Second graphics card for MediaPortal (1 Viewer)

[Roberdin]

Hey, in my existing arrangement, I use one computer for both general purposes and for MediaPortal, necessitating the usage of MediaPortal on a secondary monitor. This results in high CPU usage and often (though not always) poor responsiveness and instability within MediaPortal. I assume this is due to the unavailability of DirectX hardware acceleration on secondary monitors? However, I wonder, if I were to purchase a reasonably cheap PCI graphics card and attach my telelvision to that instead, so only MediaPortal gets the resources of that card, would this yield a significant improvement? Or would acceleration be still unavailable because the TV would remain a secondary monitor?

 

[Marcusb]

You're on the right track. I think your best option is to make the TV your primary display. The only down sied of this is that if you want to play games on the monitor youll have to change it back.

 

[Roberdin]

I can't do that. My point is though, will a second graphics card make any difference if only the TV is connected to it?

 

[Marcusb]

it may, but the trouble is that you would still need a gfx card that has hardware dx9 support. This is a minimum of gf5200 which would cost a fair bit for PCI.
Also, with 2 gfx cards and any number of tv tuners sharing the pci bus (agp still shares the pci bus) you may get some performance issues.

Unfortunately, unless someone else has the same setup, you can't find out until you've already spent the money.

 

[Roberdin]

My main graphics card is on the PCI-E bus.