Dual cards/monitors, worse FPS?

[viperia]

I currently have two 8600's each running a their own monitor. When I have my main window open on one, and two slaves on the other, my FPS get's down into the 20's. But when I move all three windows to the same monitor, FPS jumps back to 50-60. Doesn't seem like it should work that way?

I set my salves to maxfpsbk 15 and all low in game video settings, and that helped a lot, but still not getting the performance i want since I switch to my slaves to leads a lot. Is there something I am missing? or that I can do to get better FPS on all of them?

[RobeK]

I also had this problem. After installing another card in my machine the fps actually went down. After a good night sleep I finally came to the conclusion why. ALL WOW INSTANCES RENDERS ON THE PRIMARY DISPLAY. Oh yes, you are only using ONE card.
By forcing windows to shuffle the rendered screendata over to the other card to be placed on screen number two actually lowers the bandwidth. Yea sad but true.

SO NOW WHAT?

I asked in the technical forum how you can force WOW to open on a particullar display device but as you all know... Blizz support is what it is => no reply.

I read up on how DirectX functions. Default is that all 3D accelerated windows opens up on the primary screen if the callee doesn't request a specific one. That fact gave me an idea and I finally I got it to work by switching the primary display around.

This is how to do it:

Switch primary to second monitor. Start instances you want to render there. Switch primary back to main monitor (and hope the game doesn't crash. On my system it is a 20% chance of that). Then start the main instance of wow.
You now have WOW rendering on different cards and much better FPS.

To simplify the process I use UltraMon (You should use it just for the taskbar on both monitors anyway). I create two display profiles that only differ in what monitor that is the primary display. I then bind a hotkey to each profile.
Now is switching primary display a breeze.

Happy boxing.

[algol]

Oh, it's worse than that. WoW doesn't even properly recognize anything beyond the primary adapter on your main card. WoW takes its display information indirectly from one of the places Windows logs it, and is largely blind to anything beyond the first display ID. This can also cause things like having an incorrect resolution list displayed for displays on secondary adapters/cards, including totally omiting widescreen options. Yay, Blizzard.

Yeah, I told them about it. Repeatedly and until I got ahold of someone who sounded reasonably technically competent. This was about 6 months after release, and it still has the problem. GG Blizz, aye?

Maybe I'll just go back to one of the single-display maximizer layouts for now...

[Lax]

The way DirectX works is the resources for your game are put on one physical video card, and if you move the window to the other video card, the resources stay on the original one. The game is then software rendered instead of hardware rendered, which is why your framerate drops like a rock.

With one video card, on certain versions of Windows (specifically Vista) or with certain software (desktop spanning) you can move the windows between monitors. With Windows XP and without desktop spanning software, you will get the same issue you are seeing with two video cards.

Not to toot my own horn here but WinEQ 2 and Inner Space both allow you to select which monitor/display adapter you want launch the game on, eliminating the problem of having to move the windows to the desired monitor. You still can't drag the window to another monitor later, but it at least solves the initial problem. (Or use one of the workarounds suggested by others)

[algol]

Hmm. Is there a command-line option to set the display a program executes on? If so, one could potentially add it to the execution string for a given client instance in Keyclone.

Of course, you'd run into trouble when you wanted to PiP swap...

[pinotnoir]

I also had this problem. After installing another card in my machine the fps actually went down. After a good night sleep I finally came to the conclusion why. ALL WOW INSTANCES RENDERS ON THE PRIMARY DISPLAY. Oh yes, you are only using ONE card.
By forcing windows to shuffle the rendered screendata over to the other card to be placed on screen number two actually lowers the bandwidth. Yea sad but true.

SO NOW WHAT?

I asked in the technical forum how you can force WOW to open on a particullar display device but as you all know... Blizz support is what it is => no reply.

I read up on how DirectX functions. Default is that all 3D accelerated windows opens up on the primary screen if the callee doesn't request a specific one. That fact gave me an idea and I finally I got it to work by switching the primary display around.

This is how to do it:

Switch primary to second monitor. Start instances you want to render there. Switch primary back to main monitor (and hope the game doesn't crash. On my system it is a 20% chance of that). Then start the main instance of wow.
You now have WOW rendering on different cards and much better FPS.

To simplify the process I use UltraMon (You should use it just for the taskbar on both monitors anyway). I create two display profiles that only differ in what monitor that is the primary display. I then bind a hotkey to each profile.
Now is switching primary display a breeze.

Happy boxing.

Wouldnt this just render everything on the 1st card as before? There is nothing telling it to render on card 2 vs card 1 doing it like this. Let me know if I am wrong.

[Lax]

Hmm. Is there a command-line option to set the display a program executes on? If so, one could potentially add it to the execution string for a given client instance in Keyclone.

Of course, you'd run into trouble when you wanted to PiP swap...

That would depend entirely on the program, and there isn't such a command-line option for World of Warcraft that I know of.

Wouldnt this just render everything on the 1st card as before? There is nothing telling it to render on card 2 vs card 1 doing it like this. Let me know if I am wrong.

That really depends on whether DirectX considers the default adapter for 3D to always be the primary monitor. Makes sense to me that it might work.

[Nairi]

[quote='RobeK',index.php?page=Thread&postID=137782# post137782]I also had this problem. After installing another card in my machine the fps actually went down. After a good night sleep I finally came to the conclusion why. ALL WOW INSTANCES RENDERS ON THE PRIMARY DISPLAY. Oh yes, you are only using ONE card.
By forcing windows to shuffle the rendered screendata over to the other card to be placed on screen number two actually lowers the bandwidth. Yea sad but true.

SO NOW WHAT?

I asked in the technical forum how you can force WOW to open on a particullar display device but as you all know... Blizz support is what it is => no reply.

I read up on how DirectX functions. Default is that all 3D accelerated windows opens up on the primary screen if the callee doesn't request a specific one. That fact gave me an idea and I finally I got it to work by switching the primary display around.

This is how to do it:

Switch primary to second monitor. Start instances you want to render there. Switch primary back to main monitor (and hope the game doesn't crash. On my system it is a 20% chance of that). Then start the main instance of wow.
You now have WOW rendering on different cards and much better FPS.

To simplify the process I use UltraMon (You should use it just for the taskbar on both monitors anyway). I create two display profiles that only differ in what monitor that is the primary display. I then bind a hotkey to each profile.
Now is switching primary display a breeze.

Happy boxing.[/quote]
Welcome to the club!

[url='http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&postID=34403#post34403']Horizontal Span vs Dual View on nvidia[/url]

btw this works with pretty much most of the games.
right now im using 9600gt for my 3 wows and 8800gts for my main wow, only thing holding me back now is my cpu .