Will a second monitor degrade my FPS in games?

[kyanite]

CPU: i5 2500k @ 4.5Ghz
GPU: XFX ATI HD5770
Two 19" monitors both running 1440x900.

Hey guys,
Basically, I will have one main monitor (primary) for games etc and general use, and another which will come in handy when i'm doing stuff like working on a website and refreshing etc.

When I play games, I only want games to run on my primary monitor.
I'm not sure what will happen to my secondary monitor when I'm playing games, but my question is if i'm playing games on one monitor, will I have less fps due to having a second monitor enabled doing nothing?

Thanks

NOTE: I do NOT want the game to spread across the two monitors. The game will only be on one monitor.

 

[beltzy]

Good question. Your game will come up on your primary screen. The secondary screen will still display whatever it normally displays. You will see a very slightly lesser performance level in your game because your card is still pushing the pixels on the second screen. That being said, the second screen doesn't have any 3d rendering on it so it's not a huge hit.

I have a few friends that run a second screen with either a website, music player, performance monitoring tool (afterburner, etc) running on it while they game. It can be a pretty good quality of life option.

 

[bucknutty]

I have a second screen and while gaming it shows my steam friends list, core temp, afterburner, some times vent, some times an IE winodw, or even an AVI playing in VLC. I dont see any performance differance with the second screen on or off.

I think video ram might be a factor here. Keep in mind your second monitor is still using video ram even if it is not running the game. I have a gtx 470 with 1280MBs. A 512 card might see a performance hit, but I doubt it.

 

[jitpublisher]

It will make no difference on how your games run simply by enabling the second screen, the card is doing the work anyway whether you are taking advantage of using a second screen or not.

What will make a difference though is the programs you are running on the second screen while gaming on the first. If you just have something like a chat box open, simple apps, no big deal. If you are trying to do something like encode video at the same time, of course you may see some slowdowns, but it has nothing to do with the display or GPU, (unless you are doing like 3D modeling) its how hard you are working the rest of your hardware in the background.