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As a multiple monitor guy: I’m just gonna ignore this

Thank you linus, I will run my other monitors in 240p now :)

Ill save you 10 mins, you only really lose 1-2 fps

This is the stuff I am stoked to see more data of. I have 3 monitors and a few follow-up questions related to this subject. If I have an older high refresh rate monitor with g-sync does that hurt my performance on my primary gaming monitor since the GPU is trying to sync with more than one g-sync module? Would it be best to disable G-sync in the monitor? If I set my IGPU to run other applications like Chromes hardware acceleration, discord, etc. How does that affect things? How about If I have extra monitors set to a higher fresh rate? I have a 60hz tv, a 144hz side monitor, and a 175hz primary monitor for gaming. Is it best practice to set the monitors I am not using for gaming to 60hz? Does it not affect it? How about color depth differences, mixing HDR and non-HDR, 10-bit color, etc? I am very excited for more lab data.

Interestingly, you can actually get an FPS boost with a monitor on a gaming laptop, as most HDMI ports connect directly to the dGPU and bypass the iGPU. Many screens with optimus go iGPU > dGPU, so the integrated graphics act as a bottleneck. This is less important these days with the MUX switch becomming more common, but it's still a nice trick.

I actually thought a second monitor would have a far larger impact on your in game performance, it’s really nice to know in most cases it’s fairly negligible.

the twitch / kick joke at around 6:50 absolutely destroyed me, soo funny

Most people nowdays use 2 monitors, the second monitor beeing a cheap 60hz. Running 2 monitors at different refresh rates creates major stutters and jerky motion when both monitors are simultaneously displaying motion. Now I heard an windows update partially fixed the problem. You can make a video about this issue will be very interesting seeing the results

It's worth mentioning that having a multi-monitor set-up doesn't REQUIRE you to use all of your available monitors in tandem. Sometimes you can just turn on only your main monitor and chill that way.

I believe it would be interesting to see how much difference using iGPU or a second GPU for secondary monitors would make.

1:20 Lol, I was literally just watching Viva la Dirt Leage right before this. 😂

honestly, I feel like two monitors is necessary nowadays, especially when games don’t let you dashboard to go into like discord or something without breaking the game to a point where you need to restart it

Would like to see a deeper dive into this kind of testing. HDMI vs DP, 60 fps refresh vs a higher one etc

im suprised you guys didnt test to see how much the input lag gets worsened for each monitor getting added, and to see if plugging the main monitor into the gpu for gaming and all the secondary and so on monitors into the integrated gpu for non gaming tasks will help with the peformance. i hope you guys will make another video addressing these issues.

Everyone should Unsubscribe from this channel until they release an apology video about gamers nexus and hardware unboxed. I just unsubscribed and you should do they same if you value honestly in your product reviews. Quit rushing your content willingly making errors and still releasing it to the public. Very disingenuous numbers and takes in LTT videos we the content consumers must hold them accountable.

If your computer is having performance issues from having 2 monitors, I'm pretty sure your computer has much bigger issues

The high end system was used and while the results were surprising to see how minimal this impacts the performance I would also how loved to see how the effects are with the mid and low end system. But those who buy low or mid range pc might not be using multiple 4k monitors since 4k monitors do cost a lot and depending on the GPU they might have to opt for display through igpu and not through the GPU. This could have been a longer video with more variation in setup as this is a interesting topic to know about more.

Would've been nice to also include the test on lower end hardware, maybe something like a 2060 to see what the difference would be there

What would be cool is seeing this effect on laptops as many of may use gaming laptops to work or complete our school/college qssignments and then come home and plug monitor(s) in to play using additional accessories. I also think that this will vary a lot based on the gpu for lets say a 3060 or a 4060 or whatever other gpus are currently in use by the gaming community

I don't watch this video willing to remove my other monitor I am just watching to see how bad my performance is effected.

Having the extra real estate is worth more to me than a couple of FPS. BTW - I love that you had VLDL on the lab's monitors

Would be cool to test response time with different monitors connected (diff. refresh rate and resolutions) to see if having something like main 165hz 1440p with a 2nd 60hz 1080p would alter performance or response time.

