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Tip for Multi-monitor users


sunryze

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I play games on Windows 7. I notice that sometimes the games lag and I found the cause.

With all 3 of my monitors enabled, the game lags.

With the two good ones enabled, the game doesn't lag.

With one monitor, the game runs great.

With one good and one bad one, the game lags.

My monitor setup is:

LEFT = Acer P205H (60hz 900p)
MIDDLE = Acer SB220Q (75hz 1080p)
RIGHT = Acer SB220Q (75hz 1080p)

Is there a way to fix this other than disabling the monitor when playing games? Disabling DWM (using basic) fixes it as well.

Edited by Tonny52
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What if you turn off the extra monitor(s) using an app like ClickMonitorDDC instead of disabling? Usually I use this cmd line to turn off my secondary display via software-only:

ClickMonitorDDC_7_0.exe <name of monitor listed in ClickMonitorDDC app> x

The same command turns it on again. Does that improve your gaming performance?

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Not something I know anything about from personal experience but plenty of information out there suggesting explanations for this problem.

The most obvious one is you're exceeding your GPUs performance capacity. But the explanation that seems to fit the information provided is that mixing monitors with different refresh rates can cause lag. So that 60Hz 900p ACER (the bad one?) may be the cause and if you had three identical ones there would be no problem.

However without that third identical one to to test the theory you can't prove it.

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On 2/8/2021 at 8:00 AM, UCyborg said:

Windows 7's DWM simply doesn't handle mixed refresh rates properly. If you want all 3 monitors active at once, all of them must run at the same refresh rate.

I don't have problems with my monitor setup

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On my end, if I put the second screen to 75 Hz while keeping the first at 59 Hz, things are fine on the first screen, but anything placed on the second one is laggy. If only second screen is active, it's fine, likewise if both are at 59/60 Hz (or 75 Hz), everything is smooth regardless of which screen a particular application occupies.

Edited by UCyborg
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On 2/8/2021 at 6:50 AM, xpclient said:

What if you turn off the extra monitor(s) using an app like ClickMonitorDDC instead of disabling? Usually I use this cmd line to turn off my secondary display via software-only:

ClickMonitorDDC_7_0.exe <name of monitor listed in ClickMonitorDDC app> x

The same command turns it on again. Does that improve your gaming performance?

Just tried this program and regardless of that it is a really nice program, all my monitor support DDC including the one from 2010. 

On 2/8/2021 at 8:14 AM, WalksInSilence said:

Not something I know anything about from personal experience but plenty of information out there suggesting explanations for this problem.

The most obvious one is you're exceeding your GPUs performance capacity. But the explanation that seems to fit the information provided is that mixing monitors with different refresh rates can cause lag. So that 60Hz 900p ACER (the bad one?) may be the cause and if you had three identical ones there would be no problem.

However without that third identical one to to test the theory you can't prove it.

My GPU is pretty powerful (eql RTX 2070) so I am not sure this would be the cause. I think 7 Aero keeps refreshing on the 60hz monitor. With Vsync on in Minecraft, I can notice that without anything on the monitor, I get 75FPS. With something on the monitor, I get 60FPS.

On 2/8/2021 at 9:00 AM, UCyborg said:

Windows 7's DWM simply doesn't handle mixed refresh rates properly. If you want all 3 monitors active at once, all of them must run at the same refresh rate.

I may be able to use the AMD radeon software to force the monitor to run at 75hz, ive done it before.

5 hours ago, asdf2345 said:

I have a 1440p 144hz monitor, a 1440p 60hz monitor, and a 1080p 60hz monitor.

How is this working fine? 

6 minutes ago, UCyborg said:

On my end, if I put the second screen to 75 Hz while keeping the first at 59 Hz, things are fine on the first screen, but anything placed on the second one is laggy. If only second screen is active, it's fine, likewise if both are at 59/60 Hz, everything is smooth regardless of which screen a particular application occupies.

In my case, anything that gets put on the second monitor that is the lowest refresh rate, it slows down all the other monitors, which also for some reason causes web browsers and electron apps to become extremely laggy. With Basic, this problem doesn't exist.

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Are you saying the slowdown occurs only if some application is on the slow monitor, but not otherwise? That'd be strange, because AFAIK, DWM refreshes at the speed of the slowest monitor, so the slow monitor always bogs all the others down.

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5 minutes ago, Tonny52 said:

In my case, anything that gets put on the second monitor that is the lowest refresh rate, it slows down all the other monitors, which also for some reason causes web browsers and electron apps to become extremely laggy. With Basic, this problem doesn't exist.

In my case, I usually have a browser on my 60hz 1080p browser maximized all the time, sometimes also playing a video

While this is the case, I don't notice anything being laggy, other than Gecko being Gecko. I notice some things have really fluid animations on the 144hz monitor with the other monitors connected, and one of those things is a Chromium wrapper

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15 minutes ago, UCyborg said:

Are you saying the slowdown occurs only if some application is on the slow monitor, but not otherwise? That'd be strange, because AFAIK, DWM refreshes at the speed of the slowest monitor, so the slow monitor always bogs all the others down.

With nothing on this monitor, windows moving is fine. With something on it, the thing on it is extremely laggy and other windows are laggy as well.

12 minutes ago, asdf2345 said:

In my case, I usually have a browser on my 60hz 1080p browser maximized all the time, sometimes also playing a video

While this is the case, I don't notice anything being laggy, other than Gecko being Gecko. I notice some things have really fluid animations on the 144hz monitor with the other monitors connected, and one of those things is a Chromium wrapper

I do the same thing and whenever that is the case with aero ON, games, Discord, and the browser will lag badly. With aero off however (Basic or Classic) Discord, Games and the browser runs perfect and snappy. 

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1 minute ago, Tonny52 said:

With nothing on this monitor, windows moving is fine. With something on it, the thing on it is extremely laggy and other windows are laggy as well.

I do the same thing and whenever that is the case with aero ON, games, Discord, and the browser will lag badly. With aero off however (Basic or Classic) Discord, Games and the browser runs perfect and snappy. 

Guess I'll just have to try regular 7

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1 minute ago, asdf2345 said:

Guess I'll just have to try regular 7

A consideration though is my GPU drivers. AMD drivers suck badly for every OS except for the open source ones on Linux and macOS. I have an older 1050 Ti that I will try out and see how that goes. I've been meaning to sell my current AMD card anyway.

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