It used to be that two monitors was only for business users. [music]
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 [music] 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?
[laughter] 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. [music] Is this why you're
stuck at Silver 2? Is this why you can't
get sponsored by Origin PC? This August, get up to $1,000 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 reran 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 1% 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
going to 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 cuz the story is
far from over. In that same scenario, we lost nearly 7% of our performance in
Total Warhammer 3 with Cyberpunk 2077
landing in the middle at just over 3%.
Obviously, these aren't earthshattering 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 War Warhammer 3
actually improved going down to 5%. [music] But Red Dead and Cyberpunk shot
up to around 7% 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 [music] frame rates where realistically in most of
these games you can probably spare a few FPS. It also applies to your 1% lows,
the situations where 8 to 9% difference
could be noticeable as hitching or additional stutter in your gameplay.
[music] 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. A 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 [music] 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, which is all interesting, but
doesn't answer why this is happening. To find that out, we reran 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 1
FPS faster, which [music] is weird, but low enough to chalk it up to runto-run
variance. 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 signup sheet
for our stubby screwdriver launch here. By the way, be the [music] 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, it goes away. [music] 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 desk pad configurator
where you can put in the size of your desk and what kind of deskpad. Oh, look
at that usage. Yikes. Though 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 going to 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 TW, 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 Envank and NVEC which offload encoding
and decoding tasks to dedicated hardware on their GPUs. It was a gamecher [music]
and it has enabled more than just streaming from a single PC. Remote play
for example relies heavily on Envank and Nv. [music]
However, their promise that with decoding and encoding offloaded, the
graphics engine and the CPU are free for other operations wasn't entirely true.
Envank has always come with a measurable hit to in-game performance. [music]
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 multimonitor 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. [music]
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 ShortCircuit video and we're going
to have that one linked down below along with some other affordable and more
[music] premium options. If you enjoyed this video, make sure to check out the
one where we explored motherboard performance with 10 different
motherboards and one CPU. Once again, I
think the results [music] might surprise