Many thanks to Paul King from www.prime.net.nz for the following blog entry.
Any red blooded Octane user would struggle to
overlook the fact that with a multi-Nvidia GPU setup, they have a fairly
decent SLI gaming rig on their hands.
The
problem is that Octane performs best when all Nvidia GPUs are allocated
exclusively to Octane, with the mundane task of driving monitors
delegated to the generic GPU most motherboards have built in.
Should
the need to smite a few bad guys in Battlefield 12 become pressing, an
Octane user is faced with crawling around behind the computer,
disconnecting monitors from the motherboard ports and connecting them to
their Nvidia card ports. And of course putting them back again
afterwards.
Most
monitors have a few port types available, as do the GPUs, and by using
two of these at once it is nominally possible to leave both motherboard
and NVidia GPUS connected to the same monitor even for multiple monitor
setups. The Windows
display manager often struggles with this arrangement however; going
into paroxysms as it keeps detecting and attempting to start unused
connections, particularly while the user is attempting to switch
multiple monitors one by one from one GPU type to the other, or to a
hybrid combination of both. The only sure way to succeed involves
physically disconnecting the cables from ports that are to be switched
off.
A windows app called Display Fusion (www.displayfusion.com)
however solves this problem by use of stored profiles that can switch
multiple monitors simultaneously from one combination of inputs to
another – eliminating the flaky process of sequential manual switching
via Display Manager. Users can thus leave the cables in place
connecting all GPUs to all monitors at the same time.
Users
can also set up application specific display profile settings
(triggered when app is launched) and manage a range of other display
related tasks. There is a free version and a more fully featured paid
version ($US25).
NOTE
1: If you happen to ever use a hybrid of motherboard GPU and Nvidia
cards simultaneously to drive a multi monitor setup, this won’t work
well while Octane is active. It is important to ensure that BEFORE Octane becomes active there
is no active connection between any Nvidia Card and ANY of the monitors
(whether achieved by physically disconnecting , or deactivating connections via monitor profile switching).
Consequences otherwise are that long freezes
and lags will occur while NVidia Cards are set as prioritised to Octane
- even if the monitor in use by the ArchiCAD/Octane application window
is being driven by the motherboard GPU and not an Nvidia card;
when windows desktop is extended to span across monitors , the whole
user interface system then has to wait for the already busy Nvidia card to complete every refresh of those parts of the user interface occurring on it’s monitor (desktop display, mouse pointer etc.).
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