One thing you didn’t mention is multi device setups. I have 3 laptops, none of which is particularly powerful, but a combination of software like Synergy, networking, and a video capture device make them feel like one quite capable multi-tasking monster. And also it’s cool that I have Linux, Windows, and MacOS all working together and each typically does what it’s best at. The MacBook Air records, streams, and edits, the HP has midrange AMD graphics and a ton of RAM, and the touchscreen goes between being a streamdeck-like launcher and a dedicated SSH terminal. Plus it also runs servers on the local network. Maybe it’s niche, but it seems like people should know it is completely viable to have a streaming / recording setup where one machine is the multi tasker running most of the monitors and handling the stream, while another machine just handles gaming. This is even nice that you can have a separate keyboard and mouse for say like chat without leaving the game and potentially bugging out the cursor

You didn't mention the additional VRAM usage that comes from additional monitors. Even if you're not running anything on the other monitors and they are just chilling on the desktop, their additional VRAM usage can be significant if you're trying to play one of the newer VRAM hungry games on an 8GB GPU. This is the main reason I started turning off my 2nd monitor while playing heavy games and not the FPS loss.

I would've loved to see an exploration on how this impacts lower end systems. A few years ago I used to run triple monitors off an RX 480 4GB and the performance increase I got from removing one of my monitors was SIGNIFICANT. I don't remember any exact numbers but there was a big jump in less demanding games like Minecraft, allowing me to finally use shaders, and heavier games went from noticeably stuttery to very smooth, sometimes even almost doubling FPS, like it did in R6 Siege, where I went from low 30s to high 40s and even 50s.

Viva La Dirt League! Nice.. Thanks for finally covering this topic -- I once asked some former engineers who worked on DirectX at MS, and they didn't seem to have a high-confidence explanation of how things like v-sync and g-sync work, with multi-mon (and potentially with monitors fused together at the driver level, via Eyefinity/Surround). And how it intersects with things like the Win10 "FSO" (fullscreen-optimizations). There's a lot of confusion, and it's very hard to measure display latency, with any certainty or precision.

If you feel you need the extra performance in certain games or whatever else just temporarily turn off the second monitor and turn it on when you need it again.

I would really like to see them test this, but have the side monitor plugged into another (presumably older and less powerful) gpu. Thats how I run my setup and I feel that it works quite well.

The thing is, if you have a second monitor, you don't have to use it all the time. It's just amazingly useful when you do need it.

As a gamer, I despair at knowing I'm sacrificing performance. But as a person that watches LTT on my second monitor, AIN'T NO WAY I'M GIVING THAT UP!

I wouldnt put too much stock in most anything these guys say. They routinely make errors while testing and seem to be more concerned with selling 75 dollar plastic screwdrivers than actually being a consumer advocate.

just watched this with recent events of accuracy issues fresh in my mind and I found the "Why" section very much lacking.The Labs data is nice, but was unfocussed. We already know that a powerful PC can take the hit of a few FPS and nobody cares, but what Labs should have been looking at here is if the Game is running CPU bound, or GPU bound and draw conclusions based on that. And most troubling for me, you didn't mention or look at VRAM usage at all. If you look at recent titles like Diablo4 or others, that can fully saturate your VRAM after extended play, this will impact your performance VERY significantly. You should have looked at how a 4k Wallpaper has to be stored in Video Memory uncompressed, easily adding up to 200MB to the memory, which is almost a Gigabyte in your 4 screen scenario. In conclusion, I would love if you could spend a bit more time on this in a future video and test with and without 4k/8k wallpapers and have an eye on the Vram in general. I personally do a lot on my machine, not just gaming and I regularly see my 16GB VRAM fully used and yes, I have 3 4k displays that are busy with chats and stats and websites that aren't static. That will impact systems with only 1 monitor as well of course, but that is actually testable by Labs. Thank you for trying to be better.

1:21 HOLY CRAP THAT'S VIVA LA DIRT LEAGUE ON THE TEST SCREENS (Epic NPC Man series) 😂 I'm so frickin happy 🤣

At 1:55 You have Viva La Dirt League up on three monitors!! Nice!!

