Questions about dual monitors and performance

[Mr. LL]

I bought a Radeon 6950 and I think you can use dual monitors if you want. If I were to use the HDMI and the DVI ports with a 23" and 22" monitor, making the 23" my primary. When I play a game would it just disable the second monitor and would it cause any performance hit having two monitors even if one is disabled or turned off? The purpose of dual monitors for me is work related not for playing games I just want to make sure it doesn't hit my GPU.

Also, if you want to use something like eagle eye or whatever it's called so you can use three monitors in a game does that require two video cards or can you use three ports on one card? And does it hit GPU performance pretty bad?

Also, when looking at 23" does it matter if it uses a DVI or HDMI plug other than sound with the HDMI? Is there a loss of dusplay quality using DVI instead of HDMI?

Thanks,

 

[Puddle Jumper]

I bought a Radeon 6950 and I think you can use dual monitors if you want. If I were to use the HDMI and the DVI ports with a 23" and 22" monitor, making the 23" my primary. When I play a game would it just disable the second monitor and would it cause any performance hit having two monitors even if one is disabled or turned off? The purpose of dual monitors for me is work related not for playing games I just want to make sure it doesn't hit my GPU.

Also, if you want to use something like eagle eye or whatever it's called so you can use three monitors in a game does that require two video cards or can you use three ports on one card? And does it hit GPU performance pretty bad?

Also, when looking at 23" does it matter if it uses a DVI or HDMI plug other than sound with the HDMI? Is there a loss of dusplay quality using DVI instead of HDMI?

Thanks,

When you are playing a game on dual monitors or triple monitors the game won't have any effect on the extra monitors, they will display whatever they had up before you started the game. Some games will black out the extra displays but that is becoming less common. I have never noticed any performance hit running multiple monitors while gaming.

Eyefinity is what you are thinking of for triple monitor gaming and it has some prerequisites. The main one is all three monitors must have the exact same resolution for it to work and for the best results they should all be the same size as well. You can run eyefinity off of a single video card however one monitor must be connected to a dsiplayport output (you can use an active displayport to dvi adapter if your monitor does not have displayport). Eyefinity does cause a performance hit because you are running at 3x the resolution of a single display setup, for example 5760x1080 instead of 1920x1080. There is no differnce in picture quality between DVI and HDMI

Here is one of the adapters needed for eyefinity
Newegg.com - SAPPHIRE Active DisplayPort Adapter 100924 DisplayPort to DVI Interface

 

[Mr. LL]

Will it work if you manually adjust the resolution of all the monitors to match or do they have to be the same physical size? Like could I have a 23" and two 22" monitors as long as they are all set to 1680 x 1050? I know it's not ideal and this is just something I might do later on, for now I am mainly concerned about adding another monitor and would like to upgrade to a 23" screen.

 

[baron5]

Yes you can run Eyefinity with monitors of different size, as long as they are both set to the same resolution. So if you grab a 23" you can run it with your 22" at 1680x1050 for eyefinity if you wish.