Two different GPU, for two monitors?

[mbox_bob]

Adding a second graphics card comes with a whole new set of potential issues. It also may not fix any perceived performance issues if they aren't stemming from the graphics subsystem, but rather CPU, Memory, Network etc (yes I saw your percentages, but if my cpu is running at 13%, I usually double check what's going on, because it usually means that a single core is pegged at 100% on some single threaded process. percentages are ok, but not totally useful).

Now if you have introduced Cross Monitor Swapping, or essentially have your window layout setup so a game is initialized on one graphics card, and then displayed on a monitor powered by the other graphics card, then you will get even worse performance than before, because the card that the game is initialized on will be the card the game is rendered on, and then all that data has to be pushed across the bus to the other graphics card and then displayed. This will be a highly probable result if you have not changed your ISBoxer configuration to make sure that anything displayed on a given monitor is initialized there too (ISBoxer usually has a RESET region in the Window Layout Swap Groups. This is what is used to initialize the game window and will determine the rendering graphics card).

More detail on that can be found on this page. http://www.isboxer.com/wiki/GPU_Mana...arate_monitors


ps. Just thought I'd add that Cross Monitor Swapping and it's deficiencies are not an ISBoxer limitation. This is a Windows things, for which you can find all over the MS forums if you search for it..
Actually it is more a driver/hardware thing and a rather complex one; swapping the rendering from one card to another as you drag the window from one monitor to another is just rather tricky framebuffers and the like have to swap over from source to destination, and at which point should you attempt it? then there is the synchronising of the displays and the ramdac/lvds/tlms.
Imagine if you were watching a video with half displayed on each graphics card/monitor, which card is doing the rendering. And the portion being shunted to the other card for display, it needs to be on the same Frame that the render card is, otherwise you have half your video lagging behind the other half. This means that there has to be a whole lot of synchronisation going on, and this in turn will cause frame rates to plummet. It works better when the output is not spanned between the different displays because then it is up to the displaying card to output the complete set of pixels on it's own, but then on a video you then have Audio Sync too, so it brings in a load more variables. etc. It gets rather complex as you get into it..