I can't imagine how any future reviews of Noctua products can be trusted coming from a business that has partnered with Noctua to sell a cross-branded product. "Trust me bro." just ain't gonna cut it.

another thing about multi monitor setups (on windows) is that borderless full screen applications can have frametime issues due to the dwm only having one compositor for all monitors. before i think w10 version 2004, it used to be even worse. if there was ANY activity on your secondary monitors, the frame rate of your differing refresh rate monitors would suffer. these issues i brought up happen only if the refresh rates of your monitors aren't exactly the same as far as i can tell.

This was quite unexpected, I never thought some games might affect the multi-monitor setup that much. I would also love to see this experiment on Linux with a few more variations (e.g. Proton and native titles, Wayland/Xorg etc.) Keep up great quality!

Out of curiosity, how does the performance change if the secondary monitors are connected to the IGPU (integrated graphics) of the CPU?

0:27 NOT HIM PLUGGING IT INTO THE MOBO😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

Data is incomplete and inaccurate monkey testing

I feel like its important to clarify that it's not because you have more monitors plugged in but what you are doing on those monitors - having a windowed game along with a video playing on a single ultrawide will have the same effect. If your GPU is slow/old enough you will notice a performance impact just from having multiple monitors attached due to limited bandwidth. When I want to be immersed in a game I just turn my 3 side monitors off.

Even if I lost upwards of 5% of my game's performance, there's no way I'm giving up my triple monitor setup. I'll sooner add a fourth screen, a big 4K TV for media viewing, than I will discard a single monitor! >:U But, it's fun to know what the difference may be anyways, inconsequential as it may be.

If you're someone struggling with having a short attention span and you use dual monitors try switching back to using single monitor. It personally really helped me at getting back the ability to focus on just one thing for longer periods of time without constantly checking discord or some other crap every 3 minutes

If you're going to play competitive games, having just 2 monitors with something running in the background will make your input lag go up very much. You want the minium input lag you can have while playing these games.

Rather have a little lower performance than not having 3 monitors. That being said, i wonder if i can just add another small grafics card that handles the other 2 monitors

I've used a 3 monitor setup at work for a very long time and now that I mostly work at home that setup has come home. I did some searching for a monitor that could easily handle switching from landscape to portrait as reading code for debugging is one of those times portrait is wonderful. There are some games, looking at you Elite Dangerous, that natively support multiple monitors and it makes immersion so much better.

I can't be bothered to spend 10 minutes watching this. I'm just going to follow my belief, since I've not tested this, that using multiple monitors has no impact.

Yooo, love that you guys were streaming VLDL! They’re really underrated!

I don't know why I'm surprised at this point... Seeing VLDL videos playing on the monotors was something I did not expect to see. Cool!

Love your recent tests, LMG, though I find the conclusion here to be a bit incomplete. It would be nice to see more in depth how extra monitors affect the overall system delays like input lag and render consistency. Personally I've always noticed that something was off whenever using the second monitor. Even though the frames are very similar, the feeling is way different. Examples of tests: Timings + fps consistency when only 1 monitor connected to GPU Timings + fps consistency when 2 monitors connected to GPU Timings when 1 monitor is connected to GPU and 1 to integrated graphics Try to add more monitors to the mix. 1, 2, 3, 4 with same spec vs different specs.

I was hoping you would expand testing a bit to show if you get any performance hit on your main GPU if you have your extra monitors on a separate one? My guess would be no hit since those tasks should now be done on the other GPU, but maybe there is a surprising answer?

As a long-time multi-monitor user, I have been wondering for a long time whether it really makes a big difference if you use static images on the second or third screen while gaming. I have recently been a user of a Ryzen 7000 system and have now connected the second and third monitors to the mainboard via the CPU and the main monitor is still connected to my nvidia GPU. Works perfectly, even with VMs and Citrix Workspace across different monitors. I just haven't been able to determine the difference in performance yet. Maybe something for a follow up? thanks for the video

You had Viva La Dirt League on the monitors, I love them so much

Would be interesting to see how having a second monitor connected effects the latency when playing games.

