Slower Performance after 2nd Card added?!?

[ipaine]

Ok, so here is my problem.

I was playing Dragon Age on my lousy work system, dual 19" monitors@1280x1024, Core 2 Duo E6600@3.0GHz with 4GB ram and a measly 7600GS PCI-E. Anyways, it ran ok at the lowest settings in a 960x600 window. This was fine for the little bit I used it.

Then I wanted to go to three monitors and got another 19" and to run it I got a eVGA 8400GS 512MB PCI card. So basically I have one monitor on that card and the other two on the 7600GS.

Now when I try to run Dragon Age at the same settings as before and it is choppy, very choppy and that is not with any action, just walking around. It does this no matter which monitor I have the game window on.

Does anyone know why this is happening and/or even better a way to fix it?


Oh yea, I do have my primary monitor set to the the one that is run by the 8400GS, in case that makes a difference.

Edit: I also tried setting it to a very crappy 800x600 and still the same.

[slay3r]

You can't run two cards like that.
Its not in sli but if u have different card, you can put one as physx.
The second card isn't made to support a lcd.
Thats probably why you experienced the laggyness.

[ipaine]

Umm, no offense, but yes it is made for a LCD. I could just run two monitors off of that single PCI card, the 8400GS, or two off of the 7600GS, or I could even run 4 monitors, 2 off of each.

This has nothing to do with SLI. You have always been able to add multiple graphics cards with PCI. Hell I have run 6 LCD's just for the heck of it once. (3 PCI cards, not this machine of course)

They are both low end cards so I do not expect "good" performance. I just want it to run the way it was. I'm not sure as to why it would change as it is still being run on one of the two original monitors on the 7600GS.

[slay3r]

At first i thought it could be a driver issue but then i have no idea.

[ipaine]

Oh yea, they are using the 195.62 drivers. Really this one has me somewhat confused as to why it is happening.

[MpG]

How does the game run with only the 8400GS and one monitor? I'd have to wonder if the PCI interface isn't the issue.

That aside, what's your task manager usage looking like after playing the game a little?

[3.0charlie]

Are the drivers properly installed on the 8400GS? How many GPUs are shown in Device Manager?

Still, I'm not sure you can run 2 cards from different families - series 7 and series 8 - SLI, or not.

[ipaine]

Yep the drivers are all installed properly and both the 8400GS and the 7600GS are showing in device manager.

And yes you can run both cards from different families. Actually you can (well used to be able to, haven't tried with newer cards) run both ATI and Nvidia cards on the same machine, although I would not recommend.

You have to remember that I only got the 8400GS PCI so I could run the third monitor. Oh and yes the 8400GS is not anywhere nearly as good as the 7600GS, damn 64bit memory. Sure I would love to get a better PCI-E card than the 7600GS, but this is just the work machine so I really don't want to spend my money on it.

Well, almost home time so I can't do any more checking. But I know I am stumped as to why adding another card that is not even running the monitor that the game is on would affect the performance.

[belgolas]

Can you uninstall the driver and reinstall the drivers or go back to an older on. I found the 191.07 to be better drivers for this game.

[ipaine]

Well I have moved back to 191.07 after I found that I could not select 960x600 anymore as a resolution. Of course I still can't anymore with the new (older) drivers. So I set it back to that by editing the .ini and now we will see what kind of change going from 195 to 191 will do.