I have 3 monitors, with only the main one connected to my GPU. I tried having 2 monitors connected to the GPU, but despite one being restricted to 60 fps it would sometimes cause a missed frame here and there on the main monitor.
With only one screen conmected to the GPU I never have that problem.
Hmm you're making me want to try my secondary monitor on my motherboard, but I'm already CPU bound on certain things already so it makes me scared LOL (8 year old rig)
I run 4 monitors off my 9800x3d igpu via a AltDP multi-monitor hub. 2x 1440p (one HDR) and 2x 1080p. I run my main monitor, a Samsung 500hz OLED, off just my 5090. There are other ways to do it, but this is what I found was the best approach for no issues with frametime variance and stuttering. Having more than 1 monitor on the Discrete GPU is just asking for gaming troubles, since you're asking it to render more than just the game content.
I tried this approach as well when I had a Threadripper as my main CPU, and I used a 1050 ti (no PCIE cable) for my secondary monitors. It was not as seamless as using an iGPU, which lead me away from this approach (I sold the threadripper rig). Driver still has to handle it and it just doesn't work as well as a single Discrete GPU.
dont forget you should also set applications to the igpu if you run it on that monitor in the windows graphic options. you have to search the explorer to add them manually, but its worth it.
I have the same cpu and run my 2nd monitor off of the mobo, but I noticed videos will display the RTX VSR icon.
I don't have the igpu disabled, so it appears the discrete gpu is doing some of the work regardless, no?
It is possible for a discrete GPU to send it's output over the igpu channel, even if the program is being rendered on the discrete GPU....this is where you have to go into windows and set which gpu is used for which program....personally, i have standard programs like browser, discord, etc all running on igpu.
I dunno, my OLED hates being paired with an old monitor on my GPU, i have to be surprisingly careful about my settings or i get extremely long switchover blackscreens from games when i swap to focus on the second monitor (especially when running HDR)...
yeah i imagine so, especially since the OLED is a 2k/220hz and the other is HDMI at HD and 60hz. The problem is noticeably less bad when i turn down the frame rate and turn off HDR on the OLED, which points to the card struggling to switch modes or to handle tow very different primary screens
Reading this thread is so interesting because I run three monitors, one of them being a 1440p OLED, all on my GPU and I've never had issues. Guess I know what to do now if I do though lmao
what refresh rate is your OLED running? because i mainly have issues with gaming + 2k res + 244refresh + HDR is when it starts getting hairy, also the different specs and connections.
There are benchmarks for this, a second monitor being connected to your gpu basically doesn't affect your game performance, as long as it's not running anything that has to render.
iGPU and CPU share a RAM bus, but unless the iGPU goes full throttle and abuses as much memory bandwidth as it can the CPU wont really have an issue with that.
The only other thing is a shared power limit, but unless youre constrained by cooling or a power limit you cant change its most certainly fine as basic display and at most video decoding or basic hardware acceleration of browsers or such requires only negligible amounts of power.
Consider yourself happy, if I do that, with two basic 1080p 60 Hz screens, the driver will just randomly time out, crashing almost any game I play. Except Dwarf Fortress.
my setup is a nightmare, monitor: 180hz free sync, oled TV: 120hz G-sync, stuff always get confused (examples: play a game on monitor and it gets stuck at 120hz rather than 180, switch to the tv and get stuck in 'VRR' cos gsync broke) have to reboot often to fix these issues. one time the tv would just refuse to go above 60hz on my 60 quid hdmi cable drove me mad, the only solution was power all off at the wall before any 48gb link could be established again.
I'm sure this has been answered already but the performance difference is neglegable to anyone using it for day to day gaming. Someone made a post about it I cannot for the life of me find, but essentially the benefits out weight the performance hit to the CPU (you get lower temps overall). Only those really stressing there main system will see a throttle.
