Freeze on exit

[Kevin]

I do actually notice a difference between performance if I disable the second monitor before playing.  Or at least I did before I got the extra memory to bring me up to a gig. :)  But I wasn't just cloning; I was dualviewing so there could be a difference between what I saw and what you might see performance-wise.
Heh.  That's ok Swirly.  I had a dream the night before last where an old boss of mine (who I hated) kept sending me on quests to a field in front of the store.  I was quite annoyed when I woke up. ;)
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More of my geek is rubbing off on poor Treesh. Performance is degraded by cloning and by spanning/dual vision. With cloning you aren't using extra memory put you are adding an additional instruction on your rendering pipe for the data split. If you have two seperate RAMDACs each processes the scene individually, if you only have one you increase instruction cycles as well. Mutli RAMDACs (which is the common way) still puts more commands to the memory controllers (though the controller should still only do one fetch) to get the scene.

Spanning and dual vision will have to hold the memory for the other image that it has to paint on the other monitor, this will very depending on the resolution and color depth (just over 3MB for 1024x768x32bit color and yeah it is just straight math just multiply the res by the color depth and divide by 8 to get bytes then divide by 1024 to get kilobytes and agian to get mega or giga or what have you). You then also have the RAMDACs using someone of you pipe to get the scene just like with cloning.

There is some other overhead involved with both of them as well. So disabling either will net you some potential video memory as well as free up some execution cycles and cut down on the bandwidth on the cards bus.