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I plan on getting a laptop next year with a second monitor. My friend told me that having multiple monitors slows down your computer. Is this true? Has anyone had any lag in performance? |
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From my benchmarks when I moved to multiple displays, it does not have a noticeable impact on performance even when benchmarking. But when it comes to gaming, it has a slight performance impact. It lowered my 3dmark score by about 20-30 points. This drop in performance was not enough to lower any of the recorded frame rates though. But there is one thing to keep in mind. Both nvidia and ATI and Intel are unable to provide consistent hardware acceleration on both displays if both displays are using 2 different acceleration types, for example, if you are watching a movie on monitor 2 and launch a game on monitor 1, the video may go black on monitor 2, requiring you to minimize the game and enter and exit and enter full screen on the video then go back into the game to enjoy both. I don't know exactly why this happens but it seems that when dealing with hardware acceleration in multiple displays, you generally have to launch the more demanding app first then launch the video or at least re-initiate it's video track Overall, you wont notice any performance drop unless you run a benchmark. PS when using an extra display, the process involved in displaying the UI will use more memory, for example in windows, explorer.exe may use an additional 8-10MB of memory for each additional monitor you add. |