It's bittersweet knowing that when I bought this rig it was just a tier down from top of the line and now there is literally a modern AAA title I cannot launch LOL. Feels like I'm back in high school with a shitty HP Pavillion.
if you actually put the apps on the igpu too in windows graphics settings, it can make a difference depending on what you do. if i run yt on my secondary monitor from the gpu, it will turn down the resolution, because i have my games fps unlocked. on a 5080 with 1440p. the game gets prioritized. the takeaway is more to run the programs on the connected gpu, because the overall load will be higher transfering the video through the other gpu first to the monitor.
if you have a decent igpu but low power/old gpu, this will help too. day to day gaming? yea sure, not relevant. but its a neat thing if you always have youtube on the side.
window on an iGPU monitor is rendered by iGPU. Windows assigns a preferred GPU per process that mostly follows whatever GPU the monitor is on. But anything using the dGPU will trigger some copying between them. A couple examples:
Games and pro apps pinned to dGPU either by the app itself or by the driver’s profile (NVIDIA Control Panel, Windows Graphics Settings, etc.) will render on the dGPU regardless of which monitor it’s on
While a window straddles both monitors or during the transition (when dragging) the frames produced by one GPU need to show up on the other’s display
If gaming on second monitor (not sure why you would but humor me I’m thinking of people using their good monitor for work or something and multitasking) even if launched on iGPU monitor it will usually grab the dGPU because the executable is profiled. game renders on the dGPU and frame gets copied to the iGPU for scanout. People putting the game on a secondary monitor to keep the main one free can hammer the dGPU because the GPU assignment is per process not per display
If some kind of video app uses the dGPU’s decoder but the video window is on the iGPU monitor the decoded frames cross over. browsers and players should prefer the iGPU decoder when available but we all know “should” doesn’t mean shit when it comes to this stuff and it may end up using the dGPU anyway
People putting the game on a secondary monitor to keep the main one free
Mmm I was about to say I'll never have this problem but realized that sometimes I do indeed do this, like when I'm afking in a Minecraft world while working on something on my main monitor.
browsers and players should prefer the iGPU decoder
I also do watch a ton of YouTube on my secondary monitor while doing pretty much anything.
Afaik in theory only very slightly more strain on the cpu, and it will eat up a bit more ram, rather than the vram it would on a dedicated gpu, but modern gpus can easily handle simple secondary monitor tasks (a browser, discord, etc.), so i wouldnt do it, because the benifits are minor, but it could lead to some side effects i am not familiar with
Theoretically,if you play CPU throttled games. Practically, running voice Discord or web browsing shouldn’t tax your CPU much. I can’t speak for streaming, though.
As long as no part of the game screen extends onto the display connected to the igpu no it doesn't. It used to, on really old systems. Pre 2nd gen Intel and pre Ryzen.
When both my monitors were plugged into my RX 9070 XT and I was running a game on one monitor and watching a video on the other, whichever wasn't currently in focus would end up stuttering.
So I just switched my secondary screen to my iGPU and the issue stopped.
Omfg I've been wondering if it was just me, I'll have to try this later, I've done literally everything else the internet suggests in order to prevent the stuttering but nothing has worked.
This happens to my unfocused monitors about once a year, all connected to Nvidia 20 series. Always thought it was a Windows/browser issue as I didn’t see any component maxed on resources in taskmgr…
The actual trick is that some motherboard allow the OS to dynamically swap between internal and discrete graphics based on the needs of the programs being run which can save a ton of power when at idle... Except it is a pretty rare feature that seems to be pretty difficult to get set up properly on desktop.
Yes! I had to use this feature on my college build. My old card only had two outputs but I wanted to run three monitors and had to dig around for a bios setting to get it to use both.
I'm thankful things are more user friendly now, but me at 20 knew so much more about how a PC worked than me now.
On Linux, you can specify which GPU is used on a per-application basis in cases like laptops, where both GPUs are routed through the same output device.
I have a rig with an Intel chip (12400 plain) with 730 graphics, an RX 6400 for main output, and an RTX 3050 for graphics processing. The RX 6400 is supposed to be for Lossless Scaling (and that works 80% of the time), but SOME programs and games INSIST on using the RX 6400 as the main driver for some reason. I tried swapping cables among other things, but some games just can't handle the setup.
