Multiboxing Hardware Science!

[Tonuss]

So far, it would seem that I'm alone when I say I take a performance hit and my FPS becomes "spikey" if more than 2 monitors are hooked up to my system while multiboxing.

Not sure if this is related, but I have had a performance issue with dual video card/monitor setups. The setups I have tried were:

Dual Radeon 5850 cards, each connected to one monitor.
Single Radeon 5870 card connected to two monitors.

I would use either keyclone (early on) or pwnboxer (later on) to put the main WOW on one display and the rest on the second display. Whenever I was focused on the primary display, it would slow to 30 fps max, but it could run at 60 fps if I was interacting with one of the characters on the second display. The cards are powerful enough that running 30 fps was generally smooth and playable, but it was annoying to know that the minor stuttering that I would see was not due to the card being underpowered.

My current system still uses the 5870 with a single monitor, so it won't be an issue. I plan to try IS Boxer whenever I get back to multiboxing and perhaps I'll have an opportunity to test a multi-monitor setup in the future. But by then I hope to have one or two of those 3GB 580s, so that might skew the totals.

[MiRai]

Not sure if this is related, but I have had a performance issue with dual video card/monitor setups. The setups I have tried were:

Dual Radeon 5850 cards, each connected to one monitor.
Single Radeon 5870 card connected to two monitors.

I would use either keyclone (early on) or pwnboxer (later on) to put the main WOW on one display and the rest on the second display. Whenever I was focused on the primary display, it would slow to 30 fps max, but it could run at 60 fps if I was interacting with one of the characters on the second display. The cards are powerful enough that running 30 fps was generally smooth and playable, but it was annoying to know that the minor stuttering that I would see was not due to the card being underpowered.

My FPS spikes were pretty severe. All 4 or 5 windows would get locked at about 10-15FPS and monitoring the
GPU's usage via GPU-Z would show that the GPU load would just shoot up to 100% at random times and it
wouldn't matter whether I was in a main city or in lonely Redridge. There was no method to the madness
what-so-ever which is why I could never pinpoint the issue and I assumed it was hardware, although, I do
remember that decreasing View Distance to a very low value seemed to remedy it for the most part but not
entirely (it would just happen less frequently). At this point though, I do like having 2 computers... one for
gaming/video editing that I can keep clean while I clutter up the second one with browsing/IRC/whatever else.

My current system still uses the 5870 with a single monitor, so it won't be an issue. I plan to try IS Boxer whenever I get back to multiboxing and perhaps I'll have an opportunity to test a multi-monitor setup in the future. But by then I hope to have one or two of those 3GB 580s, so that might skew the totals.

You will definitely not be disappointed with ISBoxer one bit... or a few 3GB 580's for that matter (assuming
your CPU can handle it).

[Kekkerer]

I don't think that I've seen you mention what your FPS limits are for main/slave windows, may just have missed it though. Might be worth playing around with that as well, I run my slaves at 15 fps and main 60.

[MiRai]

I don't think that I've seen you mention what your FPS limits are for main/slave windows, may just have missed it though. Might be worth playing around with that as well, I run my slaves at 15 fps and main 60.

Were. This is all in the past since I've switched to 2 computers and split my monitors between them The FPS
problem went on for over a year and of course I tried everything from swapping hardware to limiting FPS to
adjusting video settings to whatever else I tried. I just ended up having to push through it like a boss.