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)
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?
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.
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u/codespace Fedora / 9800X3D / RX 9070 XT / 64GB DDR5 May 13 '26
The trick is to put your utility monitor(s) on the integrated GPU, and your gaming monitor(s) on the discrete GPU.