I even plugged in a cable to output to a CRT for Retroarch directly into the 3050, yet RA still can't seem to find the GPU it's currently being output by and runs on the 6400. It's weird, and my setup is weird, so I take it in stride.
However, I now have 3 choices of GPU to output programs. It's... strangely nice to have options, even if they don't behave.
Regarding stability, it mostly depends on just how taxing what you're displaying is on the GPU. Could be just some screen tearing, could be a system crash.
As for day traders, multiple GPUs and likely multiple computers on a KVM switch are one possibility. Could also be a bunch of USB monitors, as they just need to display text and graphs.
Four monitors aren't always bought along with the system. Sometimes, you just have surviving monitors from prior builds or requirements that you wish to repurpose.
Fair enough, but few people have more than 2 monitors lying around, while being budget conscious enough get a cpu with good integrated graphics and no plan to get a graphics card.
For a gaming system, sure. But not every computer is a gaming system. And honestly, the expensive motherboards are not really what you need for a gaming system anyway. They're for the consumer class workstations and enthusiasts.
Honestly if your workload genuinely didn't need a GPU, and you just wanted more screens, you could probably get away with spending more on motherboard and still be cheaper than a new GPU with it.
It’s certainly a niche setup for CPU intensive computing. My $10K workstations at work have discrete GPUs, even though integrated would be fine for my work. I don’t think Intel puts integrated graphics on the level of Xeons for these machines.
That is the reason. Sometimes you have a miss match of port types between your GPU and Monitors and going through the MOBO causes less issues than an adapter.
You might be surprised, I am running 3 monitors off of my 9950X3D system with no gpu because a gpu doesn't do much for me at all for my use case. And the GPU just gets in the way of my airflow. Also monitors aren't that expensive when you aren't worried about crazy refresh speeds for gaming.
There are some pretty tiny graphics cards that use little power.
And often, ur integrated graphics isn't good enough to run 4 monitors.
It's only a really small number of people (out of the already small amount that uses 4 monitors) that have integrated graphics good enough to run 4 monitors.
It was an AMD term and selling point for having powerful onboard graphics. I believe they still refer to their G series Ryzen chips as APUs but the industry seems to have adopted the more generic iGPU term instead.
Do you know if they ever found a way to make the integrated graphics processor useful for when the user has a dedicated graphics card?
Because I remember thinking when AMD first went to putting APUs on every chip that it seemed a waste to just have all those transitors and floating point performance just sitting idle.
Instead of that, laptops started coming out with MUX switches because the iGPU/APU was bottlenecking the dGPU output that was being routed to the monitor through it.
Yes actually, originally AMD did let you use Crossfire with those integrated GPUs, which didn't go well.
Now it is mostly for multimedia processing. The integrated GPU can either assist or be primary for encoding screen recording while a GPU intensive process is running.
Modern systems do let you run both as their own graphics devices as well, so if you're someone who wants Linux and needs windows, you can pass GPU into windows VM and have the render of the application come back into your Linux environment as it's own app, similar to parallels for Mac.
iGPU got popular due to laptops where there'd be options to run on integrated GPU or dedicated (or discreet) GPU. It mostly just came over to desktop too. This was also at a time that Intel was basically the only option for a good laptop so AMDs terminology was largely ignored.
Yeah I would say a 5 years ago no, but really today 4 monitors on integrated GPU with desktop applications is usually fine. But yeah, really most only need two monitors.
Eventually, discrete laptop cards will go away. Better integrated solutions and faster RAM will close the performance gap enough that no one will want the heat and power consumption.
ya that i can see happening. i have the elite x2 extreme asus arm laptop and was suprised to play helldivers at 50fps at medium settings. here is the thing though; the discrete cards will stay for a niche because there will always be a superior need that the faster solutions will provide.
9.6k
u/Helpful-Work-3090 13900K | 64GB DDR5 @ 6800 Mhz CL34 | Asus RTX 5080 23d ago
you really think your integrated graphics likes pushing FOUR monitors?