Dual display: Use 980 or IGP for second monitor

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ScArE2100

Limp Gawd
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Jan 22, 2004
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My friend just got a 980 and wants to use it for gaming on his primary display, but instead of using another output from the 980 to power his secondary display (for watching netflix) he wants to use the integrated GPU in his i5 to power the second display.

1) Is this possible? Can you even enable the IGP w/ a PCI Express graphics card?
2) If it is possible, is there any benefit from this?
3) Is there anything I'm missing?
 
It depends on the motherboard. Also to some extent the operating system (or really the available drivers and operating system).

There are various pros/cons which will be situational (including hardware) dependent.
 
I believe that it is possible however I don't think that the 980 will have any issues driving two monitors and you can still place the game on one monitor while playing netflix on another by playing in windowed mode.
 
Assuming the motherboard chipset supports it (if the motherboard has a hdmi or dvi out built in) it is certainly possible.

I'd run it off the 980 first and do some benching. Move to the igpu if your see any significant performance impact.

Cant see why you'd want to watch a movie and game at the same time unless you are playing some mmorpg where you have lots of downtime....
 
ScArE2100 said:
My friend just got a 980 and wants to use it for gaming on his primary display, but instead of using another output from the 980 to power his secondary display (for watching netflix) he wants to use the integrated GPU in his i5 to power the second display.

1) Is this possible? Can you even enable the IGP w/ a PCI Express graphics card?
2) If it is possible, is there any benefit from this?
3) Is there anything I'm missing?
Click to expand...

I tried this exact setup myself recently, and so I'll share my experience...

1) On my Asus z87 Maximus Hero6 with latest bios it is most certainly possible.
2) Yes - you can also take advantage of quicksync to fast encode h264 encodes with an app like handbrake.
3) Yes, actually, funnily enough it still uses the 980 to render. What? Yeah, so I run a windowed 3D app on my primary and note the framerate, but when I drag it to the other display (that is most definitely connected to the motherboard and not 980) the framerate still renders the same, implying it's actually using the 980 still, just physically connected to the motherboard hdmi port. I think the Asus has some Lucid tech on it that allows this, so I'd expect it's not possible for all motherboards

So it seems you don't actually gain any benefit from reduced overhead on your primary, like you'd expect, but actually LOSE performance since rather than the output going straight out of your gcard, it has to now go through the 'system' somehow to get out of the onboard hdmi port. I didn't bench it, but I'd bet money on the performance being worse.

And worse still, probably overclock related, but I started getting crashes every day when I changed my config to this (4790k@5ghz so not surprised!)


Overall, I decided it wasn't worth it due to crashing. The only real advantage was access to quicksync, but that's not a big deal for me and is worse quality than a proper software solution anyway, just faster.

Hope that's useful. :cool:
 
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