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I want a three monitor setup. Two monitors on a fast powerful card and one monitor on a slower card. They are not linked together, no sli and all that. Can I run a game on all three monitors or will it only run on one card? Will the more powerful card help the slower card? What are my display options. Can I extend the desktop on all three or will the cards have to mirror each other, how does this work?

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    It works however your OS and config say it will work. May 24, 2011 at 4:26
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    What graphics cards do you have?
    – Moshe
    May 24, 2011 at 4:41
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    You will probably need to supply more info such as which particular OS, graphics card models, motherboard, games you want to play, etc, before any real answer can be given, and even then, it would be hard to say exactly what will happen.
    – MaQleod
    May 24, 2011 at 4:49

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My experience has been that the graphics cards will not properly show 3D graphics or overlays that extend to more than one screen on the separate card.

In other words, if you show a video (usually done in an overlay) in a window on a single monitor, then move the window to show across two monitors, it will only work when both monitors are either

  1. On the same video card or
  2. On video cards where the video card drivers explicitly support such usage (such as SLI, although some cards will share the data correctly when they are both being driven by the same driver, but not in an SLI configuration)

Similar things happen with 3D graphics, and in many cases you simply can't extend the window beyond the two screens on the better card, or the one screen on the lessor card.

In order to have the best chance at getting this to work seamlessly, use cards from the same manufacturer that use the same graphics driver - which usually means using cards within the same family.

However, if you really need to use three or more displays with advanced 3D rendering across all three, you should look at video cards that explicitly support this feature. Both ATI and nVidia have cards that will support this usage.

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Assuming that the game dosen't support multiple screens (the only one i can think of is the supreme commander series), you're best off using a single video card with something like eyefinity, that supports, and renders everything as a single screen as far as the game is concerned.

Alternately, If you're all PCI-E, you might be able to use one good card, and a few cheap ones along with SoftTH to software render the game into running multi screen.

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  • Pretty rare functionality, indeed. Let me provide another one: DOOM, for DOS, only versions 1.0 and 1.1. Three monitors could be used, with two of them showing a view that is 90 degrees off of the front view.
    – TOOGAM
    Sep 24, 2017 at 9:18
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I would suggest trying it. I'm not sure, but I guess that it will either:

a. Not work on more than one monitor - This depends on the game.

b. Work at the speed of the slower card - Like RAM, I'm guessing that it's likely for this to result. (When RAM is mismatched, the slowest speed prevails on all sticks.)

c. Work at the speed of each of the cards, depending on the monitor - Each card may try it's hardest, but your results will vary depending on how slow that weaker card is. You may be just fine in this case.

d. Work on only one of the graphics cards at once. - This may be enforced by your OS or drivers, to prevent strange things from happening.

e. Strange things may happen.

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It depends on the video cards, the OS, and the driver settings.

There are ways of having two cards work together (SLI and CrossFire), which you don’t have.

Most video cards (eg ATI, NVidia) with more than one output allow you to use “clone mode” where each output, ie monitor, displays the same thing (this is usually most useful for presentation/kiosk type things).

Some (read few) games support multiple monitors, similar to the Nintendo DS. (I recall that Serious Sam allowed you to play multi-player using separate monitors.)

You can extend the desktop across the monitors, but when you do so, games (or other fullscreen programs) that do not specifically support multiple monitors will simply use the primary display and the other(s) will continue to show the desktop. If the game does not properly capture the mouse, then moving the cursor towards another screen could cause the game to lose mouse focus (and thus cut your in-game control), and if you happen to click while the cursor is on another screen, the game will pause and/or switch out to the desktop (on the primary display) and/or continue on its own without your having any control. Fortunately, most games (especially these days) do properly capture the mouse.

What you can then do in a setup like this is to have a some kind of information or something on the other screen(s) like email, eBay, game walkthrough, etc.

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Ugh. This is a terrible "question", because it is actually multiple questions. Doing this makes the "question" harder to answer fully. The preferred approach is to ask each actual question that you have in a separate "question" on the site.

Despite that, I will try to be nice by answering each of your questions, but if you have further questions, please follow the site's guidelines. (Thanks in advance.)

Can I run a game on all three monitors or will it only run on one card?

It depends on the game. Special support for multiple monitors has been pretty rare in my experience. Although, if the operating system supports a desktop being extended on multiple screens, a lot of software will work on a single "desktop", and so could have video data being seen on multiple monitors. (This is mentioned more by other answers. If I got more detailed, I would just be repeating what they say.)

Will the more powerful card help the slower card?

This is extremely unlikely if they are from multiple manufacturers. Having video cards help each other has often been a feature that requires identical video cards, and involves using something like nVidia's SLI technology or AMD/ATI's equivalent Crossfire technology. Sometimes I've heard of such technology supporting different models of cards. Supporting vastly different models, and different manufacturers, is unlikely to be supported.

What are my display options. Can I extend the desktop on all three or will the cards have to mirror each other, how does this work?

In modern versions of Microsoft Windows, you have options.

  • Hold down the Start key (sometimes called the "Windows" key) on your keyboard, and press "P". (The reason for "P" is that changing such an option is often done, particularly in the business world, by people who are trying to show a "Presentation" on a "Projector".
  • Another approach is to use the operating system's "Display Properties" screen, which has a checkbox called something like "Extend desktop to this display".
  • Manufacturer-specific solutions may also be available. For instance, your system tray may have an icon related to the manufacturer of video circuitry in your system. The icon may provide some options for changing such details, but might only detect and affect video cards by the one manufacturer.

Note that this is a modern answer (made in late 2017). If dealing with significantly older equipment/software, you may have less options available.

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  • there's also dx12 multi-gpu now - which supports different models, and manufacturers, but isn't all that well supported. I do believe AMD might be dropping crossfire for that.
    – Journeyman Geek
    Sep 24, 2017 at 9:34
  • I'm glad I explicitly dated my answer, as it sounds like technology is planning to move beyond some of the limitations I've become familiar with. That reason is one that I'm happy to be wrong for. Yay!
    – TOOGAM
    Sep 24, 2017 at 9:55

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