If you’re a hardcore gamer, you probably use one or more secondary screens in addition to the one your game is displayed on. Do these impact your computer’s performance in-game?
If we can at first glance suspect that using several screens reduces the performance of your PC, the famous youtubeur Linus Tech Tips wanted to check what it really was. The latter compared the performance of a computer using one screen and multiple screens in various video games.
At 1080p on Red Dead Redemption 2, the computer with a screen manages to average 202 FPS. However, we notice a drop in performance of about 1% when a second screen is connected, and 2% when the PC uses a total of 4 screens. If this difference may seem quite small, the problem is ultimately more complex.
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Using multiple screens reduces your in-game performance
On Total War Warhammer 3, the youtuber loses no less than 7% of performance by connecting several screens, and almost 3% on Cyberpunk 2077. Things get tougher with 4K definition screens, since this consumes more performance, unsurprisingly. The computer loses 7% performance with 4 4K screens on Cyberpunk 2077 and Red Dead Redemption 2. Obviously, the more powerful your PC is, the less you will feel this difference, but only few gamers can afford the graphics cards the most powerful on the market.
Note however that this drop in FPS is not systematic. Indeed, if you only display a fixed page on your secondary screen, such as the Windows desktop or an Internet page, this will not impact your in-game performance. This is stored in the system memory and therefore does not use the resources of your graphics card.
However, if you are displaying dynamic content, such as a video, the graphics card will have to use some of its performance to display it, and therefore reduce your FPS in game. If you game while using multiple screens you want to maximize PC performance, we therefore advise you not to display anything dynamic on the secondary screens.