Gaming + HDTV (Dual LCD screens)

[dpazza]

Hi,

I've been looking into having a dual monitor setup one of the scenarios would be to use HDTV via TV card on one screen while gaming on the other screen. My question is since the TV uses the graphics card to display the image does this give you much of a performance hit if playing the latest in FPS games such as FEAR, HL2 etc?

If it is a significant performance hit in that scenario do they make a HDTV card with its own output to the monitor so as to avoid using the graphic card's performance at all?

I like the idea of dual screens and gaming on one and TV on the other but since GPU performance is at a premium cost if it’s using the GPU used for gaming then id rather look into other options like a HD set top box connected direct to the monitor.

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

 

[Bruxbox]

I can't answer you with specific performance indicators like FPS.

However, I have had dual monitors setup with my Windows Media Center box. One was a 30" LCD TV panel connected via DVI, and a 17" wide screen pc flat panel monitor also connected via VGA.

I had HD TV running on the 30" and a HalfLife2 session running on the 17".

Obviously, the pc game takes up more pc resouces than the HD tv. The CPU usage for the HD tv was about 5%. It is low because HD tv signals are all digital, and most processing, if any, is done on the tuner card, and mostly what's going on is recording on the hard drive (for time shifting).

The graphics card is very important for pc gaming, as you say. So, you have a pretty good one.

I'm not aware of a TV tuner card that can output directly to the computer monitor, although I remember reading about one that was sold with a separate daughter card with a DVI output port. Can't remember the model.

Lastly, how about using a dual core processor?

 

[Heyyou27]

That's interesting. I can do it with Doom3 because it's runs at 1280x1024; the native resolution of both monitors. However when I try to do it with F.E.A.R., media center blacks out and won't display. This having to do with the resolution change to 1280x960.