Advice for set up of 2 x 4K Monitors and FPS drop

[dlystyr]

Hi,

I have been having an issue for a few weeks running 2 x 4K 28" monitors, Gaming on one and watching videos (Youtube, UFC, Emby etc) on the other.

I currently have an RTX 3070 and finding that the VRAM usage when I play a game like CoD:BOCW on my primary monitor whilst watching Videos on the other goes way above 6GB even on Low settings at 4K Res, this is with DLSS on. It becomes unplayable with the GFX Lag.

I do not watch many 4K videos, The monitor was bought to replace a 1080p 19" and I bought an identical monitor to my primary as my work was paying for it.

I am wondering what is the best solution for this? I was tempted to use the onboard graphics for my second monitor but I have had problems with the Integrated/Nvidia drivers having issues in the past. Changing my secondary monitor resolution does not seem to make much of a difference.

I am wondering how other people have worked with this kind of issue?

Thanks for any help.

 

[oguzsoso]

windows dwm can be bloated with a 4k monitor, and even more so with two

check your dwm.exe vram usage, if its north of 700-800 mb, i can say that only solution would be to change to something with adequate vram

try disabling hardware accerelation on the browser you use,
disable all kinds of hardware accerelation across the programs you use, until it creates a problem with specific situations

chrome, discord, steam, they all hog down vram usage these days. morely so if you're rendering them at 4k. even at 1080p, it becomes problematic and i had to cull down hardware accel for all of them. this might solve your issue.

 

[dlystyr]

windows dwm can be bloated with a 4k monitor, and even more so with two

check your dwm.exe vram usage, if its north of 700-800 mb, i can say that only solution would be to change to something with adequate vram

try disabling hardware accerelation on the browser you use,
disable all kinds of hardware accerelation across the programs you use, until it creates a problem with specific situations

chrome, discord, steam, they all hog down vram usage these days. morely so if you're rendering them at 4k. even at 1080p, it becomes problematic and i had to cull down hardware accel for all of them. this might solve your issue.

Thanks, I just rebooted and instantly up at 1.6GB usage on dwm.exe, I will try and tweak things like hardware acceleration.

I think I may need to trade it in for something with 12GB VRAM, Which is a shame as I have only had it a few months. Not sure why it was released with such little and there is 3060's now with 12GB GDDR6.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

Windows DWM can eat into a fair bit of the video memory for desktop rendering, especially at high resolutions. But also modern browsers and many other pieces of software can use GPU acceleration to speed up certain things, primarily decoding video. These can eat heavily into vRAM usage as well as GPU cycles. I think 2-3 tabs of youtube for me in chrome can result in about 1.2GB of vRAM usage.

In Win10 you can use task manager to see GPU usage of different applications. Chrome also has its own internal task manager (shift+esc) and will show you all the chrome processes and their usage including the GPU process used for things like decoding, as well as its memory footprint.

If you're bumping up against vRAM limitations when gaming and watching video then you could test disabling your browsers hardware acceleration, this should stop it from using the GPU to decode video and hand that task back to the CPU which will free up GPU cycles and GPU memory, but it will put more load on your CPU. Whether this results in better or worse game performance will depend on if the game is GPU or CPU bound. If you're GPU bound it could help, if you're CPU bound it will hurt.

In chrome I believe this is in the settings, expand the "advanced" menu and look under "System". I have never actually tried this myself so it's a case of you'll have to test and see. Results with probably vary with each game and the games demands on CPU/GPU.

FWIW 1.6GB usage on DWM seems absurdly high. I'm running a 4k and 1080p monitor side by side and mines like 22Mb. I dunno what's going on there. I'd investigate that, it doesn't seem right to me.

 

[HangTime]

Kind of stating the obvious here but if you are worried about gaming performance, playing a video on another screen at the same time seems counter-productive.

I run dual monitors on a 3070 and I close stuff down if I'm running close to the VRAM limit.

 

[oguzsoso]

Windows DWM can eat into a fair bit of the video memory for desktop rendering, especially at high resolutions. But also modern browsers and many other pieces of software can use GPU acceleration to speed up certain things, primarily decoding video. These can eat heavily into vRAM usage as well as GPU cycles. I think 2-3 tabs of youtube for me in chrome can result in about 1.2GB of vRAM usage.

In Win10 you can use task manager to see GPU usage of different applications. Chrome also has its own internal task manager (shift+esc) and will show you all the chrome processes and their usage including the GPU process used for things like decoding, as well as its memory footprint.

If you're bumping up against vRAM limitations when gaming and watching video then you could test disabling your browsers hardware acceleration, this should stop it from using the GPU to decode video and hand that task back to the CPU which will free up GPU cycles and GPU memory, but it will put more load on your CPU. Whether this results in better or worse game performance will depend on if the game is GPU or CPU bound. If you're GPU bound it could help, if you're CPU bound it will hurt.

In chrome I believe this is in the settings, expand the "advanced" menu and look under "System". I have never actually tried this myself so it's a case of you'll have to test and see. Results with probably vary with each game and the games demands on CPU/GPU.

FWIW 1.6GB usage on DWM seems absurdly high. I'm running a 4k and 1080p monitor side by side and mines like 22Mb. I dunno what's going on there. I'd investigate that, it doesn't seem right to me.

u're probably looking at raw ram usage

we talking about vram usage

right click on tabs and select columns

find dedicated gpu memory, and select it, and then you can observe

if you're getting 22 mb gpu memory usage... then i don't know what to say... wish i had that kind of low usage...

 

[PrincessFrosty]

u're probably looking at raw ram usage

I apologize, I was looking at system RAM usage.

For some reason that column wasn't available for me, I dunno if it's a difference in windows or something like that. I've checked my Dedicated GPU memory and it's about 830MB although I do have a lot of stuff running on my desktop I'm not sure what accounts for the memory usage.

 

[oguzsoso]

I apologize, I was looking at system RAM usage.

For some reason that column wasn't available for me, I dunno if it's a difference in windows or something like that. I've checked my Dedicated GPU memory and it's about 830MB although I do have a lot of stuff running on my desktop I'm not sure what accounts for the memory usage.

no prob, its not there by default

honestly, people all be like "windows is smart!!! unused vram is wasted vram!! unused ram is wasted ram!!11 it will give it back when the game requests!!!"

well! it does not GIVE it back. cyberpunk literally caps out at 6.5 gb vram usage if i let the system run things itself

once i kill dwm.exe and let it "flush", all of a sudden game can use 7.3-7.4 gb vram and voila, its much smoother and frametimes are improved

it can ridiculuously grow to enormous sizes, especially if you leave the pc open for quite some time, killing it resets it to a lower value, but it accumulates with time again

its windows being unoptimized at its best, nothing more, nothing less