulation, CAD, and others. NVidia point at Microsoft and changes to the API's available to them as the source of the problem.

As far as drivers go, I'm using the latest drivers released by Nvidia, which came out a few days ago (the 19th). 180.48. This same issue occurred with the previous versions of the driver, though the frame rate hit isn't quite as bad with 3 or 4 instances of wow as it was previously. If this was just my box showing this drastic frame rate reduction I would chalk it up to an error on my end. Since I can drive over to my buddies house, and watch the exact same behavior occur given that our hardware is not similar I am less inclined to believe that.

Also, if there is a way to overcome this I would generally love to know as right now it's driving me crazy and has been for a few weeks.

[cgistar]

The 180 driver series is supposed to have SLI multi monitor built in, so I'm going to try that now.

[cgistar]

I am getting respectable frame rates with SLI turned on and two displays running from the SLI configured cards. I've gone from maybe 15fps max in the main window to 55fps.

[zanthor]

I can reproduce this on multiple computers. One video card and two displays - instant frame rate hit. Two video cards and two displays - instant frame rate hit. Vista changes the graphics sub systems a lot, but that doesn't necessarily mean they were fixed. If you read around on the nvidia forums there's lots of complaints about multi monitor 3d acceleration in all kinds of applications including scientific simulation, CAD, and others. NVidia point at Microsoft and changes to the API's available to them as the source of the problem.

As far as drivers go, I'm using the latest drivers released by Nvidia, which came out a few days ago (the 19th). 180.48. This same issue occurred with the previous versions of the driver, though the frame rate hit isn't quite as bad with 3 or 4 instances of wow as it was previously. If this was just my box showing this drastic frame rate reduction I would chalk it up to an error on my end. Since I can drive over to my buddies house, and watch the exact same behavior occur given that our hardware is not similar I am less inclined to believe that.

Also, if there is a way to overcome this I would generally love to know as right now it's driving me crazy and has been for a few weeks.

I have a bit of experience with Windows, Multiple Displays, and Microsoft's support of dual monitors as far back as windows 98, as that's when I put my first dual-display system together.

Pre-Vista windows support of dual monitors was great for 2d apps and sucked for 3d apps. This was fixed by and large by driver options from the video card manufacturers that fixed the issue by lying to windows and saying it was a single big display. The downside, dialogs often pop mid-display which has a big fat bezel in the way... a very minor inconvienance for what it's worth.

Vista completely revamped the graphics sub system, beyond that I don't know what they did.

I do know that on my Athlon64 X2 5600 and X2 6000 systems I had nearly identical performance in XP using span as I did in Vista using the dual displays. This was consistant no matter which monitor I drug windows onto, no matter if I used maximizer.exe, Keyclones maximizer, or just ran wow in windowed mode.

Using Vista I found myself in the position of having an 8800gt, a 7900gt, a 7600gt and an 8500gt all at the same time, so I figured why the hell not, lets put two cards into my box and see if that works out... it didn't, as soon as I drug wow off onto the 2nd video cards display it went to shit. Playable, but no where near the performance I got with a single card driving both displays. I quickly wrote this off thinking that it was a new version of the old issue, later (if I'm interpreting this right) I found out that its quite a logical limitation based on DirectX.

DirectX chooses a primary card to render an instance with, if you drag the window to another display, it still uses that card to render the data with, then passes it to the other card to display. I believe this can be negated by telling directx which display to load the game on... I could be misinformed though.

So my question to those having performance issues with single card systems: What model card do you have? The 9800gx2 as discussed earlier is really two 9800's soldered together... anyone else using similar cards having the same issues?