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Old 02-16-2009, 02:47 AM   #43
CheriePie
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Join Date: Jan 2009

Location: SF Bay Area, CA, USA
Posts: 24
Originally posted by Jim Sachs:
Again - there is no provision for running in fullscreen mode while allowing a second monitor to display the desktop. This is not a problem to be tracked down, it's the way the DirectX screensaver framework works. The second monitor can either duplicate the first monitor, stretch the scene across both, or be blank. It's a security issue: Microsoft doesn't want your data to be showing on any screen when a screenblanker is running.

In anticipation that some people might like to view the Aquarium while working on something else, I added the Windowed Mode. The combination of even having a Windowed mode, being able to resize it to fill the second screen, and have it remember that size and position is probably unique to this program. If the card were more powerful, it would deliver more FPS. If that screen is set to 32-bit, you might gain some performance by setting it to 16-bit.  
BUT that is exactly what I was doing! Yes, in my first post, I did ask if it were possible to run it full screen in the second monitor like I can with Windows Media Player and VLAN Media Player, however I discovered after only an hour or two that it was application specific and you told me MA could not support that. I get it.

All further testing I was doing is with MA running in a window on the second display. And then I stretched said window not across both monitors but only wide and tall enough to fill up the second display!!

When MA runs on the primary monitor, I get 125 frames per second. Are you saying that's slow and it should be faster than that??? :-\ I also get 125 frames per second if I run MA in full screen across both monitors (what I called the default multi-monitor way above since that seems to be what MA defaults to when you first launch it with multiple monitors).

So what am I not getting here? I'll try to repeat and summarize everything I've already stated above:

I am running MA3 beta 9b. Running full screen on my primary monitor, or stretched across both monitors, I get 125 frames per second. My graphics card is an nVidia GeForce 8700M GT with 512 MB dedicated VRAM (seems powerful enough to me).

If I attempt to run an MA window in the secondary monitor only (while continuing to work in the first), the frame rate of MA on that second display slows to around 18 fps and even though I'm on a dual processor system, MA slows things waaaay down as it consumes about 50% of the CPU time. Again, this is when running in a window stretched to be close to full size on the secondary monitor only (with no overlap).

Let me know if I missed anything. As I really don't think I should be seeing that slowdown and frame drop (from 125 to 18) like that. Right?
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