Reason for performance decrease since dual monitoring

[Hocknose]

Morning guys,

I recently set up my system with dual monitors.
I'm quite a keen gamer so what I've been doing is playing games on one screen and then streaming video (youtube, iplayer, tvcatchup, etc...) on the other one. I have noticed a slight decrease in FPS while playing games.
Now I know that the graphics card now has extra to do than it used to.

So my question is what part of the card is having the issue, is it the GPU or is it the VRAM or even both?

I currently have a HD6870 1gb, I was looking to upgrade shortly anyway so I was thinking if it is the VRAM I will make sure I get one that has more than 1GB,

Cheers

 

[slh28]

So my question is what part of the card is having the issue, is it the GPU or is it the VRAM or even both?

Both. Although you're still only gaming on one screen so the slowdown shouldn't be too severe (watching videos isn't that GPU intensive). There's many programs out there which lets you check your GPU activity and VRAM usage in programs, personally I use MSI Afterburner.

If you're looking to upgrade then pretty much all current generation mid range cards have 2GB of VRAM or more.

 

[St1ckM4n]

I'd say it's more of a combination of factors. Since you're watching video, the CPU, RAM, VRAM, and GPU are all slightly more under stress. This combines for the small dip in fps.