BUT LINUS, HOW WILL I EVER HAVE MY TENTACLES HENTAI AND NARUTO ANIME RUNNING WHILE I PLAY HELLO KITTY WORLD AT THE SAME TIME WITHOUT THE EXTRA MONITOR???

- What are we? - Maggers. - What muggers do? - They... mug people. - Sooo... LET'S MUG THEM

I want to see Linus and the team do a sound setup using a home theater receiver hooked up via HDMI

So happy I ordered 2 new monitors today. Couldn't you have released this 2 hours ago?

*looks at my single monitor* “perhaps I have judged you too harshly”

You can rip my extra monitors from my cold, dead hands. lol

Would be nice if he talked about having multiple monitors with for example in the case of 2 monitors, have main gaming monitor plugged into GPU, and second monitor plugged into the Motherboard. Would be curious to see the comparison between 2 monitors in a GPU and 1 in each.

A look at what happens if the monitors are on independent GPUs would be interesting, especially in terms of what happens if you use an iGPU for a secondary display. For my part, doing the gaming VM in a NAS thing it’s been an easy path to enabling multiple VMs when I actually want a second seat.

0:42 he just turned into a Nokia 3310 for half a sec

If LTT says it, you know it's most likely incorrect. Their test results are as accurate as Stewie Wonders dart record

Note: this performance loss can be entirely circumvented with either a 2nd GPU or iGPU handling the 2nd display, this is as easy as plugging the display into the other GPU and then anything on that display should run on the 2nd GPU, and if not you still always can force it to in windows settings It is a bit overkill to have a 2nd GPU for like 2 fps average, but if you already have an iGPU, why not

Would be interesting to see another video like this involving a similar multi-monitor issue, that being the fact that having multiple monitors with _differing_ refresh rates can sometimes cause inconsistent frame timings or even actual refresh rate drops with a faster monitor trying to match a slower one (ex: 144Hz briefly dipping down to 60Hz) While I've never experienced the refresh rate drops myself, my frame timings have always felt inconsistent (even with G-sync) and the only way I can get a valid result on the UFO test is by setting my 144Hz monitor down to 60Hz to match my secondary monitor (the test always stutters or fails to sync at 144Hz). So I'm very curious to know if the labs team could produce any helpful information about all of this

Those Monitors were Mugging Performance...

this has got to be the best sponsor sideway ever hahaha

The vram usage will also increase as you add up monitors. Also, it's a bit of a niche case but I noticed that running two displays on different GPUs (e.g on a laptop, the built in display running on the igpu and the second one running on the discrete gpu) will also increase the driver overhead

Honestly, the last point hits the hardest for me. I used to have videos running on a second monitor, or an active chat or whatever, but somewhere along the line I remembered how much more enjoyable the gaming experience is when you actually focus on it.

Don't care. I will gladly sacrifice some performance to keep my extra monitor. After using two, I don't get how people can use less.

Bro that Kick joke thrown in killed me.

Question. Is there a reason Labs didn't run the same tests with secondary monitors connected to CPU integrated graphics? Since current gen CPUs from both teams now have integrated graphics (basically across the board), I feel like this might have less of an impact on FPS as (especially at higher resolutions) more load is on the GPU vs CPU.

A video about best vertical monitors would be awesome. The viewing angle on the 27 inch I flipped vertically isn’t the best but not sure what to look into for a replacement 🎉

That sponsorship transition is probably the e smoothest I’ve ever seen

single monitor pc + a laptop on my desk for twitch chat is the golden method

6:50 Kick 🔛🔝

0:57 Oh look, an ACTUAL segue for once

0:58 The writers have become too good at transitioning to an ad read.

The first person to ever use two monitors on a PC must have felt like they were inventing the wheel.

Could you do a video on running multiple displays at different framerates? This should be quite common with many people buying a new high refresh rate monitor for gaming and using their old 60Hz as a secondary. Apparently windows really does not like this. In my case plugging both monitors into the gpu completely kills gsync and there are massive framerate drops on the main monitor whenever something was moving on the secondary. My only fix for this was plugging the secondary 60Hz monitor into the mainboard to run on the iGPU

8:39 just skipped a heartbeat there 😅

hmm how much of those numbers are acurate?

