Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Extra Monitors DO Hurt Your Gaming Performance”.
It used to be that two monitors was only for business users, but these days, whether you’re a worker, a gamer, a streamer, multiple monitors have gone from being a luxury. To being almost essential, I mean you know who you are with the stream playing during your Zoom meeting or the latest Mr B Shenanigans next to that boring tutorial that you’re really watching. But what if I told you that there’s a dark side to your harmless little habit? That’S right! Your extra monitors are costing you more than just desk space and power consumption. I am talking about performance. How much well the general consensus is that that’s not really enough to matter, but considering the lengths that Gamers will go for another three frames per second, I disagree. So we set the labs team loose to settle this debate once and for all. Is this? Why you’re stuck at Silver two? Is this? Why you can’t get sponsored by origin PC this August, get up to a thousand dollars off origin, PC’s 30 Series Laptops 200 off their desktops and 100 bucks off their 40 Series. Laptops learn more using the link below that’s a lot of discount to cover all our bases. The labs team needed a lot of gear, a high-end test bench, a variety of popular games and four displays that we then ran at either 1080P or 4K.
They then set out to ensure that the physical displays were the only variable, which is how we ended up with a pretty unusual starting config, three edge browser windows, each running the same 4K YouTube video. In the background. With our game out front, we recorded performance shut down. The system plugged in a second monitor dragged one of our background videos over to the secondary, monitor and re-ran the test. Then, for you Mega taskers out there, we did the same thing, but with four displays and right out of the gate, the results were pretty shocking at 1080p, even with all four monitors in use. This only cost us one percent performance in Red Dead Redemption 2, which is fantastic Case Closed uh. You should keep all your monitors, maybe buy a few more we’re gon na have some nice ones Linked In the video description, but wait a second.
That’S a lot of bar left down there. Ah, okay, that’s because the story is far from over. In that same scenario, we lost nearly seven percent of our performance in total Warhammer 3, with cyberpunk 2077 Landing in the middle at just over three percent.
Obviously these aren’t earth-shattering numbers and the impact is lower if you only run two displays rather than four, but I was still surprised by how significant the performance impact was, and this is on a top of the line machine and it gets worse. I mean given that 4K is literally four times the pixel count of a 1080p display. It probably won’t surprise you much that our performance loss was even more substantial. Total Warhammer 3 actually improved going down to five percent, but red dead and cyberpunk shot up to around seven percent. If we had video playback running on our three extra screens, the real story, though, is that this doesn’t just apply to your average frame rates. Where, realistically, in most of these games, you can probably spare a few FPS.
It also applies to your one percent lows: the situations where eight to nine percent difference could be noticeable as hitching or additional stutter in your gameplay. Now, In fairness, this is an extreme example and most people aren’t going to be running three full screen video instances while they game, but on the other hand, I don’t think it’s entirely unrealistic either. I streamer, for example, could easily have their game running here. Their OBS preview over here their live twitch feed over here and maybe a let’s play or a walkthrough running on a fourth display and the lower the performance of your PC, the more you’re going to feel this difference I mean even a pro might struggle to notice 200 FPS versus 220 FPS, but 30 versus 33, when you’re feeling those dips, that’s something just about anyone could feel even if they’re not sure what’s off about. It is all interesting, but doesn’t answer why this is happening to find that out. We re-ran our tests in 4k, but this time without the video playback and you might think well obviously outputting those 8.3 million pixels per display is going to cost us something.
But as it turns out, that’s just not the case. Our game benchmarks actually came back either the same as if we were on a single monitor or about one FPS faster, which is weird but low enough to chalk it up to run to run variants. So, what’s the catch then pushing more pixels means our computer is working harder? Doesn’T it yes, but also? No, when you have a static image, that’s just sitting on the screen in Windows. It gets stored in system memory when a window gets dragged to a new position. It gets redrawn as needed, but if the contents of that screen need to be changing all that optimization goes out the window watch this I’m going to move around the sign up sheet for our stubby screwdriver launch here by the way, be the first to know sign Up and don’t miss it got that Linked In the video description. I shake it around and we see an immediate spike in 3D GPU usage, but then I stop and Boop away.
Then, if I want to kick things up, a notch, rendering animations or decoding a video will put additional load on the GPU. Oh like this, the LTT deskpad configurator, where you can put in the size of your desk and what kind of desktop. Oh, look at that usage yikes so again In fairness, that’s a little unrealistic! So why don’t we just go with something, that’s closer to our test and play back a video where 3D usage, not so bad, but video decode starts to pop off you’re gon na see this depending on the load. There will be some usage, it’s not that much and it’s mostly not on the parts of the GPU that your 3D games rely on, but it obviously is something.
Of course. This isn’t the first time we’ve learned this lesson years ago. If you wanted to stream to Twitter. Excuse me kick. The best option was to use a second computer to capture and encode your stream, but that all changed when Nvidia introduced, nvank and envy deck, which offload encoding and decoding tasks to Dedicated Hardware on their gpus. It was a game changer, and it has enabled more than just streaming from a single PC. Remote Play, for example, relies heavily on nvank and envy deck. However, their promise that with decoding and encoding, offloaded the graphics engine and the CPU are free for other operations wasn’t entirely true.
Nvank has always come with a measurable hit to in-game Performance and, as we’ve seen here today, this is also true for decoding and for running extra displays, even if it’s as small as reallocating the power budget, that’s needed to fire up those other functional units on the Gpu, it will cost you something, however, even as a one monitor guy, both at home and at work, I am not going to tell you to throw away your secondary display for all, but the most competitive Gamers out there. The benefits of multi-monitor probably far outweigh the drawbacks, however, as a one monitor guy, even if you’re not worried about the performance loss you’ve seen here today, there are some reasons that I do prefer. A single screen there’s less to troubleshoot. When video issues arise, it requires less power and less cable management and, most importantly for me for gaming, I find it more immersive. Not only can you Dive Right In without a second monitor, stealing you away through your peripheral vision, but as someone who really needs a break when I take time to game, I appreciate that I never see notifications popping up on that other screen. Of course, none of that makes a difference for you if you need to have twitch chat up or whatever else so for those of you who are looking for a second monitor, it is true by the way we do have some displays linked down below, and I Want to especially shout out Sony for providing the displays that the lab used for our testing. It’S a super nice one. We did a full short circuit video and we’re going to have that one linked down below, along with some other affordable and more premium options. We’Re going to also have a link to our sponsor keeper. One of the most important steps to take with personal cyber security is proper password safety. The majority of security breaches are the result of human error and weak or stolen passwords are big contributors. We learned that the hard way we’ll keep our security lets you manage and track all of your passwords and private information.
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