Please help. Game launching on wrong monitor.

[Jason Romney]

Hello! I'm having some issues with one of my games launching on the wrong monitor. About a week ago I got a new BenQ GW2255 budget gaming monitor and I'm using it as my primary monitor. I also have a 2nd monitor called the HP W1907 for use with Skype, file browsing and viewing the twitch chat when live streaming. Before I got the BenQ monitor the HP was my main monitor for a while.

When i tried launching an older game called FEAR 2, it would launch on the older HP monitor instead of my new monitor. I tried changing the game settings, hitting the auto button on the monitors, and even swapping the cables so my BenQ monitor would be detected as monitor 1 instead of monitor 2 none of which did anything to fix my problem.

Both monitors use DVI connections but the BenQ monitor is using a DVI to HDMI cable since I only have one 1 DVI connector on my graphics card. I tried launching fear 1 and 3 to see if they did the same thing but its just fear 2 giving me these issues. In fact out of all the games I have played on both monitors, FEAR 2 is the only game doing this. Is there a way to fix this issue? Please help.

Here is some additional info:

Things I've tried:

Spoiler

• 
  
  -Launching the game and hitting the auto button on BenQ monitor
  
  -Going into windowed mode (FEAR 2 didn't have any options for windowed mode)
  
  -Swapping the cables so the BenQ monitor is dedected as #1 and the HP as #2
  
  -Uninstalling and re-installing the game
  
  -Setting the picture mode to game on the BenQ and setting the HP to movie
  

Computer info

Spoiler

• 
  
  intel core i7 4790 locked quad core cpu
  
  16Gb 1866Mhz ADATA XPG v2 ram
  
  EVGA GTX 750Ti FTW with 2GB GDDR5 memery
  
  Gigabyte z97x-SLI motherboard
  
  Windows 7 professional 64bit
  
  main monitor BenQ GW2255 1920x1080 with 6ms response time
  
  2nd monitor HP W1907 1440x900 (i don't know the response time.)
  
  both monitors run at 60Hz
  

 

[Vynavill]

Are you sure the monitor is set as the primary monitor, and not just appended the #1 index?

Mind you, the steps I'm about to state are personally translated on the fly, as my OS isn't set to use English; option labels might be slightly different.

Right click on your desktop and select Display Resolution. You should see the two monitors on that screen, and a couple of drop down menus. Directly under those menus there can be either a checkbox saying "use this as the primary display" or a label telling you that the currently selected monitor is the primary one.

Make sure to select the monitor you want as primary and tick the checkbox if it appears. Post back otherwise.

 

[Jason Romney]

Right click on your desktop and select Display Resolution. You should see the two monitors on that screen, and a couple of drop down menus. Directly under those menus there can be either a checkbox saying "use this as the primary display" or a label telling you that the currently selected monitor is the primary one.

i went to my monitor settings to double check. and i selected the check mark you mentioned above when i was setting up my monitors. i just tried launching the game again and i still got the same issue

 

[Vynavill]

Ok, let's try this again, the clean way. It was too much hoping it would work like that...

Unplug all monitors except the one you want to use as primary and reboot. Make sure it is set as primary, both in the resolution screen and, if present, in any setting available in your video card's control panel. (this is to force windows to accept that as your first monitor, due to windows being...well, itself).

Once this is done, run the game, modify at least one setting and save, revert it back and save again. Then, get in game at least once and completely close it down afterwards. (this is to force the game to accept that as the application's primary monitor and overwrite any hidden setting that would associate the game with a particular display device).

Once you did all of this, reboot again. Connect your secondary monitor and verify that the game launches on your wanted primary one.
If it doesn't work like this either, there might be something else we're missing, as this is mainly windows messing up with its window position cache...

 

[Jason Romney]

Unplug all monitors except the one you want to use as primary and reboot. Make sure it is set as primary, both in the resolution screen and, if present, in any setting available in your video card's control panel. (this is to force windows to accept that as your first monitor, due to windows being...well, itself).

Once this is done, run the game, modify at least one setting and save, revert it back and save again. Then, get in game at least once and completely close it down afterwards. (this is to force the game to accept that as the application's primary monitor and overwrite any hidden setting that would associate the game with a particular display device).

Once you did all of this, reboot again. Connect your secondary monitor and verify that the game launches on your wanted primary one.
If it doesn't work like this either, there might be something else we're missing, as this is mainly windows messing up with its window position cache...

alright so i tried a few different things relating to your instructions above. i disabled the secondary monitor both via the windows 7 control panel in [display settings] and by unplugging it completely. when the secondary monitor was disabled I managed to launch FEAR 2 on my primary monitor. so far so good. i changed the resolution to 1080P and played the game till i hit an auto save point (since FEAR 2 doesn't seem to have a manual save button). then i hit [exit to windows] in the pause menu after saving the game and settings and restarted my computer. when i logged in and tried to start the game again it still launched on the wrong monitor when i reconnected it. you said something earlier about "windows messing up a window position cache" is there a way to fix said cache? if so how would i go about doing it? thanks by the way for taking time out of your day to help me with this problem.

 

[Vynavill]

That's registry editing we're talking about, at least AFAIK...Had a similar issue some time ago.
This solved it automatically for me, although you should use it at your own risk (it's still a registry modification we're talking about, after all).

The batch file kills a couple records from where Windows stores view settings for apps (including window positions and dimensions) and restarts explorer.exe (which is obviously not Internet Explorer ) to refresh the view. Mind that your icons may shift of a line or two to the left, so you might want to enable and disable the automatic icon re-order option if that happens, to get them back in your "field of view"; simply right click on any part of your desktop and open up the "View" submenu, then select the 4th option from the top, should that happen.

 

[Jason Romney]

ok so i went through the display settings in my Nvidia control panel. and finally got the game to run on my main monitor after messing with the color settings and monitor configuration options. the bat file you sent me didn't seem to do anything but make my entire monitor go blank accept for the wall paper and didn't really help fix my problem but my PC didn't explode and i finally got the game to run on the correct monitor so I'd like to call victory against buggy PC games! take that screwed up monitor configuration!! XD anyway thanks again for taking the time to help me fix this problem