Ran into this issue a handful of years back, running a 144hz 1080p gaming monitor for main, and two portrait 60hz 1080p IPS monitors on either side of it (web dev / DBA) on a GTX 1080, everything seemed to be ok. Picked up a 4k monitor for my Playstation, had it above my main PC gaming monitor, figured "it's just sitting there during work hours, I should just hook my PC up to it and watch videos during the day on it instead of the portrait monitors". My poor GPU had a meltdown with the added load and was running sub 30hz just existing in that config. Nowadays, the PC is on a single 244hz 1080p gaming monitor, with a LG DualUp hooked up to my MacBook. PC is much happier since I'm still running that GTX 1080, it's given me a few extra years out of this system without a hit to my productivity.

I feel it would have been interesting to see what running secondary displays does to performance when running those displays on a second GPU for example using integrated graphics for secondary displays and then your GPU for the single primary display.

The worst thing is that both AMD and NVIDIA are seemingly unable to fix the high-power-draw bug for multi monitor setups! My 2070s uses 50-60W while my two monitors are connected. Sometimes there are tweaks and workarounds to get power draw back to 15-20W, but that doesn't work for everyone or every case. It’s insane how both of these huge companies have not solved these issues for years(!) now.

i legit cannot imagine being a Gamer and not having task manager open on a second monitor to always see your performances . Also having something to see your CPU temperatures ? and GPU usage ? i think i would be so anxious to play new games without seeing if my hardware is lowkey burning in the background. Because from my years of monitoring, it happens alot that a game looks fine on your monitor (with ok FPS) but its actually using 95% of your CPU and running on the maximum temperature "allowed" at the same time. 2 monitors is a must for me and my Anxiety problem :)

guys i have been waiting for a video like this for so long and i'm watching most of your videos for years now, how could i miss this

curious that you never mentioned refresh rates, they made a huge difference in frametiming for me. with a secondary 60hz monitor i had lots of stutters on my 144hz main monitor, but once i switched to a 144hz 2nd monitor those issues went away.

Should also test mixed refresh rates, turning off/on hardware acceleration on various pieces of software, exclusive full screen vs borderless/window. mixed HDR. This headache has gotten better in recent years, but especially Vista to Win10 DWM with mixed refresh rates and window'd mode games would seemingly cause the game to stutter down to the lowest refresh consistently. EDIT: Also I do think layout can mess with it as well especially portrait next to landscape, which it does appear y'all did test. I think the "virtual canvas" has to be even larger, because of monitor layout.

All the people working and watching this on the side must have gotten a jump scare with that Teams notif.

Really loved that transition into the sponsor.

This was a good video. a while back I tried to determine through benchmarks if my 2nd screen was hindering my performance. as far as i could tell it wasn't having an effect. but my 2nd screen always had idle apps on screen, now I better understand why this was the case. for me having extra utility is worth the minute performance hit. I appreciate what you guys and the other tech channels do, so I don't have figure everything out for myself.

Linus talking about notifications somehow triggered my brain to remember I had to buy a ticket to an event before the cut off. That just saved me from an angry girlfriend.

that teams notification sound made my heart rate spike, please don't

Thanks for making this video and clearing things up and quantifying the effects. My personal take from this is that having a browser or chat window open on the 2nd screen doesn't have that huge of an impact. 👍

I'm using one monitor straight from the graphics card and the 2nd monitor from the motherboard (yes Intel integrated graphics). From what I can tell, the 2nd monitor still uses the graphics card and does affect performance a little bit. I'll be interesting if the Labs team can follow up this video with this configuration.

*please test gaming laptop with internal display and through hdmi, its shocking results *

"most people won't be playing 3 full instances while gaming" I beg to differ sir, I got 3 in 4k 72" main, 2 43" in portrait turned inwards at 55 degrees. LOVE IT! dual stick mounted directly to my chair with a tablet mouse pad and Razer Tartarus Pro mounted at 50 degrees for my hurt wrist. No desk at all. My question you didn't answer is how much of a difference when stretching the game across all screens.