Can a single GTX 680 game with two large displays?

kaliyama

Hi everybody,
I have an apple 27" monitor now. I'm thinking about getting a second monitor - I would get a second apple, but my GTX only has one displayport and trying to convert from minidp male to HDMI male doesn't seem doable in one adapter. I'm instead looking at one of the 30" dell ultrasharps. Has anybody used one? Would I need to get a second video card to run games across both screens? If so I think i'm better off getting a smaller second monitor and running games only on one screen.

Dehumanized

It's really all about overall resolution. The physical size of the monitor doesn't much matter, nor does the number of monitors. Just the number of pixels being pushed. There's no reason why you couldn't add a second monitor to your system and play a game on that. You might need to lower the pretties to maintain a playable framerate, depending on the game, and some games might not be flexible enough about resolution settings to allow for a wider aspect ratio..

TPSou

I run two screens on my GTX 550 Ti so it's definitely doable. Things like WOW work brilliantly with it, and I can run taxing games like Skyrim with my desktop open on the other screen without much of a FPS penalty.

TPSou

Accidental double post.

Donovan Puppyfucker

Keep in mind, it's a GTX 680. Not exactly lacking in the horsepower department. It should be able to run two monitors pretty easily, but on more taxing games at higher resolutions, you will see framerates go down. It's an unavoidable part of trying to push double (probably) the pixels. It's like putting the engine out of a Lamborghini into a big heavy saloon car - it'll still rip shit up, just maybe not be quite as fast as before.

Soggybiscuit

kaliyama wrote: »

Hi everybody,
I have an apple 27" monitor now. I'm thinking about getting a second monitor - I would get a second apple, but my GTX only has one displayport and trying to convert from minidp male to HDMI male doesn't seem doable in one adapter. I'm instead looking at one of the 30" dell ultrasharps. Has anybody used one? Would I need to get a second video card to run games across both screens? If so I think i'm better off getting a smaller second monitor and running games only on one screen.

If you have the 4GB model, you will be okay. If you have the 2GB model, you will start bumping in to the limit of your video card's capabilities. For example, Crysis 2 on Ultra everything @ 2560x1600 uses about 2.5-2.8 GB of VRAM. Mind you I am running two cards in SLI, but I had 2 2GB cards before and my framerate would start dropping during heavy fighting. I had to drop quality off to keep the game playable. As far as horsepower goes, it takes 2 cards to push 75-80 FPS with everything on ultra (system is a 3770k @ 4.6GHz, 32 GB DDR3 RAM @ 1866 MHz, and 2 x EVGA GTX680 classifieds)

Best solution here is to download a program that will let you see how much VRAM you are using while gaming (EVGA Precision X is one example) and make observations.