I have multi-GPU Linux workstation but sometimes I’m also using it for games under windows. It has 2 displays and recently I was playing two games at once since Palworld is often “idle” game type where you’re just waiting for something to complete. In order to not waste time I fired up Skyrim on second monitor and started playing that simultaneously.
Unfortunately 3090 is not capable of handling those 2 games at once and Palworld was having really bad time.
Since I have 3 GPUs in this workstation I kinda started to wonder… Would it be possible to use 2 GPUs for 2 displays separately, so that each GPU would render and accelerate game that is launched on its own display?
I believe on Linux doing something like this would require some really wonky shenanigans like using bumblebee/optimus (laptop dGPU mechanism) for desktop GPUs but maybe Windows has better support for something like this? I remember long time ago I had Windows system where you could choose GPU from right click context menu but I don’t remember the details now. It could be just some laptop :<
does it switch between GPUs when I move window from one display to another or do I need to somewhow specify, on which display I want to launch app as “main”?
So launch your game you want to have on the second, slower GPU first then move it to that GPU/monitor and pop open the second one on your main.
Same with web browsers and everything else. If your config is set to remember display positions, it’ll survive reboots and reinitializations even with fast boot enabled and after monitors have been disconnected and unplugged.
I noticed that when Skyrim is not running (when I alt+tab from it) then both GPUs have load, but as soon as Skyrim launches then trop on GPU 0 drops to 0 and GPU 1 spikes to 100%
I believe “load” on GPU 0 without skyrim is due to fact that Palworld is generating some reasonable framerates in such case but as soon as Skyrim lanuches it has like 10 fps so GPU 0 doesn’t get much load from just displaying 10 fps image.
I changed “Make this my primary display” setting on the fly while Palworld was running on GPU 1 and then launched Skyrim - it now does utilize 2 GPUs properly.
I guess I just gotta find a way to make it more… usable than changing system setting between launching games xD Just as I thought windows (at least older builds of windows) bind GPU on which app is launched initially so kinda clue of my problem was that all apps always launched on primary display. No matter how I launched them. I think I need to find a way to launch app in a way that it starts up on display 2 despite display 1 being “main”.
I don’t think I’m target audience of “depreciation notifications” XD I also have Windows 8.1 on another VM (man, you have no idea what kind of rocket science it is to get RTX 3090 to work on Windows 8.1 - but it is possible, there are modded drivers with modified OS whitelists) and physical PC with Windows XP SP2 for older games.
Inb4 since someone could get triggered - those are my OS’es for games. I’m running them on KVM+VFIO based WRX80 workstation as guest VMs with snapshotted disks and controlled network environment. As these are for me in a sense “specialized, single purpose” systems they’re not very… exposed to conventional threats due to not being used to access internet, not being exposed to WAN, hidden behind LOTs of security gear, not launching random software and not getting random devices plugged in, etc etc. That’s why even this XP SP2 just plows with 0 f*cks given. If it explodes I can just restore snapshot from 2 years ago…
Yeah now I just remembered that this motherboard has also an integrated on-board VGA from AST2500 (just simple 2D VGA that you can use on “host” if you pass-through all GPUs to VMs, which I frankly do). Before I set up Linux KVM host on this machine, I was performing stress tests and cooling tests on some random windows. I once performed some mumbo-jumbo with GPUs swapping and windows ended up accidentally setting this 2D VGA as “main” GPU and I couldn’t run any benchmarks with error “your GPU doesn’t support 3D acceleration” I was like what the… xD