Question PC Stutters and Freezes - Gaming on Dual Monitors

[Saaby06]

Hello,

I have a dual monitor setup and when I open a game in full screen mode my PC goes absolute berserk. It freezes, my monitor flash on and off.

It’s very odd because I don’t have this problem when playing in windowed mode but who wants to plays games in that mode ? Any advice will help.

My Specs are

AMD Ryzen 9 9950X

ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 4070 Ti

Kingston FURY Beast RGB White 64GB

Im playing simple games like CS2, Dota2 etc

 

[Ralston18]

PSU: make, model, wattage, age, condition (original to build, new, used, refurbished)?

Disk drive(s): make, model, capacity, how full?

Make and model monitors? Connectivity?

Game sources?

Start by looking in Reliability History/Monitor and Event Viewer.

Either one or both tools may be logging some error code,warning, or even an informational event just before or at the time of the problems occurring.

 

[Saaby06]

PSU:Corsair RMx Series RM1000x 1000W Power Supply, Cybenetics Gold, Fully Modular, 140mm FDB Fan, 2x EPS, 4x PCI-E, 12x SATA, 6x Molex, ATX 3.1 Compliant, Supports PCIe 5.1, Zero RPM Fan Mode , Resonant LLC Topology with DC-to-DC Conversion

Disk Drive: Kingston 2TB SSD, KC3000, M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe Gen4, Read up to 7,000MB/s, Write up to 7,000MB/s, IOPS R/W up to 1000/1000K, 1.8M Hours MTBF, 1.6PBW, Low Profile Graphene Aluminum Heat Spreader (PS5 Compatible)

Monitors:ASUS ROG Strix XG27UCS USB Type-C Gaming Monitor – 27-inch 4K UHD (3840x2160), 160Hz (Above 144Hz), 1ms (GTG), Fast IPS, Extreme Low Motion Blur Sync, USB Type-C, G-Sync Compatible, HDR

Connectivity: DVI

Game Sources: Steam

Reliability History:

 

[CelicaGT]

Generally speaking you want to run in borderless windowed in games that have it, as it enables focus change seamlessly. Note that sometimes there is a performance penalty but Win11 seems to be much better. In fullscreen mode changing focus to the non gaming screen often induces some sort of rescaling/HDR/refresh rate change tomfoolery for a half second. This is worse if the monitors are of different types/resolution or refresh rate.

(Edit: to add) FYI my system does this too, in many games. It's been this way through two full platform upgrades, and 4 GPU upgrades, as well as Win7 through Win11. Some games are much worse than others, forcing the non gaming screen to conform to the game resolution scale.

 

[Saaby06]

Generally speaking you want to run in borderless windowed in games that have it, as it enables focus change seamlessly. Note that sometimes there is a performance penalty but Win11 seems to be much better. In fullscreen mode changing focus to the non gaming screen often induces some sort of rescaling/HDR/refresh rate change tomfoolery for a half second. This is worse if the monitors are of different types/resolution or refresh rate.

(Edit: to add) FYI my system does this too, in many games. It's been this way through two full platform upgrades, and 4 GPU upgrades, as well as Win7 through Win11. Some games are much worse than others, forcing the non gaming screen to conform to the game resolution scale.

Thanks for the heads up on this, i though it was only my PC. I significantly notice performance issue when running in BW playing CS2 i dont get the required frames and feels "skippy"

 

[CelicaGT]

Thanks for the heads up on this, i though it was only my PC. I significantly notice performance issue when running in BW playing CS2 i dont get the required frames and feels "skippy"

There's stuff like fullscreen optimization and other settings within Windows itself that can alleviate some of these issues, or make them worse. When it comes to things of this nature, especially when it's specific titles I recommend you visit the specific game's forum or fan site forums, Reddit even. It's more likely you'll find a tailored solution there. Unfortunately you are unlikely to find a one size fix for the frame pacing/sync issues as each game engine does things a little differently and very few are written taking dual display setups into account. The only ones I know of are typically MMO's and Sim titles where it's common practice to run a dual head rig for secondary parsing software, flight maps, instruments etc.